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In 2005 Manchester United was taken over by US businessman Malcolm Glazer, in part because of the club's brand name prominence in the global sport of soccer. This paper examines how Manchester United rose to a pre-eminent position in world football through its on-field performances and its off-the-field management strategies. It shows how the club took its storied history into world markets to take full advantage of globalisation, the opportunities extended through the English Premier League's reputation and developments in global media technologies. Astute management of club resources is identified as the major factor in global brand management.

There has been limited research on why football clubs contribute to charity. This paper examines how football clubs and their charitable conduits report information when discussing their connectedness. In addition, it explores reasons why, and the extent to which, football clubs support altruism via such charitable vehicles.

Case studies of four major football teams (Manchester City/Manchester United in England and AC Milan/Inter Milan in Italy) are discussed, with formal reports of the clubs and their associated charitable conduits being analysed.

Boundaries between the clubs and their charitable conduits are frequently blurred. Evidence suggests that acknowledging the co-existence of different factors may help to understand what is reported by these organisations and address some of the caveats in terms of autonomy and probity of their activities and reporting practices.

The research uses case studies of four major ‘powerhouses’ of the game and their associated charitable spinoffs. While this is innovative and novel, expanding the research to investigate more clubs and their charitable endeavours would allow greater generalisations.

The study provides material that can be used to reflect on the very topical subject of ‘sportswashing’. This has the potential to input to deliberations relating to the future governance of the game.

The paper explores relationships between businesses and charities/nonprofits in a sector so far little investigated from a charitable accountability perspective. It suggests that motives for engaging in charitable activity and highlighting such engagement may extend beyond normal altruism or warm-glow emotions.

The purpose of this paper is to extend research on boundary making and breaking through alternative football clubs. These entities have borne out of the disappointment caused by the neoliberal turn of the football industry, which excluded traditional fans from being active actors and therefore call for study and generalization of specific forms of alternative accountability.

The study looks at emerging trends in the accounting and sport literature by drawing on two concepts that emerged in critical scholarship: critical performativity and critical dialogical accountability, with the aim of better understanding how these elements are developed and shaped within an alternative form of football organization. The focus on Football Club United of Manchester drives the ethnographic approach with data collected via participant observation, field-notes, documental analysis and semi-structured interviews.

The research shows that the pillars of the club's ethos, pushing its critical performative interventions toward setting new boundaries, are democratic governance and accountability, favoring participation and inclusion, and strictly linked to this, a responsibility to local communities. However, the study also highlights the difficulties of maintaining these boundaries when core values are threatened by degeneration.

The study makes a novel contribution to the field of accounting and sport, showing how an alternative football club adopts inclusive accountability systems that go beyond mainstream neoliberal practices. Such an inclusive approach can stimulate critical performativity, moving away from means-end rationality.

The purpose of this work is to study how different stakeholders of a football club engage with interactions online through Twitter. It analyses the football club’s Twitter network to discover influential actors and the topic of interest in their online communication.

The authors analysed the social networks derived from over two million tweets collected during football matches played by Manchester United. The authors applied social network analysis to discover influencers and sub-communities and performed content analysis on the most popular tweets of the prominent influencers.

Sub-communities can be formed around current affairs that are irrelevant to football, perhaps due to opportunistic attempts of using the large networks and massive attention during football matches to disseminate information. Furthermore, the popularity of tweets featuring different topics depends on the types of influencers involved.

The methods can help football clubs develop a deeper understanding of their online social communities. The findings can also inform football clubs on how to optimise their communication strategies by using various influencers.

Compared to previous research, the authors discovered a wide range of influencers and denser networks characterised by a smaller number of large clusters. Interestingly, this study also found that bots appeared to become influential within the network.

The purpose of this paper is to help demonstrate the extent to which socio‐cultural and market‐oriented incentives jointly contribute to corporate control outcomes that prevail in the UK football industry.

Illustrative case studies informed by analysis of financial performance data, discussion with key informants, review of official documents.

The paper finds long term performance outcomes were influenced in substantive ways by actions led by shareholder groups pursuing largely non‐market‐oriented objectives.

Industry‐specific empirical work that analyses how the interplay between voice and exit strategies influences corporate control outcomes is limited. This paper focuses on two UK cases and therefore would benefit expansion to further UK cases and comparative analyses to non‐UK situations.

The outcomes suggest that the market for corporate control in this particular industry context requires specific attention to actions driven by largely non‐market‐driven incentives.

Previous papers have not provided detailed empirical‐based evidence about how socio‐cultural concerns have influenced corporate control outcomes in the case studies provided.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight and encourage consideration of the ethical and in some instances legal implications of managerial change in the English Premier League (EPL) which often gets overlooked and sidestepped by clubs.

Extant literature relating to managerial change is identified and discussed to provide the foundations of the discussion of whether managerial change in the EPL which is primarily focused on performance outcome, is neglecting ethical and legal issues.

The loophole that exists in the Employment Rights Act (1996) allows clubs to instantly dismiss a manager and consequently not see out their notice period as agreed in their contract or the statutory notice period. Whilst legally clubs are at will to act in this manner, the instability of EPL management evident today appears to have taken away the rights of an employee.

Greater consideration of the current managerial change practices in EPL from an ethical and legal perspective appears warranted. The incomparable rights that a player and a manger have relating to their tenure at a club seem somewhat unfair.

Presents thought-provoking information relating to managerial change in the EPL which appears to have been overlooked in the literature to date which primarily focuses on the impact of change on performance.

There has been increasing engagement with Annual General Meetings (AGMs) in the UK during the past decade by both private investors and protesters. At the same time, proposals have been mooted to allow companies to not hold such meetings. When examined from an agency theory perspective, AGMs appear largely redundant. This paper reports a qualitative investigation of such meetings and considers their relevance both as sites for the expression of stakeholder issues and also as a means for management to (re)confirm their power and status. The paper utilises Lukes (1974) three‐dimensional model of power as an alternative to the conceptualisation of power inherent in agency theory as a means of analysing the dynamics of power at AGMs

This paper analyses the media ownership of professional sports teams. The theory of vertical integration is used to identify internal efficiency gains, lower uncertainty and increased market power as general explanations. The industryspecific reasons are examined, particularly the importance of securing access to broadcasting rights. The potential implications for teams, leagues and fans are discussed. It is suggested that media ownership of teams may undermine the sporting and financial viability of leagues thus necessitating intervention by sports administrators and government regulators.

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.

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.