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This study investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the sustainability of sports business models by means of a specific case analysis, conducted on M-I Stadio S.r.l., the service management firm that provides all types of backstage activities related to football matches performed at San Siro Stadium in Italy.

Building on interviews on its management team's direct experience and on archival data, the authors depict the consequences of the pandemic in terms of corporate governance, accounting choices and overall strategic business development through information triangulation from a forward-looking perspective.

Complying with restrictions, M-I Stadio S.r.l. preserved its financial position by embracing digitalization, increasing information flows with partners and adopting a risk aversion behaviour. Overall, results indicate that the pandemic played a catalyst role in the transformation process of the football industry. Moreover, apart from the physical and virtual merge acceleration, well-being for athletes, society and the planet, transcending the gaming part of sports activities has also been taking place. The study also illustrates the foreseeable developments of sustainable sport management practices from a critical perspective.

Since the San Siro Stadium management company might represent one of the forefront companies, within the sports industry, this study results should be conveniently taken into consideration by sporting authorities and international bodies, emphasizing the relevance of sustainability (i.e. environmental and social practices within the sports industry) and digitalization so as to better prepare sports organizations and to provide the overall industry with the tools deemed necessary to navigate this important transition in a smoother way.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of sports sponsorship on brand equity using two managerially related outcomes: price premium and market share.

This study uses a best–worst discrete choice experiment (BWDCE) and compares the outcome with that of the purchase intention scale, an established probabilistic measure of purchase intention. The total sample consists of 409 fans of three soccer teams sponsored by three different competing brands: Nike, Adidas and Puma.

With sports sponsorship, fans were willing to pay more for the sponsor’s product, with the sponsoring brand obtaining the highest market share. Prominent brands generally performed better than less prominent brands. The best–worst scaling method was also 35% more accurate in predicting brand choice than a purchase intention scale.

Future research could use the same method to study other types of sponsors, such as title sponsors or other product categories.

Sponsorship managers can use this methodology to assess the return on investment in sponsorship engagement.

Prior sponsorship studies on brand equity tend to ignore market share or fans’ willingness to pay a price premium for a sponsor’s goods and services. However, these two measures are crucial in assessing the effectiveness of sponsorship. This study demonstrates how to conduct such an assessment using the BWDCE method. It provides a clearer picture of sponsorship in terms of its economic value, which is more managerially useful.

The study aims to identify critical factors that influence football fans’ support of their favorite team by examining the impact of social responsibility, brand credibility and team brand equity on patronage intentions of professional football teams.

An online survey collected data from 331 football fans of the Persian Gulf Premier League (PGPL) in Iran. The data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The findings revealed that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is able to influence brand equity, brand credibility and patronage intentions. Also, brand equity and brand credibility were found to be positively related to patronage intentions. In addition to that, the findings show that brand equity and team credibility partially mediate the relationship between CSR and patronage intentions.

The findings provide valuable insights to sports teams/club managers aiming to attract new fans and retain current ones by investing in CSR and enhancing brand credibility and equity. Strategies to integrate CSR into relationship marketing and brand management are outlined.

This study empirically highlights the critical role of adhering to CSR and the effects of brand credibility and equity in enhancing patronage intentions among football team fans.

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.

In the age of nine-figure transfer fees and football stars building their own brands and follower base, a shift in fan identification in football appears to be taking place as athletes can build strong connections with their followers. This paper examines the level of identification shown by football fans towards both their favourite team and their favourite player, in connection with the concept of fan loyalty.

A total of 4,707 international respondents participated in an online survey to examine the relationship between fan identification and fan loyalty, and to measure the impact of variables like country, player, club, on fan identification using multi-regression analyses.

The results underline the strong presence of team identification compared to identification of single players. Results have also revealed that the relationship between a fan's favourite team and player has a significant impact on identification levels towards both actors. Fans supporting a foreign club were found to show significantly stronger team identification than those who support a club from their own country or region.

This research contributes to the growing body of publications in the field of sports consumer research and underlines the importance of understanding the quality of relationships and thus the identification of fans with clubs and individual players for the stakeholders involved. International sports marketing is becoming increasingly important and an understanding of fan interests is essential for effective marketing, as information on trends in fan interests enables a more tailored strategy for clubs and sponsors.

This study aims to explore spectators' awareness of and attitudes toward sponsoring firms as well as to propose a model predicting their purchase and word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions toward the sponsors of a major sporting event during a pandemic crisis.

A quantitative method was used to collect the data, with 1,259 questionnaires being effectively collected and analyzed using SPSS and AMOS. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), path analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze the data.

Factors such as sports involvement, sincerity, social media use, beliefs about sponsorship, sponsor's image, Covid-19 beliefs and emotions, awareness of and attitude toward sponsors were found to significantly predict spectators' purchase and WOM intentions.

The results support the structural equation model, providing a multidisciplinary conceptual framework that highlights the significance of comprehending the role of significant factors in sponsorship efficiency during the Covid-19 crisis. The proposed framework adds to the knowledge corpus of this field.

In this paper, the authors empirically and theoretically analyze the scaling and control of talent development to highlight an important part of commercialization in football clubs, especially in the light of a growing transfer market.

Conducting a single case study of a Swedish football club, the authors adapt a view of the club as a “high-intensity” organization (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2004), one that inherently relies on strong identification of employees and the fostering of talent. This view allows us to detail the importance of both socio-ideological and technocratic forms of control involved in the talent development process.

The authors show how socio-ideological and technocratic forms of control were combined to establish the football club as a “talent factory” in the league, as well as the corresponding challenges when scaling talent development activities and how these challenges were handled. In doing so, the authors contribute to the broader accounting literature on talent- and human resource management, as the authors provide an example of how football clubs may commercialize without necessarily violating their fundamental sports values.

Talent management has mainly been studied in terms of increasing player wages and a focus on the cost of talent. As opposed to these perspectives, the authors highlight the revenue potential in developing players in the light of a growing transfer market and the relevance of talent development for the commercialization of football clubs.

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.

Bringing together our analysis from the previous chapters allows us to lay out the various contradictions and issues surrounding ownership models that have arisen for fans of football clubs. Exactly when are most English football clubs supposed to have conformed to the normative model? Our analysis reveals that the context in which football clubs operate is that of global business and has developed in line with the practices of other businesses that exist outside the sporting arena. There is always going to be an uneasy tension between a fan ideal and something that has to operate within global contexts. However, in the modern game ideal and practice find themselves not merely in tension, but often completely in opposition to one another. Football finds itself in a position where something has to give, be it ownership models or the affective ties of the fans themselves. Fans can either continue to wrestle with the contradictions that arise from what they think their club is or fandom itself changes to embrace the context of the ownership. Given the moral injunction that is almost invariably built into the idealised image that fans have of their club, there is one question that we must always ask in the contemporary climate: How far is too far before all of this means nothing?

Given the rise of sport non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and sponsorships from cryptocurrency companies in the sport industry during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, this paper aims to critically frame the partnerships between cryptocurrency and sport by exploring the reception of fan tokens amongst supporters of three English Premier League clubs: Manchester City, Everton and Crystal Palace.

Drawing upon the emerging critical scholarship on cryptocurrency and the political economy of professional football, this study uses digital ethnography in an attempt to understand the major themes emanating from the online forum discussions amongst fans in response to the issuance of fan tokens by the aforementioned three clubs, among other types of partnerships with crypto companies.

The supporters’ critical deliberations revolved around the contradictions of fan tokens (as a means for supposed “fan engagement” or for financial speculation) and the utility of cryptocurrency for the public. These reactions in turn showcase a larger tension underlying the financially unstable professional football industry: the contest between the owners and the fan bases over the exchange value (for profit) and use value (for community) of the clubs.

This paper is one of the first studies to adopt a critical framework to examine the emerging partnerships between sports and cryptocurrency companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also provides one of the first in-depth analyses of the critical receptions of sport NFTs amongst sport fans. While contributing to the literature on fan activism/protest in the context of the commercialization and commodification of sport, the paper also raises new questions on the responsible use of cryptocurrency/NFT in sport.