Soccer is a sexy subject. Harry Browne checks out how the glorious game has made the transition into academia.

Not so many years ago, "football academic" would have been considered an oxymoron, or a joke label applied to an especially loquacious pub-talker. That was before the likes of Arsenal and England hired cosmopolitan managers who look more suited to a postdoctoral seminar than a dressing-room bust-up.

Now, with the dramatic growth of soccer-related research in Britain, there is still some sense that such studies exist mainly to spark, or settle, pub arguments (which is no bad thing, surely?). Last week, after EL visited DCU to learn about REAP, this writer called into his local to find the barflies engaged in an animated conversation about which English clubs are best at looking after their Irish lads.

The "data" for settling this argument has been bouncing around working-class communities in Dublin, Drogheda, Cork, Waterford and Galway

for years. If the REAP programme for deselected footballers works, and it expands, then it might not be long before reliable and representative information is available at a central location, where it can be of use to the FAI and to "scientists" (they use the word repeatedly themselves) such as Daragh Sheridan and Neil Coleman.

It's not just an academic question. "If it works," says Eoin Hand, "we can affect the induction and recruitment of boys going over." The often-brutal nature of football in England is something REAP can both learn about and teach about. "We show the guys the system they're up against, where players might only literally be given hours to make the grade," Sheridan says.

At the University of Liverpool, football studies has recently "graduated", with the Football Reseach Unit (established in 1995) now called the Football Industry Group, part of the university's new management school starting next September. It already has postgrads studying pay-per-view TV, fan culture, the media and football, regulation in the "industry" etc, and it's looking for more. Its director, Rogan Taylor, is probably the game's leading talking-egghead.

It's courtesy of that unit that we learned, for example, that men whose ring fingers are larger than their index fingers are more likely to be successful footballers.

There's also an Institute of Football Studies in Preston and, increasingly, soccer-related content on business and economics courses. That's ironic, because in conventional business terms soccer is clearly floundering at present; as a subject for study, however, it holds an irresistible and growing fascination.