Abstract:

With soccer clubs gaining more importance in economies from a financial point of view, the need for an efficient and sustainable management has evolved. In that matter, the assessment, tracking, and management of sporting and financial performance measures becomes an essential toolkit. Current literature offers adapted frameworks derived from traditional companies, which acknowledge the close interdependencies of sporting and financial key performance indicators (KPIs) without providing the conceptual means to assess these from a common perspective. This presentation was developed based on a real-life case and provides an integrated and comprehensive performance measurement concept with a detailed set of KPIs in the sporting, financial, and interrelated dimensions for each hierarchical level of a soccer club.

Abstract:

Football has been a mainly male domain for decades. Women's football is a sport that has long been plagued by prejudices and cliches. However, is was clearly visible that women's soccer has entered a new era in 2019's FIFA Women's World Cup with FIFA quoting a total of 1,12 billion viewers over all platforms. The growing interest, as well as an increase in competition forces female clubs to internationalize, be it via engaging international players and coaches or by attracting international sponsors. 

By analyzing the current level of internationalization of this year's participants in the UEFA Women's Champions League quarterfinal significant differences become visible. The project gives an overview of the degree of internationalization and shows in which dimensions certain clubs my lag behind.

Abstract:

This master thesis focuses on the two most prominent conglomerates in football, the Red Bull Football conglomerate, and the City Football Group. The rise of football has been present in various spheres of everyday life and effectively touches each continent of the globe. Its fans can be attributed to highly distinct social groups, coverage is omnipresent in media, and transfer fees for players have experienced a skyrocketing development along with growing club revenues, player salaries, broadcasting contracts or marketing activities. The two conglomerates have the potential to change this industry substantially. The thesis‘ main scope is to better understand conglomerate transfer practices between the affiliated clubs and whether these enable the conglomerates to gain a competitive advantage by leveraging the synergies of managing multiple clubs. We firstly portray the conglomerates and conduct a literature research to provide a fundamental understanding of the conglomerates’ operations which facilitates comprehension of our findings. Our findings are further based on a quantitative analysis with a focus on intra-conglomerate transfer activities and also touching upon market value developments of players. Our findings indicate that the conglomerates do achieve a competitive advantage through their organizational set-up. In the emerging discussion and conclusion, we portray our key findings and predict strategic implications: the focus on improving the players’ career paths based on our introduced concept of player journeys emphasizing the conglomerates’ major advantage of flexibility, the establishment of common playing styles to advance competitively and improve fan recognition and the pursuit of a unified branding strategy to maximize the conglomerates’ impact on multiple dimensions. Our findings underlie certain limitations, especially with regards to a player’s market value development, which can guide further research.

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