Search results

To provide insights into the role of formal and informal accounts in preventing the liquidation of a professional football club and in post-crisis rebuilding.

This case study, framed as a conflict arena, covers an eight-year period of a high-profile struggle over the future of a professional football club. It uses a mixed methods design, including direct engagement with key actors involved in administration proceedings and transformation to a hybrid supporter-owned organisation.

Our findings suggest that within the arena:• formal accounting and governance were of limited use in managing the complex network of relationships and preventing the abuse of power or existential crises. • informal accounting helped mobilise critical resources and maintain supporters’ emotional investment during periods of conflict. • informal accounts enabled both resistance and coalition-building in response to perceived abuse of power. • informal accounts were used by the Club as part of its legitimation activities.

This study provides theoretical and empirical insights into an unfolding crisis with evidence gathered directly from actors involved in the process. The conceptual framework developed in this paper creates new visibilities and possibilities for developing more effective accounting practices in settings that enable continuing emotional investment from supporters.

Accounting is problematically shaped by a culture of spin. In the practice of accounting, presentational management risks assuming greater importance than an open and clear communication motivated by a concern to serve the public interest. We elaborate upon this problematic feature of contemporary practice and suggest pointers towards responding to the challenge it poses in terms of a better way for accounting in the new millennium.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to highlight the heterogeneity of the organizational aims within the professional football teams in Ligue 1. Second, to understand why some teams swing from a win orientation towards a soft budget constraint from year to year, and vice versa.

Financial data from annual reports for the period 2005/2015 was collected for the 35 Ligue 1 clubs. To define the degree of compliance with the intended strategy for those clubs, an efficiency analysis was conducted thanks to the data envelopment analysis method. This measure of performance was supplemented with the identification of productivity and demand shocks to identify whether clubs suffered from such shock or changed their strategy. It enables to precise the nature of the evolution in the utility function, with regards to the gap between expectation and actual performance.

The paper suggests that a team can switch from one orientation to another from year to year due to the uncertain nature of the sports industry. The club director’s utility function could also be maximized under inter temporal budget function in order to adjust the weight between win and profit according to the opportunities in the environment.

The paper sheds new light on the win/profit maximization. The theoretical model provides an assessment of the weight between win and profit in Ligue 1 and then identifies a new explanation for persistent losses in the sports industry.

Women’s football has received increasing attention in the academic literature, partly due to its growing popularity worldwide. However, women’s football research remains scattered across numerous academic domains. Focusing on the social sciences, humanities and management disciplines, the purpose of this paper is to map and organise contributions, and to identify research directions for future studies within these disciplines.

Using the keywords “women”, “girls”, “female” and “football” or “soccer” to initially identify articles, an integrative approach was followed to evaluate and analyse relevant literature. In all, 117 academic journals were classified and subsequently divided into 26 themes according to the subject area, topic and level examined.

Results of this integrative review show an increasing trend of journal publications since 1998, with a large representation of studies related to historical and sociological research, where qualitative methods are dominant. Articles investigating economic, managerial and marketing areas appeared in more recent times. Women’s football has been researched from different perspectives (players, fans, sport organisations) and across various countries.

The restricted scope of this review (i.e. its focus on social sciences) and the manual classification of articles represent two limitations of this study. However, the synthesis of academic literature provided may assist scholars who are interested in women’s football and women’s sports research to fill identified research gaps and contribute to further advance academic investigations in this area.

This paper provides an overview of salient research avenues and represents the first attempt to critically appraise the direction of academic contributions in women’s football for the purpose of advancing scholarly inquiry in this sport.

The decision by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg in the case involving the Belgian footballer Jean‐Marc Bosnian presents the most serious challenge yet to the influence football clubs hold over their players. The court decided that it is a breach of European law for clubs to demand a transfer fee in respect of a player at the end of his contract, as this is a restriction of the free movement of labour as set out in Article 48 of the Treaty of Rome. This paper considers the implications of this decision for professional football clubs in the UK, several of whom record the services provided by their players as assets on their balance sheet. The paper considers various possible accounting treatments and concludes that in the short term at least, given the uncertainties surrounding the industry post Bosman, recording the cost of players' registrations at their historical cost is the most appropriate policy for clubs to adopt. The paper also considers the implications of the case for clubs' fund‐raising capabilities, through interviews with clubs' bankers, finding that banks are more concerned about the quality of income stream rather than the existence of security in the form of transferring players' registrations. ‘If someone regards players as a merchandise with a monetary value, whose value may in some cases even be included in the balance sheet, he does so at his own risk.’

This paper considers whether the prospective services provided by a football player on behalf of the club holding his registration can be recognised as an accounting asset. The first section of the paper considers the appropriateness of treating these prospective services as intangible assets within the terms of the UK Accounting Standards Board criteria for definition and recognition of assets. In the second section, four valuation methodologies are evaluated using case study data made available by a major Scottish club. Each of the methods evaluated is either currently used in accounting practice by some clubs, or is used in some form in the existing market place for players. The historical cost model involves capitalising players acquired by the club via the transfer market on the balance sheet at their cost of registration. The earnings multiplier model applies a multiplier to a player's earnings to produce a current valuation of that player. The third model involves capitalising players at directors' valuation, while the independent multiple player evaluation model involves obtaining valuations for players from various informed sources, knowledgeable on those particular players. The paper concludes that there are convincing arguments for the conceptualisation of the services provided by football players as accounting assets, and recommends an system of valuation in which players are valued at their realisable value by independent experts.

The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate football club financial reporting with reference to: the long-standing debate on the nature and purpose of accounting; and the implementation of UEFA's Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations.

The paper is based on a review and analysis of academic literature, accounting regulation and football regulations.

The focus of financial reporting on rational economic decision-makers results in football club financial reports being of limited use to many football club stakeholders. Consideration of the social and organisational context of football, as takes place in FFP, can be used as a catalyst to consider broader approaches to football club reporting. The paper calls for fuller and different pictures to be provided of clubs’ performance, in particular broadening the scope of accountability to users beyond that provided by an economic account.

The paper is designed to stimulate debate about accounting for and reporting on football club businesses. A necessary next step is an exploratory project, focusing on one or a small number of clubs and their stakeholders, exploring in a practical setting what enhanced football club reporting might look like.

While the weaknesses of financial reporting have been considered extensively in the mainstream accounting literature and on occasion in terms of sport, the paper seeks to progress this discussion by linking it to significant football policy initiatives and to wider social and community-based football research.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the implications of power imbalance and over-emphasis on commercial logic on the structure and governance of Scottish football.

An in-depth analysis of secondary sources is used to identify the logics at play in Scottish football and to explore implications of the liquidation of Rangers for the structure of the game.

Over-emphasis on commercial logic has led to power being concentrated in two clubs, Celtic and Rangers, and to other clubs and the league itself becoming financially dependent on those clubs. The collapse of Rangers thus threatened the stability of other clubs and the league. The case highlights the challenge of reconciling competing logics and the role played by previously peripheral actors in bringing about change in the field.

The on-going nature of the case, related investigations and legal process meant that it was not possible to supplement the secondary source material with primary evidence.

It demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of elite contemporary football and of the challenges faced by leagues and governing bodies in accommodating logics and multiple stakeholder interests. It also highlights the need for more effective financial regulation of corporate football clubs and their officials and emphasises the importance of inclusive stakeholder governance.

It highlights the risks inherent in football business in small markets dominated by one or a few clubs. It highlights the role that previously peripheral actors can play in bringing about change within a field.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of how corporate social responsibility (CSR) develops within professional football clubs, along with its organizational implications, phases, drivers and barriers for corporate governance, given that professional football organizations have become particularly strong socio-political business institutions, often home to numerous social and business relationships. Additionally it aims to consider CSR development generally drawing specifically on examples from Scottish professional football while answering two key research questions: what kind of drivers do clubs identify as reasons to develop CSR? and Can developmental phases be identified during this process?

The paper builds on a qualitative case study methodology that draws on primary and secondary data collected across 12 Scottish Premier League (SPL) football clubs. Three stages of data collection were set out including interviews, Web content analysis and annual/CSR reports analysis.

This research highlights internal and external drivers of change in Scottish football clubs along with institutional barriers and organizational (developmental) phases of CSR and corporate governance.

This research is limited on the CSR development across the 12 SPL clubs.

The paper is the first to consider CSR in professional football clubs from a developmental point of view. Six phases of CSR development are identified and defined – volunteering, regulation, socialization, corporatization, separation and integration – and implications for football and general corporate governance are presented.