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The paper aims to present key insights for achieving a sustainable competitive advantage from implementing data analytics solutions and artificial intelligence (AI).

This conceptual paper builds on prior empirical and conceptual research, and it offers anecdotal evidence from a best-practice case study of Liverpool Football Club.

Beyond the well-known companies in profiting from AI, such as Amazon, this paper presents a surprising best-practice example for achieving a competitive advantage from combining data analytics and AI with human expertise. Liverpool Football Club is a leading soccer club from England, and it has experienced a major revival in terms of sporting success and financial performance in recent years. The club’s emphasis on data analytics and AI only contributed to this impressive evolution when it was complemented with the emotional intelligence and people skills of its present manager Juergen Klopp. Along with new conceptual arguments, this example of integrated intelligence offers important insights for managers and executives in companies from many industries – far beyond sports management.

The conceptual arguments and case example illustrate that the competitive benefits of implementing standardized AI solutions in an isolated way will often be relatively limited. Many AI solutions will be standardized in the near future, and they may easily be applied by many firms. Thus, even those companies that are considered as AI pioneers may not be able to sustain their competitive advantage unless they develop an integrated intelligence architecture, which combines human and AI. This integration of data analytics and AI with the human intelligence and expertise of a firm’s employees offers the basis for a sustainable advantage because it is difficult to match for competitors. Thus, the paper offers new theoretical insights and direct managerial implications with regard to profiting from AI and data analytics.

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 study is to analyse how professional football clubs have attained success with internationalisation and branding strategies in foreign markets.

Based on an inductive approach, 27 semi-structured interviews were conducted to analyse the perceptions of Ghanaian fans of four English Premier League teams.

The findings of this study highlight that the strength of professional football brand equity is jointly determined by the level of brand awareness, brand loyalty and perceived quality. However, increasing competition in international markets require professional football clubs to clearly define their marketing strategies to improve how fans perceive them.

This paper is one of the few studies to use country-of-origin paradigm and signalling theory to explain football brand equity building, thereby extending the earlier work of Chanavat and Bodet (2009). Its empirical focus on Africa is also unique and provides evidence to suggest that global marketers have the opportunity to capitalise on market expansion opportunities in developing economies.

This paper aims to explore the purpose and outline the key features of Liverpool Football Club Foundation’s County Lines (CL) programme and how principles of collaboration and co-production can be implemented to educate children at risk of entering the youth justice system.

This paper reviews the findings from a 12-week CL intervention programme in 14 secondary schools in the Liverpool City Region between 2021 and 2022. The programme was designed in collaboration with funders, partners and participants and aimed to improve knowledge of, and change attitudes towards CL and its associated harms, including knife crime and child exploitation.

Knowledge and attitude changes were measured across 12 indicators, with positive changes recorded for each indicator. Perhaps of most interest to those working in the sector was the recorded success in obtaining consistent attendance from beginning to end with very little erosion of engagement. This suggests that the content and method of delivery was successful in engaging harder to reach young people to make positive change.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to examine how collaboration and co-production (two of the five principles of the Serious Violence Strategy 2018) can be implemented by a football charity and its partners to educate children in a local community on the harms of CL.

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.

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.

The overall aim of this study is to improve our understanding of the strength of attraction factors of professional football club brands with foreign fans, and of the influence of demographics and individual characteristics on the influence of these factors in the context of sport spectatorship services.

This research was based on a quantitative study surveying 1,160 Chinese fans of English Premier League clubs and its results were produced through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. They identify the relative importance of 21 organisation– (e.g. star players, charismatic managers, team kits, partnerships and alliances, etc.), market and environment– (e.g. peer influence, TV coverage, etc.), and experience– (e.g. personal bonds, past attendance, etc.) induced service brand attraction points that were categorised into six main factors: star players, on-the-field performance, brand identity, marketing and merchandising, localism and experience.

Organisation-induced factors are the most important club brand attraction factors for Chinese fans. ANOVA analysis showed that demographic (i.e. gender, age, and education) and individual (i.e. brand identification and loyalty levels) characteristics influence the importance of attraction factors for fans. For instance, fans who had previously supported a different club brand rated the marketing and merchandising dimensions lower, localism higher, on-the-field performance lower and brand identity lower than those who had always supported the same club.

These results emphasise the importance of segmentation when considering consumer attraction to professional sport brands. They also provide specific practical knowledge that is useful when expanding into new foreign markets.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of autoethnography within the context of sports fandom. This paper advocates the use of such qualitative methodologies to enable a greater understanding of sports fans. The paper also aims to provide greater understanding of sports fandom.

The research moves away from traditional methodologies of studying sports fandom from an objective viewpoint and uses an evocative autoethnography to provide an account of the lived experience of a sports fan.

By writing himself into his research it has been possible to gain a deeper insight into sports fandom. The subject of passion arises and while the Dualistic Model of Passion was explored as a mechanism for dealing with obsessive passion it is suggested that attempting to move away from a state of obsessive passion may diminish the enjoyment of being a sports fan.

This paper highlights the benefits that methodologies such as autoethnography can have for academics studying sports fandom and other disciplines. It encourages academics to overcome the perceived lack of academic acceptance of the method.

This paper utilises a qualitative methodology to explore the experience of being a sports fan. This methodological approach is yet to be fully embraced within this field and hence there is a lack of in‐depth data on the experiences of sports fans. This account will allow readers to develop a greater understanding and insight of sports fans.

My objectives in this chapter are firstly to familiarise readers with the proposed methods by which human resources can be valued and secondly to summarise the benefits and objections to this concept of accounting. Finally, the significant effect of human resource accounting on annual accounts is demonstrated with regard to Liverpool Football Club.