Football Business Models and Strategic Management: analysis and comparison of the European top leagues

Since football has growth its popularity more and more as years go by, until becoming the most played and watched sport in the world, consequently in the last decades there was an huge increase of businessmen and companies, that decided to invest their money in professional football club. They treated clubs like business firms, investing money in players, infrastructure and so on, hoping to get good outcomes (economic, financial, social, political) as a consequence of an improved sport performance. This thesis examines the different business models and strategic choices that have been taken both by top European football leagues and football clubs in the last 10 years, from the introduction of the Financial Fair Play (FFP) until nowadays. I decided to insert and explain the FFP because the implementation of it was a crucial element for the football industry, since it set up limits in spending and in levels of debt of clubs, so that they could provide self-sustenance themselves. These measures were introduced because an enormous number of European clubs had incurred several losses in the precedents year, and although a small amount of them were able to sustain the losses thanks to recapitalizations of their owners, the football industry could not be sustainable in the long-term anymore. It is due to these regulations that football clubs have had to change their strategic management and subsequently their business model. I carried out a comparative analysis of business strategies and business models, taking into consideration the top-flight European leagues and clubs, focusing mainly on the so named Big Five: Italy, England, Spain, France and Germany. I chose to analyse deeper these leagues both because the federations mentioned above and clubs belonging to them are the most winning in the European competitions, synonym of a good planning in term of financial strategy and sport performances in the previous decades, being them consequently the first five football federation in the Uefa Ranking, the coefficient used by Union of European Football Associations to classify the football leagues of Europe. A further reason I’ve taken into consideration next to the sport successes, is that these football association and clubs have different business strategies and business models, that they have shaped according to the inherent characteristics of the national league and, since 2020, according to the pandemic caused by Covid-19, that have had and have nowadays an enormous impact on the finance of football clubs. In the end I analysed the economic and financial results, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic of these football leagues and clubs, with the aim of compare the different business performances undertaken.