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In recent years, the relationship between Manchester United fans and their club has been put under the spotlight due to the contentious relationship between the fanbase and the club’s American owners, the Glazer family. However, the commercialisation of Manchester United and their ramping up of their associated brand accelerated massively during the 1990s, as a result of the coincident timing of the country’s glamour club returning to dominance during a period of ever-greater financial returns for top-flight success. As the undoubted commercial trailblazers in English football (and the first English club to be listed on the Stock Exchange), analysing their development during the 1990s is, arguably, the best way of understanding how and why top-flight football clubs operate the way they do and, in a knock-on effect on the league’s competitiveness, why the clubs below them can so easily fall away.

Literature on product innovation (PI) has witnessed tremendous growth over the past 60 years. Yet, there has been a dearth of a comprehensive review of the extant PI research maintaining the breadth and depth of the topic. To seal this gap, this paper aims to explore the intellectual foundations and emergent trends in 2,588 research papers on PI from 1962 to 2022.

The paper adopts a bibliometric analysis approach via visualization maps of prolific contributions, co-citation, co-occurrence and thematic networks.

Emerging streams, frontiers and hotspots in PI research are revealed and a knowledge graph is developed. The review provides a broad spectrum of opportunities that enrich imminent research to better inform business decisions.

The review addresses 20 research questions associated with barely examined areas in PI research that require further analysis in imminent research.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first review that comprehensively synthesizes the intersected knowledge base of PI research using bibliometric analysis of a vast number of documents within a long time span.