Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the migration of foreign football players that participated in the elite football championship in Greece and the impact of this migratory channel on the athletic success of the football clubs.

The study analyzed a database of all migrant and local athletes that participated in the professional Greek football championship over the period 2001-2013 and performed descriptive and regression analyses.

The regression analyses revealed a positive and significant statistical relation between the investment in foreign talents and the position of the clubs in the championship; however, this impact was more intense for foreign athletes after the formation of the Greek Super League (SL) in 2007 but on the contrary native athletes seem to contribute less to the athletic success than their foreign counterparts.

The findings indicated that valuable resources where spent after SL formation for the acquisition of foreign well-trained athletes. Therefore, this study corroborated arguments in previous research that a basic reason for foreign player migration in football is the increased revenues accrued from the media and sponsors. The study also provided useful policy implications for football managers for improving their decisions on this matter.

The present study fills a gap in the empirical literature and contributes significantly on the ongoing debate about the international athletes’ migration and its impact on athletic success.

The purpose of this paper is to show how one of the biggest phenomena of the twenty‐first century is the internationalisation of professional sports and how premier league football epitomises this. With the influx of foreign players, managers and now owners, European League Football has become big business. This paper aims to provide a theoretical analysis of the management implications of foreign players in the English Premiership League football – renamed the Barclays Premier League to suit the needs of its major sponsors.

The approach adopted is purely qualitative in nature, evaluating the top Barclays Premier League teams and the impact of globalisation on their reconfigurations since the early 1990s to date. The study draws mainly from a review of the extant literature on sports and management, as well as a critical analysis of media reports.

Globalisation has emerged as a new force that has changed the way corporations are managed. Financial services, retail and information technology firms have all responded to this new wave – and so also has sports. Unfortunately while sports have the potential to teach lessons on management strategy, management researchers seem to have relegated sports to the sociology and psychology disciplines.

The Barclays Premier league football provides a unique environment for management decisions and processes to occur in a range of markets and at varied levels. However, the globalisation of professional sports has received relatively very little attention in the academic literature – especially in the field of business and management.

This paper contributes to the scant literature on the management implications of football by highlighting how globalisation has affected and reconfigured professional sports using the influx of foreign players into the English football league as a point of departure.

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 comparatively high salaries of professional players during their active athletic career should allow them to accumulate an adequate level of precautionary savings for a financially autonomous post-sport career. However, not all players succeed in accumulating sustainable financial assets. Therefore, the question arises how professional players' financial precaution within the social setting football is shaped. As no empirical analyses have yet been carried out on this issue, the study study examines football players' precautionary practices and motives.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 German (former) professional football players. The authors used qualitative content analysis to analyse the data, expanding the analysis to include reconstructive elements to create different precautionary types.

The results reveal that players deal with both career-specific as well as precaution-related risks quite heterogeneously. Accordingly, three precautionary types characterised by distinct forms of precautionary saving practices are identified. The authors also find that although the players are aware of the uncertainties and risks related to their professional football careers, it does not say much about the concrete implementation of adequate precautionary practices.

The findings contribute to a better understanding of precautionary saving practices among football players.

Moreover, the findings contribute to a better understanding of precautionary saving practices not only specifically among (former) football players, but generally among individuals that face high occupational career risks and earn high salaries to develop preventative concepts and approaches to sustainable financial planning.

This paper is the first empirical study that analyses precautionary savings practices of the specific population of elite athletes in high income sports professional football.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the elective affinity between sport science and elite football by situating it first, within the wider political economy of football and second, within the dynamics of the market and work situation faced by elite players in the modern game.

The methodology underpinning this paper continues this movement by considering the impact on market and work situation of elite footballers due to wider social structures and the distribution of social power peculiar to the football industry. It is premised on the view that observed events and contingent relations and processes are linked to more enduring social structures and that knowledge must take account of all three.

The resulting impact of sport science on elite football is contradictory, facilitating, on the one hand, the development of football as an aesthetic experience, while on the other hand, threatening to transform the football spectacle into a mundane exercise in the search for increased functional peak performance for its own sake.

The value of this paper is that it considers salaries and player power to determine value by exploring the impact on market and work situation of elite footballers set in the context of wider social structures and the distribution of social power peculiar to the football industry.

Elite footballers yield immense power over their market situation, which sport science has the potential to enhance and sustain by fine honing peak fitness. The football club’s relative lack of control of the player’s market situation necessitates the appliance of sport science to help maximize control over the player’s work situation.

The paper demonstrates that sport science develops elite footballers to peak fitness, while also developing footballers as commodities; and this latter aspect if taken too far may potentially transform football into a mundane exercise in the search for increased functional peak performance for its own sake.

The paper draws together the relatively neglected analysis of the football labour process with the increasing interventions of sport science to football and sets this within a broader political economy of football.

This research proposes analytical valuation models throughout football players' life cycles based on crowd valuations from social media to produce dynamic sporting human capital disclosures, and therefore, supplying further useful information to capture the intellectual capital (IC) of football clubs.

This work is carried out using an econometric model that includes 658 observations of crowd judgments versus their transfer fees, for the best footballers of the three major European Leagues between 2006 and 2018. To make the model more parsimonious, the set of independent variables that really add value has been found across the stepwise methodology.

The significant differences between both models are analyzed, integrating previous academic literature based on the existence of negotiation elements in prices, and in the capacity of crowdsourcing to explain assessments of football players, from a dynamic perspective, alongside a new variable: injuries, which has not been explained before.

The broader assessments from crowdsourcing should be integrated in intellectual capital disclosures (ICD), from a critical, novel and dynamic perspective, creating a virtuous cycle between managers and fans, to increase transparency of financial information for stakeholders and society.

In this chapter, I study athlete activism as practices of collective care in the context of football communities in Kerala, India. This particular collective is formed through a network of football players, fans, organizers of tournaments, team managers, and families of these actors. I look at these practices through two different yet interconnected “events.” One event is the public discussion of a form of care represented in the Malayalam movie titled Sudani from Nigeria (2018). The movie shows the acts of care centered on the mothers of a local football team manager and an African player who plays for a local team in Malabar. The other event that I seek to study is a campaign not yet fully articulated nor has generated significant discussions in the public sphere possibly because of its emerging nature. A local team manager organized a campaign during the initial months of the COVID-19 lockdown to facilitate the safe return of African players in the Malabar tournament circuit. The campaign led to the establishment of a network of care that is invested in the welfare of migrant athletes. Through these two events, I will look at what constitutes athlete activism at a translocal level in South India. I argue that such practices of care reconstitute the relationships among the people across the region as well as the people's relationship with the state. These practices of care recognize the inequalities in terms of race, class, and nationality and encourage action toward social change.

In the current era of fake news, illusions, manipulations and other artificial attributes of virtuality and reality, authenticity is a virtue that people highly appreciate. This study aims to examine the influence of the personal brand authenticity of top football players on loyalty to the football discipline in general, via the mediation of personal brand identification.

Based on data collected from a convenience sample of 562 respondents from Poland via an electronic survey and analyzed using the structural equation modeling method, this study explored, first, the influence of top football players’ personal brand authenticity on consumers’ identification with these football players, and second, how this identification may lead to enhancing loyalty to the football discipline. Finally, it verified how the loyalty effect (attitudinal and behavioral) varies across different categories of spectators.

Personal brand identification with authentic football stars is a focal factor enabling the creation of loyalty (attitudinal and behavioral) to the whole discipline. Consumers’ perceptions of the authenticity of the personal brands of football players play a role in increasing identification with these personal brands. This identification is essential in achieving loyalty to football as a sports discipline via football celebrities.

Football players perceived as authentic are evaluated more positively, leading to consumer identification with these players, which, in turn, increases consumers’ loyalty to football. Thus, the presence of authentic, skilled players is important for football, but the actual loyalty effect from authenticity can be achieved only by identification. Therefore, football requires exceptional, strong stars who reflect a set of desired personal values. Further research is needed to identify the desired set of values that leads to identification with football stars.

This study presents evidence that the personal brand authenticity of a football star is a driver of loyalty towards football discipline in general if the spectators’ identification with this superstar occurs. Moreover, this study proves that loyalty to football driven by the personal brand authenticity of football stars differs between spectators’ categories.

Reports of human trafficking within the football industry have become a topic of academic, political and media concern. The movement of and trade in aspirant young (male) footballers from West Africa to Europe, and more recently to Asia, dominates these accounts. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper provides an overview of scholarship on this topic, with a specific focus on exploring how this form of human trafficking intersects with the broader debates over children’s rights in the context of exploitation tied to the irregular forms of migration.

The paper illustrates how popular narratives associated with the trafficking of young West African footballers mimic stereotypical portrayals of child trafficking, which have implications for the solutions put forward. It is argued that popular representations of football-related child trafficking are problematic for several reasons, but two are emphasised here. First, they perpetuate a perception that the mobility of young African footballers entails a deviant form of agency in need of fixing, while simultaneously disassociating the desire to migrate from the broader social structures that need to be addressed. Second, and relatedly, they result in regulations and policy solutions that are inadvertently reductive and often at odds with the best interests of the children they seek to protect.

This an original study of the narratives associated with the trafficking of young West African footballers and those of child trafficking.

The sports industry is a forerunner in the international quest for talent as the search by sport clubs and the corresponding self-initiated expatriation of athletes starts at a very early age. The purpose of this paper is to address this phenomenon by exploring the experiences of talented young Icelandic footballers (soccer players) in their transition from Iceland into senior-level professional football in European leagues across six dimensions – three individual and three cultural.

Biographical narrative interviews have been conducted with eight Icelandic players moving overseas at a young age with the purpose of advancing their career. To investigate the coping strategies applied, a purposeful sampling approach was chosen, given that half of the participants successfully dealt with transitions in their career, while the other half did not experience the same success.

As an overall result, the expatriate journey for young footballers is complex, influenced by many events, expectations, conditions and pressures that affect their support web and ability to adjust. Reflecting on the experiences of successful transitions, problem-focused coping strategies have been more effective than emotion-focused coping.

This study highlights some necessary conditions and coping strategies for young self-initiated sports expatriates to cope with the expatriate transition successfully.

The authors contribute to research on expatriation, as this specific group of “young professionals” has not yet been addressed by the research within international human resource management. Our research framework responds to calls in the literature to consider additional stages of player development and an array of individual and cultural factors that may have a significant role in shaping players’ careers abroad.