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This paper aims to highlight how critical theory and political CSR might be applied to deepen our examination of the complexities associated with ‘sport CSR’. The debate on the use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the sports industry is starting to move beyond “mapping the territory”, which characterized the initial examination of this new direction in CSR. This viewpoint suggests that it is time for “sport CSR” to turn to a range of CSR perspectives found in mainstream management debates as they are under-applied at the moment.

This paper examines the current state of research in sport CSR and offers a discussion on the possible ways to apply two under-utilised mainstream perspectives – political CSR and critical CSR – to sport CSR.

A review of literature highlights how sport CSR has tended to pay insufficient attention to the maladies, dilemmas and broader structural concerns and political ramifications associated with sport CSR. This means that other viewpoints noted and applied in this journal, such as “critical CSR” and political CSR are largely neglected.

The value of this article lies in highlighting how critical theory and political CSR might be applied to deepen our examination of the complexities associated with “sport CSR”.

In the last two decades sports studies and sports management journals have called for there to be research in sports management that explores sports links to mainstream management analyses. The purpose of this paper is to argue that in many ways the sports sector is dominated by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), which have a different dynamic to larger entities and therefore should be analysed accordingly. This paper applies an SME perspective on English professional football clubs.

This paper, drawn from 22 semi‐structured interviews with key individuals in the English professional football (soccer) industry, employs an interpretivist approach of semi‐structured interviews of key personnel to provide an account of the business practices prevalent in the English football industry.

The findings are as follows: that the sports industry can be regarded as one that is largely constituted of elements that are ascribed with characteristics associated with SMEs called archetypal SMEs, either in entity size, turnover or mentality; that much analysis of the administration and management of the sports industry fails to assess the sector through the prism of SME “modelling”; there are areas of engagement with SME literature that could be useful to the analysis of the management of the sports industry.

This paper does what few other papers have achieved by outlining that the sports industry can be effectively examined by applying “SME perspectives” to help explain what might appear to be their idiosyncratic characteristics.