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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 international trade of players in European club football does not seem to have had any negative effects on the national teams in the major leagues. Data presented in this article indicate a potentially positive effect for England and no effect for Spain, Italy and Germany. Contrary to this, the national teams in Norway, Greece and France seem to have benefited from exporting players to leagues of better quality than their own domestic leagues.

Based on an overview of the anti-money laundering initiatives in the sport sector and recent efforts of money launderers focused toward finding alternative channels for money laundering operations, the purpose of this paper is to present the modus operandi of money laundering in the football sector especially.

Specifics of money laundering through the football sector have been analyzed using deductive and inductive methods. This paper provides a review of the existing anti-money laundering initiatives in the sport sector to highlight the specific features of sport that increase money-laundering risks in the football sector. Certain risks have been analyzed and linked to risk areas and money laundering methods as a way of demonstrating established modus operandi.

Analyzed vulnerabilities that arise from the structure, financial characteristics and culture of the football sector represent an increased risk of money laundering in a condition where potential money launderers achieve status of investors, football agents or owners of football clubs and players. Taking some of these roles allows money launderers to enter into transactions related to the acquisition of ownership over football clubs or player transfers. Such types of transactions are particularly exposed to abuse for the purposes of the money laundering process due to their unique features.

Through a wide range of clarified risks and money laundering methods applicable to the football sector, this paper offers a comprehensive review of the existing money laundering threats in the football sector and proposals of prevention.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what degree football clubs recruit talents and give them playing time in matches. It also investigates if foreign players displace younger talents. Furthermore, it analyses to what degree the use of younger talents and foreign players influence the performances of clubs.

The empirical data are from Norwegian elite clubs, and come from two web sites: www.altomfotball and www.nettavisen.no. The analyses were done by means of OLS-regressions.

OLS-regressions showed that clubs that had many foreign players gave less playing time to U20 players than other clubs did. However, these clubs did not have fewer younger talents in the squad than other clubs did. This indicates that foreign players reduce the playing time being given to younger players, but not their ability to train with other teammates. The clubs that won the most points gave less playing time to U20 players (in terms of minutes). Surprisingly, the regression showed that the clubs that had most foreign players did not win more points than others.

Norwegian football clubs have significantly less financial resources than, for example, clubs in the big European football nations. Therefore, more research is necessary to find out whether the findings in this research corresponds with the pattern in other nations.

So far, the discussions about these issues have mainly been based on anecdotal evidence and very little on the findings in academic research. Therefore, this research give new insight to a field that needs more empirical-based analyses.

The purpose of this paper is to provide better understanding of potential foreign customers or satellite fans' perceptions of professional‐football brands, as this constitutes a necessary step toward setting up an internationalisation strategy to create a global professional‐sport brand.

Twelve semi‐directed individual interviews with French satellite fans about how they perceive the English Big Four brands of Arsenal Football Club (FC), Chelsea FC, Liverpool FC and Manchester United are conducted.

The paper found the common and specific features of each club's brand equity and the typical fans' perceptions of the clubs, which constitute major dimensions upon which the clubs are differentiated in the customers' minds. It also identified such key antecedents to building strong professional‐sport brand equity in the French market as the fit between the image, the values or both of the foreign club and the local club a fan supports.

The main limitation is the size of the sample, even if the saturation‐semantic criterion is applied.

This paper emphasises the need for professional‐sport clubs not to underestimate the need for strategic‐marketing steps different from those used at home before implementing foreign marketing operations and constitutes a first step toward future research into the analysis of the perceptions of potential foreign customers or satellite fans in broader contexts.

Although many studies have dealt with the perception of local professional‐sport brands, this paper represents one of the first empirical studies of the perceptions of professional‐football brands in a foreign market.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the perceived brand equity of professional football clubs on foreign markets as these clubs firmly want to expand and reach a global brand status.

Fitting with an inductive approach, 12 semi‐structured interviews are conducted in order to analyse the perceptions of Chinese fans of four English Premier League clubs.

The results of this research highlight the fact that the strength of professional football brand equity on the Chinese market is strongly determined by the level of brand awareness and perceived quality but, due to the increasing competition on foreign markets, professional football clubs need to clearly define their strategic marketing in order to improve the two other dimensions of brand equity, which are brand image and loyalty, which represents crucial stake to distinguish themselves.

The results provide useful information for professional clubs in general which want to become global but also provide relevant ways to improve brand equity for the four clubs investigated. This paper is one of the first to analyse perceived brand equity of professional clubs in direct competition among foreign potential or current customers.

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 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.