Search results

Professional football clubs have increasingly initiated two corporate diversification strategies to enfold growth opportunities besides traditional income sources: business diversification and international diversification. Empirical findings from management and sport management literature provide inconclusive evidence on these strategies' financial performance effects, necessitating further research. The purpose of this article is therefore to investigate how both corporate diversification strategies affect the financial performance of professional football clubs.

A 15-year panel data set of English Premier League (EPL) clubs is examined, many of which have employed corporate diversification strategies. Measures for related business diversification (RBD) and unrelated business diversification (UBD) as well as international diversification are established from management literature. Based on fixed effects regression models, their effects on clubs' revenues and profitability are then examined.

U-shaped effects from RBD on revenues and profitability are found, but no effects from UBD. These findings empirically support the theoretically appealing superiority of RBD over UBD and, with increasing levels of RBD, over a focused strategy in management literature. With international diversification, an inverted U-shaped effect on revenues is identified.

Despite focusing only on the EPL, these findings provide new evidence of non-linear financial performance effects from corporate diversification strategies adding to (sport) management literature and setting the stage for future research on these strategies in professional football.

These findings have significant implications for club managers' strategic growth opportunities such as new business models or geographic markets.

This is the first study to empirically examine the financial effects of corporate diversification strategies in the football market context.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between human capital investments and financial performance in the professional football industry. The authors examine this association by controlling for internal (club-level) mechanisms of governance. Specifically, as they deal with a context of highly concentrated ownership and familial control of football clubs, they posit that the degree of family board representation and a dual leadership structure exert a moderating effect on the decision to spend on playing talent.

The empirical analysis employs a fixed-effect econometric model on a panel data set of 16 Italian football clubs that spans a nine-year time period ending up with 144 firm-year observations.

The main novel finding of this investigation is that clubs with CEO duality and a high degree of family board representation manage to profit from investments in player contracts as opposed to clubs which lack these governance mechanisms.

A clear implication is that the presence of corporate governance mechanisms at club level may be value-enhancing. In terms of policy direction, the finding makes the case that regulatory bodies should consider the imposition of governance mechanisms at club level as a means to promote actual financial discipline and a further ally to current regulations that are restricted to monitoring processes tied to accounting data.

This study attempts to explain the financial outcomes of player investments by combining insights from the mainstream governance and family business literature. Prior works in the field are restricted to testing the direct relation between player investments and performance, but fail to consider the potential moderators of this association.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of the size of the board of directors and board involvement in strategy on financial performance in the private club industry.

Data were collected in a web‐based survey of chief operating officers (COOs) and general managers (GMs) who are members of the Club Managers Association of America (CMAA). Hierarchical regression analysis of data from 360 respondents was used to examine the proposed model.

The results showed that board members' involvement in strategy and the size of the board of directors have a positive influence on a private club's financial performance.

Further research is indicated to include other board‐related influences such as group composition and the quality of relationships between board members and GMs/COOs to measure a club's financial performance.

The paper contributes to the limited existing literature on the association between a board of directors and financial performance in the private club industry.

The purpose of this research is to determine the nature of the relationship between sporting, financial performance and a stock price of football clubs by adopting the quarterly financial statements of the European clubs that represent the research sample: Juventus, Borussia Dortmund and Olympique Lyonnais, which helps clubs’ managers in evaluating the sporting and financial performance effect on the share price at the quarterly level.

The research is performed using the panel data technique, for Juventus, Borussia Dortmund and Olympique Lyonnais (2007–2016). The sporting performance is represented by the quarterly rate of the number of goals scored by the club to the number of goals scored against it; the quarterly rate of the number of wins to the total number of matches played by the club in local and international competitions. At the same time, financial performance is represented by the quarterly rate of current ratio, the quarterly rate of the leverage ratio, and the quarterly rate of earnings per share (EPS).

The analysis of the results was distributed at two levels: macro and micro. The analysis at the macro-level dealt with the correlation and influence between the sports performance indicators and the financial performance indicators of the three clubs combined on the share prices of those clubs. The micro-level performance is analyzed separately from the macro analysis. The results indicated that there was an effect on macro analysis. As for the microanalysis, the results showed no effect of the sporting performance of the three clubs on their share price.

The main implications of this research reveal the weakness of the correlation between the clubs' share price in the financial market, possibly due to the quarterly rate of the data. But there is a slight change for Juventus. There is a moderate correlation between the quarterly sporting performance indicators of this club and the quarterly average of its share price in the market.

The main implications of this research reveal the weakness of the correlation between the clubs' share price in the financial market, possibly due to the quarterly rate of the data. But there is a slight change for Juventus. There is a moderate correlation between the quarterly sporting performance indicators of this club and the quarterly average of its share price in the market.

The social implications of the current research are clear by dealing with the relationship between the sports and Financial performance of football clubs and its relationship to the price of its shares in the financial market. The success of football clubs in achieving sporting victory attracts more fans. This leads to an increase in the club's profits and consequently to an increase in the price of its shares in the financial markets. Therefore, the societal benefit will be achieved by increasing the enjoyment of the audience and increasing the revenues of the club and the city to which it belongs.

The originality of this research is represented in its use of quarterly data to clarify the relationship between the sporting and financial performance of a sample of European football clubs with the price of its shares in the financial markets. Therefore, this research differs from previous research that used only daily and annual data for clubs to clarify the relationship between their sporting and financial performance.

This study aims to contribute to the analysis of the impact of financial control or “financial fair play” (FFP) regulations on the financial performance of the Spanish professional football league (LaLiga) by examining the moderating role of club size. The authors argue that introducing FFP positively impacted the financial performance of small clubs but increased the economic gap between large and small clubs.

A 12-year dataset covering 22 football clubs is used to test the hypotheses. Panel regression models are estimated for eight measures of financial performance indicators, comprising three financial dimensions: profitability, liquidity and solvency. The Gini index is applied to clubs' economic and sports variables to determine the degree of economic imbalance between the largest and smallest clubs.

The results show that FFP significantly and positively impacted the profitability of small clubs and the solvency of medium-sized clubs but has not impacted the largest clubs' financial performance. After these regulations, economic inequality in Spanish LaLiga increased.

The authors find evidence that club size moderates the effect of FFP on financial performance. The moderating role of club size may explain the mixed results found in previous research. The authors’ findings contribute to improving the literature on the impact of FFP on the financial performance of European football clubs.

This study explores the relationship between governance model – private organisations vs non-profit organisations (NPOs) – and performance in football clubs.

The study is a comparative case study of two football clubs with different governance models: Malmö FF, which is an NPO, and Bologna FC, which is a privately owned club.

The results show that both football clubs focus equally on financial and non-financial performance, and in practice, both clubs use a blend of private and NPO governance models. While supporting efforts towards financial results, blending the models appears to support football clubs' management of the tension between financial and non-financial performance and the expectation that they will contribute to local development. Thus, using a blend of the two models is not only accepted but expected.

This study is a comparative case study of two football clubs. This study furthers our understanding of how football clubs manage the tension between financial and non-financial performance expectations. This is particularly of interest in light of the increasing professionalisation of sports, especially football, and how this might jeopardise the contributions that sport clubs make to the local community.

By exploring the relationship between governance model and performance, this study shows that, contrary to expectations, privately owned football clubs focus as much on non-financial performance as clubs governed as NPOs. This study contributes to the existing literature by showing how clubs use a mixture of elements from governance models to manage the tension between financial and non-financial performance that has emerged in the wake of the increasing professionalisation of football.

In the current economic climate, the huge rise in the levels of debt incurred by professional football clubs challenges the need to improve their efficiency levels. Hence, analysis of their productivity is essential and represents an integral dimension to any realistic and efficient strategy. Any such strategy includes the identification and analysis of the inputs and outputs that underpin club sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relationship between the team performance of professional European football clubs and the stability of their financial efficiency.

The sample spans 15 professional football clubs that won the league titles in the leading football leagues (the English, German, Spanish, Italian and French leagues) in the period between 2009 and 2014. The analysis made recourse to the data envelopment analysis method.

The results demonstrate that of the 15 clubs analysed, only 10 proved efficient. Football is now an industry that moves major quantities of financial capital and holds the attentions of large groups of fans worldwide. However, despite this attractiveness, the financial crisis and recession, ongoing since 2008, increasingly requires the better management of such resources. To this end, clubs should improve their control over the financial resources available given the positive relationship prevailing between the sporting performance of clubs and their levels of financial efficiency.

Analysis of the efficiency levels of the inputs and outputs encapsulating performance related financial variables may aid in improving the standards of planning and sustainable management at professional sport clubs.

This study aims to explore how responsible corporate behaviour, specifically self-imposed financial regulatory control, might subsequently be reflected in the financial performance of companies subject to such regulation.

In this study, the authors aim to explore how financial compliance in the form of the Economic Control Regulation (ECR) has impacted on the financial performance of professional football clubs in Spain. To this purpose, the authors adopted a quasi-experimental before and after study design. This type of design assesses the object of study before and after a specific event in order to determine whether this event has had any effects on the object. In this case, the event was the coming into effect of the ECR in the fiscal year of 2012, and the object hypothetically affected was the clubs’ economic performance.

The authors can confirm that in general terms and for the whole set of clubs analysed, the ECR has had a strong and positive effect on financial performance.

In this study, the authors wish to establish a link between the idea of “compliance” and that of “responsible corporate management practice”. It is not just a matter of compliance with the law. The fact of complying with certain laws could, in general terms, or from the point of view of common sense, be qualified as “responsible behaviour”. However, under the contemporary concept of corporate responsibility, compliance with the law is a behaviour that must be taken for granted. Responsibility, therefore, would entail going beyond such expected behaviour to one that exceeds the environment's expectation of the corporate actor.

What extent improvements in financial performance have also boosted social performance. Confirming such a positive effect endorses the argument that ethical improvements in corporate culture have a general effect on business sustainability in its different aspects: economic, social, environmental and in governance.

The authors may foresee that the culture of compliance will spread from the finance departments to other management areas. Its connection with ethical business practice is directly linked to the more complex concept of the “citizen company”. There are suggest interesting bases on which professional football clubs might move from a traditional profit-oriented company model towards a more contemporary one oriented towards relationships of integrity with the sport's environment. This study shows that the ECR has been a starting point for the development of Spanish professional football clubs towards this type of “citizen company”.

It was a single-sector study whose principal value lies in the verification of whether responsible economic management (the main consequence of applying the ECR) had any effects on company profits, financial results and other important indicators. In addition to fostering responsibility, this new management model involves a special innovation, as it is based on self-regulation (i.e. on regulations not imposed by national or supranational states), designed and implemented to ensure the sector's viability.

The purpose of this paper is to verify the theoretical assumption about a weaker role of internal governance structures (namely, board and CEO) in determining sporting and financial performances in highly concentrated club ownership environment.

Using data from the Italian and English football clubs playing in their national top divisions, over the period 2006–2015, the authors apply agency theory, property rights theory and win maximization logic to test the absence of a significant impact of internal governance structures on financial performances and clubs’ sporting performance. Ownership structure’s variables are used as control variable.

Empirical findings document an overall poor impact of board structure and CEO features on financial performances, in comparison with the influence of ownership structure; the consolidation of win maximization logic of clubs’ owners has been demonstrated in this specific context. However, the authors found that some internal governance elements have also an impact on performance even if their contribute is limited: board size results negatively associated to club profitability, board independence and CEO tenure are positively related to sporting performance; in addition, CEO tenure also increases profitability.

The originality of the paper lies on the contribution arising from this empirical research, since a scarcity of empirical studies analyzing the correlation between internal governance and performance in European football sector is noticed.

The purpose of this paper is three‐fold. First, to explore the relationship between the financial and sporting performance of clubs competing in the English Premier League (EPL). Second, to investigate the effect of different models of EPL club ownership on financial and league performance. Third, to review the finances of EPL clubs in the context of UEFA's Financial Fair Play regulations.

Financial data from annual reports for the period 2001‐2010 was collected for 20 EPL clubs. Correlation analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between the finances of EPL clubs and their league position. One‐way analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests were then used to examine the effect of ownership type on clubs’ financial and league performances. Where the results of ANOVA testing revealed statistically significant differences between groups, these were investigated further using appropriate post hoc procedures.

The stock market model of ownership returned better financial health relative to privately owned (domestic and foreign) clubs. However, clubs owned privately by foreign investors or on the stock market performed better in the league in comparison with domestically owned clubs. The stock market model was more likely to comply with Financial Fair Play regulations.

The paper confirms empirically that football clubs that float on the stock market are in better financial health and that clubs in pursuit of short‐term sporting excellence are reliant on substantial investment, in this case from foreign investors.