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This paper aims to propose an analysis of financial regulation practices, identified thanks to an extensive benchmark carried out in eight European professional sports leagues.

Between 1970 and 2018, 81 French football clubs went bankrupt. The paper proposes an analysis of financial regulation practices in eight European professional sports leagues to enhance the prevention of bankruptcy of French football clubs. Three research questions are addressed: What are the financial and accounting disclosure practices in the main professional leagues? What assessment tools are employed to evaluate the financial risk and budgetary feasibility? What financial support measures exist for clubs and how are insolvency proceedings initiated by clubs? To identify financial regulation practices in professional sport, a selection of leagues was made based on their economic importance, specific regulatory tools used, and their approach to financial difficulties and the handling of insolvency proceedings.

Through an examination of financial regulation practices in other leagues, three main findings are highlighted: The significance of required financial documents and deadlines varies depending on the competition organizer; some leagues utilize ratio-based assessments rather than relying solely on opinions from financial oversight bodies; certain leagues have established assistance processes for troubled clubs as opposed to punitive measures resulting in administrative regulations.

This study proposes new financial regulation modalities to prevent the bankruptcy of French football clubs. Firstly, a reform management control is suggested. Secondly, the engagement of stakeholders in bankruptcy prevention is recommended. Lastly, the implementation of a dedicated policy to support clubs facing difficulties is proposed.

The French football federation and the professional league are important actors in the European football. Many bankruptcies are noted in these championships and since the COVID crisis, the financial situation of the clubs has deteriorated, pointing to a strong risk of bankruptcy in the coming years.

Football is the world's most popular sport and the role of football on campus is of interest to university public relations (PR) and management professionals tasked with operations, promotions and reputation management. The purpose of the study is to explore similarities and differences in the structure and promotion of football on campus in the USA and the UK.

The authors completed this case study research by focusing on two related cases using cross-case pattern identification. Consistent with case study research, data collection methods were combined. Depth interviews with PR and management professionals at USA and UK universities were supported by archived documents, published media and social media accounts.

Football maintains a high level of popularity among students on campus, but each country's approach reveals different models and competitive market forces. In the USA, varsity football faces competition from popular revenue-producing sports (e.g. American football and men's basketball), but growth in the overall game, which is assisted by international influences, indicates future advancement opportunities. In the UK, football is the dominant campus sport with unique ties to professional football and high growth potential for the women's game. The lack of a fan-based model indicates the possibility for structural change, but stiff competition exists with the historically popular and well-developed professional game.

A well-known limitation of case study research is the absence of generalizability, and each case has aspects that are unique to the research (Lucas et al., 2018). That applies in this instance as well. Variance is expected to exist between, and among universities and, based on this data, this is not possible to generalize to other universities. However, future survey research could use these results to help with the development of research questions using quantitative methods.

Sports PR research using the case model with professional teams has been conducted, but the authors found no published PR research comparing the structure and promotion of football at USA and UK universities. The outcomes can help with future research inquiries and theory development and are instructive for professionals working in the field.

Football is at once both a global sport and one that is defined by fiercely guarded local boundaries. For a firm operating within this highly lucrative industry and with ambitions of establishing a strong international presence for itself, a balance must be struck between riding on the game’s global appeal on the one hand and the need to somehow embed itself within particular local spaces on the other. This study aims to analyse how one such firm, the holding company City Football Group (CFG), is going about achieving this.

This is a conceptual paper that adopts a broadly inductive approach, building on an extensive analysis of both theoretical research and publicly available secondary data to develop a framework depicting three key strategies associated with CFG’s internationalisation.

Three factors are identified as being especially pertinent in CFG’s international expansion: the composition of CFG’s top management team; the attempts to establish a unifying “City identity”; and CFG’s forays into more peripheral leagues around the world after having established itself at the “top end” of the game.

The framework presented in this paper is particularly oriented towards a practitioner audience. Managers of firms operating in football, as well as in other industries in which the pressure to be both globally integrated and locally responsive is particularly acute, can draw lessons from both the framework and the broader insights presented here on CFG’s global expansion.

Football is widely regarded as the world’s most popular sport, and fans often take matters very seriously when it comes to the club they support. How football clubs are run is, therefore, a matter of considerable societal interest, as demonstrated by various fan protests over the years. As global, multi-club ownership structures like that adopted by CFG become more commonplace, this study will provide football fans with some insight into the strategies of these companies and how their own clubs fit within these ownership models.

This study addresses an under-researched topic: the international expansion of a prominent football holding company.

The primary purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the key perspectives that emerge in this Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) Special Issue as a basis for determining the existence or otherwise of a Soccer Society, as well as reflecting on the challenges that evidence of corruption in soccer (the beautiful game) has had on the game to date. Reflections on these matters are then utilised to offer a prospective analysis of issues for further research.

The paper is a reflective analysis that draws on existing societal work to provide key dimensions of accounting and accountability for significant organisations in the world of sport in general and soccer in particular.

Much prior research on soccer has largely focussed on the internal workings of soccer organisations, with little discussion of the importance of context. This paper explores the influence of the game more broadly. Moreover, a number of the papers included illustrate an overwhelming sense of joy and pleasure from experiences of the beautiful game, as well as providing evidence of the general societal good that can flow from it. However, the study also highlights concerns emanating from weak, and seemingly pliable, governance, regulatory and accountability regimes that provide a fertile field for corruption and sportswashing.

This paper highlights a research agenda as an encouragement to interdisciplinary accounting researchers to investigate accountability and governance issues as a basis for evidence-based discussions of the impact of soccer and its regulation.

This paper specifically, and the Special Issue more broadly, offers a set of original empirical and theoretical contributions with respect to an activity that has faced limited scrutiny and consideration by academic accountants. Together, they offer a substantive body of work to enable future research in this area.

This research aimed to measure the influence of resource dependency (trading and/or shareholder's dependencies) squad age structure by building archetypes to identify strategic dominant schemes.

Based on the Ligue 1 football clubs from the 2009/2010 season to the 2018/2019 data, the authors use the k-means classification to build archetypes of resource dependency and squad structure variables. The influence of resource dependency on squad structure is then analysed through a table of contingency.

Firstly, the authors identify archetypes of resource dependency with some clubs that are dependent on the transfer market and others that do not count on sales to balance their account. Secondly, they provide different archetypes of squad structure choices. The contingency between those archetypes allows to identify three main strategic schemes (avoidance, shaping and adaptation).

The research tests an original relationship between resource dependency of clubs and their human resource strategy to respond to it. This paper can help to provide detailed profiles for big clubs looking for affiliate clubs to know which clubs have efficient academy or player development capacities.

Most football clubs were founded by members of the local community within which they are based. The success of a club is built on the time, effort and resources given by these locals, which is offered due to the benefits that football promises to the community in return. However, the game has increasingly been dominated by a focus on financial (monetary) value, at the expense of such benefits being delivered to the clubs' local communities. This article examines a need for deliberation over what accountability is owed by football clubs to their local communities in the context of questioning what and for whom football is for.

This exploration is undertaken within the context of the English game, where a series of issues has resulted in the UK Government undertaking a “fan led review of football governance”. The report produced by this review is analysed to understand whether the contents and recommendations enters the debate over what accountability is owed to local communities.

While the UK Government's fan led review recognises the pivotal role of local communities in the formation of the English game, its focus and resulting recommendations are mostly on the financial sustainability of the clubs. The analysis demonstrates that, due to their focus on financial value, the implementation of the report's recommendations is more likely to exacerbate the underlying issues rather than resolving them.

The call for deliberation over whether and what accountability is owed to local communities has been repeated over time. The UK Government's fan led review provided an important opportunity to engage in that deliberation. However, the dominance of financial value within football has all but silenced any call for and action regarding this.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, investors have more frequently invested into professional football clubs, thereby radically changing the industry landscape. This review's purpose is to analyze and synthesize the state of research to understand motives, roles and implications of football club investors, and to provide recommendations for further research.

The paper presents an integrative literature review by identifying relevant English articles based on the search terms investor, owner, investment, ownership, shareholder and stakeholder in combination with soccer or football. Around 2,431 articles were reviewed. A total of 129 relevant articles was analyzed and synthesized within eight subject areas.

Investors in professional club football is a young research stream with a clear European focus. Investor motives and roles are diverse and implications are multidimensional. Investors mostly aim for indirect returns rather than pure profit- or win-maximization.

Football clubs comprise an own investment class for which the identified, unique specifics must be considered to develop a financially successful investment model. Thorough academic research of investors' inherent characteristics, investor-club pairings and the pillars of long-term strategies for successful investor-club liaisons are avenues of future research. Furthermore, the results illustrate the need for research outside of Europe.

The paper is the first systematic, integrative review of existing literature in the domain of equity investments into professional club football. The findings genuinely show that, depending on the investor type and ownership structure, investors have a wide impact in professional club football.

Financial problems of football clubs during economic crises (such as COVID-19 pandemic) highlight the necessity of achieving economic sustainability. In addition, the economic sustainability of football clubs is accepted as a principle of the development of sports business. Therefore, it is reasonable to conduct a study with the aim of examining economic sustainability in the field of sports club management.

The present study adopted a qualitative approach to research and used semi-structured interviews in order to develop a framework for the economic sustainability of football clubs. A total of 13 members of football clubs in the Iranian premier league participated in this study.

The findings highlighted the fact that a number of factors, including media and social networks, entrepreneurship and development of club business, commercialization of the club, privatization, investment and ownership, strategic communication plan, financial management and management instability, promoted the economic sustainability of football clubs and improved their financial performance.

This study highlighted the importance of the changes in the structure of football clubs and the strategic plans for promoting entrepreneurship and commercialization. Moreover, it underlined the major role of the environmental and management components of football clubs in their financial sustainability.

This article explores the value creation process from player sales in football to understand if the related capital gains correspond to significant increases in the stock value of selling companies. In addition, it aims to detect any potential drivers for higher (or slower) abnormal stock returns.

The authors analyze all the capital gains of the Italian and Portuguese listed football companies (the only ones for which, based on their annual reports, it was possible to trace the net book value for each player sold and, consequently, if any, the related capital gain) from 2012 to 2020 and use event study analysis to calculate the abnormal returns of the football companies' stocks. Moreover, the authors use a multiple linear regression model to identify the factors affecting investors' reactions and value creation process intensity.

The results show that, on average, the capital gains from player transfers in football are positive income components and produce statistically significant higher abnormal returns. In addition, the authors identified some relevant drivers related to their intensity which could guide the choices of corporate executives regarding future disposals of the multi-year performance rights of players in the roster.

This study considers only Italian and Portuguese football listed companies. It would be helpful to consider some of the companies from other countries which are also outstanding from the sports perspective, but, in practice, it was not possible due to the impossibility to trace the net book value of the single footballers sold in those clubs' public financial disclosure.

The value relevance of the capital gains from player trading activities should increase their importance, creating cascade effects on several activities generating value for football clubs (youth sector management, player scouting, technical improvement of the players). In addition, financial data show that the capital gains from player transfers are a basic income of European football clubs nowadays. Their executives consider these operations recurrent and continually search for more valuable transfers. Hence, it is reasonable to think that they (will) choose the players to sell considering both sports and financial aspects.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study exploring the effects of capital gains from player trading activities on professional football clubs' stock value. The results obtained are even more relevant if one considers the importance these income components have in the profit formula of professional football clubs nowadays, also because of the negative repercussions caused by the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

The environmental characteristics of international football can vary significantly from one country to another. As a result, the economic and market possibilities and the objectives of each national league are very heterogeneous. This article aims to examine the differences in revenue structures amongst European national football leagues (n = 50) and cluster them based on these structures. It also investigates which revenue structure would be more effective for similar leagues, considering the previously mentioned varying environmental characteristics of international football.

The study utilises a theoretical framework of business modelling, applied in a unique way to league organisers of national championships. Data on sports and business aspects were collected from sources such as the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Financial Benchmarking Reports, transfermarkt.de and related sources for the period 2015 to 2018. K-means cluster analysis, using the Euclidean distance approach, was employed to develop clusters based on revenue sources over a four-year average.

The paper presents the characteristics and year-to-year changes of nine developed clusters. Throughout the analysis, variables such as average overpayment and inequality between player values amongst leagues were prioritised. The study's practical implications can assist league organisers in enhancing the competitiveness of their leagues, supported by short case studies that provide illustrative examples.

The novelty of the current article lies in introducing innovative variables such as the variance of player value whilst focussing on meso-level analysis, providing a fresh contribution to the existing literature in the field for understanding revenue structures and performance in European national football leagues.