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The aims of the research are twofold: (1) exploring whether football club stocks can be considered an asset class of their own; (2) investigating whether football stocks enable well-diversified investors to achieve more efficient risk-return combinations.

Using efficient frontier optimization, a base portfolio, with standard stocks and bonds, and a corresponding enhanced portfolio, which includes football stocks in the investment opportunity set, are defined. This procedure is applied to four portfolio composition rules. Pairwise comparisons of portfolio Sharpe ratios include a test for statistical significance.

The results indicate a low correlation of football stocks and standard stocks; thus, football stocks could be considered an asset class of their own. Nevertheless, the addition of football stocks to a well-diversified portfolio does not improve its risk-return efficiency because the weak performance of football stocks eliminates their advantage of low correlation.

This study contributes to the evidence that investments in football are different from ‘ordinary’ investments and need further research, particularly into market participants and their investment motives.

Football stocks are not attractive to pure financial investors. Thus, football clubs need to know more about which side benefits are appreciated by which kind of investor and how much it costs to produce these side benefits.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to analyse the risk-return efficiency of football stocks from the perspective of a pure financial investor, i.e. an investor in football stocks who does not earn side benefits, such as strategic investors or fan investors.

The purpose of this paper is to test the weak-form efficiency of listed European football stocks in the sample period 2012–2020.

Three powerful tests for randomness are performed, that is, autocorrelation of returns analysis via the Ljung and Box (1978) test, variance ratio test by Lo and MacKinlay (1988) and runs test (Wald and Wolfowitz, 1940).

Results are mixed. Autocorrelation analysis and variance ratio test reject the random walk hypothesis and are, therefore, in line with the findings of Ferreira et al. (2017). In contrast, the runs test only leads to rejection of the random walk hypothesis for five out of 20 football stocks. Interestingly, this applies to shares with the lowest trading volume.

The market for stakes in football clubs can be expected to continue to grow in the future. Thus, the issue whether the price signals derived from listed football clubs are reliable inputs when negotiating the price for a football club stake in a private transaction is of increasing importance.

This study complements, and partly challenges, the results of Ferreira et al. (2017), the only other study in this field, by applying other methods and analyzing a more recent sample period.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether stocks in football clubs are valued in line with the valuation of other capital assets in the capital market. Moreover, it analyzes the risk profile of football stocks. By taking this perspective, the paper also contributes to the discussion on the motives of those who invest in football clubs, particularly the question of whether they expect extra benefits, i.e., in addition to dividends and share price appreciation, from the investments.

The empirical study analyzes the share prices of 19 listed European football clubs from January 2010 to December 2016. Building on the capital asset pricing model, the authors used Zellner’s (1962) seemingly unrelated regressions.

The results indicate that the majority of the football clubs in the sample are overvalued. This implies that investments in football stocks are mainly attractive for those investors who expect to derive extra benefits from their investment. That might be likely for strategic, patron and fan investors, but not for purely financial investors.

As a next step, more advanced factor models could be applied to the analysis.

For investors, the results imply that portfolio diversification is particularly beneficial while buying football stocks. For football clubs, the rather low general market risk, combined with the overvaluation, leads to low equity costs when new shares are issued.

The results suggest that dividends and share price appreciation are not the only benefits football stock owners derive from the stocks, thus underlining that further investigations in their motives to hold football stocks are very promising.

This chapter presents the current research status of family constitutions from an economics perspective. It locates the family constitution as part of the family and business governance structure of a family firm and the owner family. The typical structure and content of a family constitution are introduced. The chapter focuses on the status of research about family constitutions and provides a structured map for future research. With regard to extant research, it must be stated that the stock of literature is small. The contributions to literature are categorized in surveys; conceptual contributions; survey data; small sample, qualitative, empirical studies; and big sample, quantitative, empirical studies. The latter group includes three studies with a separate family constitution variable. This small number symbolizes that the family constitution still is an under-researched area. Therefore, family constitution research is far away from being able to answer central questions of advice-seeking owner families like, for example, whether a family constitution affects family performance, firm performance, or both; or whether the development process of a family constitutions disposes of an effect on family or firm performance separately from the hypothesized effect of the family constitution document.

This chapter focuses on the ideas and proposals of the “conference,” i.e., suggestions for future research put forward by the conference participants as a group, working for two days on this subject. These research proposals include inter alia: the potential difference between the family constitution in its written form and the constitution in its practiced form; heterogeneity versus standardization of family constitution content (because of some dominating consulting approaches); the effect of national legal frameworks and traditions on the prevalence of the family constitution and its content in different countries; opportunities in large sample quantitative studies.

In recent years, the corporate governance structures of family businesses have become increasingly important to the public. This is due not only to the increasing number of corporate successions but also to the (still) lower degree of formalization of corporate governance in family-owned companies. In this chapter, the authors analyze theoretical and empirical findings on family governance with a focus on family constitution and present the results of their own exploratory empirical survey conducted in 2017.