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The purpose of this paper is to argue for the necessity of regulating European club football financially, in order to create a fair structure of sporting competition.

By deploying the soft budget constraint approach – originally developed by Hungarian Economist János Kornai in order to understand (public) business behavior in socialist and post‐socialist economies – and combining it with empirical analysis, the paper develops an understanding of why the majority of European top league clubs are loss‐makers and why regulation is needed. The paper rests on its application of the soft budget constraint approach to build its argument and uses existing empirical research in order to support it within the field of European professional football.

The paper finds substantial evidence of soft budget constraints in professional football clubs, and argues that softness punishes the few financially well‐managed clubs in sporting terms for balancing their books.

From a theoretical point of view, the new perspective of soft budget constraints takes political, cultural and emotional aspects into account in order to understand economic behavior among professional team sports clubs. This gives promising new insights into the discipline of sports economics and sports management.

The paper's findings demand action to be taken to secure financial fair play in order to deal with issues of equal sporting competition. It argues that this must be done through a central regulation scheme covering all European leagues, thus endorsing the new UEFA financial fair play program. At the same time, however, the paper recognizes the problems in implementing the program efficiently.

The originality and value of the paper is its application of a new theoretical approach that clarifies the problems of European professional football and the reasons why regulatory solutions are necessary to harden the budget constraints.

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.

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 purpose of this paper is to investigate how professional football clubs from the English Premier League, German Bundesliga and Spanish Primera División use digital media to expand their international reach in emerging football markets (EFM) outside of Europe. Based on the EPRG framework and Rugman’s home-region hypothesis, the aim is to broaden the perspective where “sports go global” for a further understanding of actors’ international orientation in the digital sphere.

The study is based on data from desk research and a qualitative survey, comprising information on international digital media activities of 58 European clubs. Cluster analysis is used to identify different international orientations with regard to digital media activities.

The data provide evidence that clubs differ strongly in their orientations towards EFM. While some global players that provide digital media content in several EFM languages and attract a large share of Facebook followers from EFM exist, other clubs focus on their home region. League-specific differences become apparent.

This study determines the international online orientations of European football clubs by combining two previously separated research streams in football management studies: internationalisation and digital media activities. Most clubs with a strong EFM fan base choose polycentric, multi-language digital media strategies, followed by geocentric, standardised approaches. By offering a novel angle on internationalisation in professional football, this study contributes towards optimising clubs’ international online strategies for EFM, which are markets that promise high growth rates.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework that can be used to understand coach dismissals in professional football.

In order to embed the suggested framework empirically and thereby strengthen the argumentation, a total of 90 management accounts from 18 Danish professional football clubs have been analyzed using a qualitative content analysis approach. The accounts cover a period of five consecutive seasons.

The analysis shows that dismissing the coach is a frequent occurrence in Danish clubs. This finding is included in the discussion, in which it is suggested that a coach dismissal may be the outcome of mimetic, coercive or normative isomorphism.

The applied methodology makes it difficult to assess whether coach dismissals actually stem from institutional forces. A more extensive research design and methodological setup is required in order to elaborate the proposed framework.

By focussing on the dynamics of club-stakeholder relationships, the proposed framework can be seen as an attempt to clarify key features of the decision-making process surrounding coach dismissals in European professional football. Furthermore, the framework suggests that in order for a club to stay attractive to its stakeholders, and thereby increase its chances of securing future financial support, club directors should pay attention to their external environment.

In contrast to existing research, this study does not aim at assessing whether a coach dismissal pays off in terms of wins on the pitch. Instead, a qualitative approach has been selected in order to offer a framework that aims at providing an in-depth understanding of coach dismissals in professional football.

This paper analyses English Premier League (EPL) and English Football League (EFL) championship clubs during the period 2002–2019 to anticipate financial distress with specific reference to footballs' Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations.

Data was collected for 43 professional football clubs competing in the EPL and Championship for the financial year ends 2002–2019. Analysis was conducted using the Z-score methodology and additional statistical tests were conducted to measure differences between groups. Data was split into two distinct periods to analyse club finances pre- and post-FFP.

The results show significant cases of financial distress amongst clubs in both divisions and that Championship clubs are in significantly poorer financial health than EPL clubs. In some cases, financially sustainability has worsened post-FFP. The “big 6” clubs – due to their size – seem to be more financially sound than the rest of the EPL, thus preventing a “too big to fail” effect. Overall, the financial situation in English football remains poor, a position that could be exacerbated by the economic crisis, caused by COVID-19.

The findings are not generalisable outside of the English football industry and the data is susceptible to usual accounting techniques and treatments.

The paper recommends a re-distribution of broadcasting rights, on a more equal basis and incentivised with cost-reduction targets. The implementation of a hard salary cap at league level is also recommended to control costs. Furthermore, FFP regulations should be re-visited to deliver the original objectives of bringing about financial sustainability in European football.

The paper extends the evidence base of measuring financial distress in professional team sports and is also the first paper of its kind to examine this in relation to Championship clubs.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the future of professional soccer by 2025. Scientific foresight studies on this industry do not yet exist despite its current position at a crossroads: toward further exploitation of profit potential? Or clear commitment to the traditional European Model of Sport?

The authors conducted a Delphi-based scenario study. In total, 62 high-level experts from sport, business, and society evaluated the probability of occurrence, impact, and desirability of 15 future projections over at least two rounds. The resulting 5,940 quantitative judgments and 670 qualitative comments were condensed into probable scenarios and surprising wildcards.

Two probable scenarios for European professional soccer by 2025 exist: in an extrapolation scenario, clubs will reap long-term gains from fulfilling public demands regarding stadium security, competitive balance, and social engagement. The less likely alternative is an extensive commercialization, including a short-term exploitation of all imaginable income sources, such as virtually augmented stadiums, financial investors, and league-owned broadcasting channels.

The findings are primarily based on qualitative research and an all-German sample. Further studies could incorporate additional quantitative data or might survey an international panel to increase predictive accuracy.

The paper is novel in that it examines a yet unaddressed research gap – the future of professional soccer – with a common scientific foresight method that is already established in sport management research – the Delphi technique.

Professional football clubs currently strive for a number of concurrent goals, ranging from on-field success to profit maximization to fan expansion and engagement. The purpose of this paper, theoretically informed by the social penetration theory, is to analyze the economics behind such goals and examine the association between team performance, commercial success, and social media followers in professional team sports.

A data set relating to 20 European professional football clubs that combines financial (revenues and costs), sporting, and digital-reach measures for three consecutive football seasons (2013/2014 to 2015/2016) was used. In addition, to elaborate on this data in terms of a descriptive study, the study constructs a range of correlation statistical tests and linear modeling techniques to obtain quantitative results.

The results indicate that all the three main sources of club revenues (match-day, commercial/sponsorship, and broadcasting) are positive drivers for Facebook followers. Staff investments (staff costs) are also positively related to Facebook followers, albeit to a lesser extent, while higher-ranked clubs seem to follow a constant approach in terms of their revenues and cost structure.

This study seeks to bridge the communication and sport economic research, providing evidence that Facebook followers are part of the cyclical phenomenon of team revenues and team performance. In doing so, it initiates a debate on the relationship between the digital expansion of a football club and its sports and financial indicators.

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.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the Union of European Football Associations’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) Regulations in the context of the European football industry. This study seeks to explore whether these regulations are perceived by member organisations as contributing to the creation of a “poverty trap”. To do so, this study turns towards what are traditionally perceived as smaller clubs operating in smaller member associations and, in doing so, explores whether the regulations limiting benefactor payments are suitable for smaller leagues.

In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with key individuals involved in the management of Scottish football clubs. The Scottish context was chosen because of the disparity in revenues amongst competing teams and the limited broadcasting revenues achieved in comparison to some other European member associations.

FFP Regulations are perceived to be an effective tool for monitoring clubs and ensuring financial stability. However, the findings suggest that participants believe that these regulations consolidate the financial position of larger teams who rely on broadcasting and extant brand power for revenue generation. Further, smaller leagues demonstrate a lesser reliance on benefactor payments, and therefore, the restriction on benefactor payments inherent within FFP Regulations is posited by participants as holding little consequence and/or relevance within the Scottish football context.

Most prior studies on FFP Regulations have focused on generating quantitative insight into the application of FFP Regulations in large, resource-rich European football leagues. Through a qualitative approach, this study provides nascent exploratory insight into FFP Regulations from the perspective of smaller leagues.