The Changing Face Of The Football Business

This examination of changes taking place in the world of football focuses on its growing commercialization. It covers such topics as fans becoming shareholders, with a say in the running of the clubs, and the setting-up of a government-sponsored scheme to support shareholder trusts.

The practice and perceptions of Japanese management are undergoing fundamental change. This book sets out to identify the essential currents of change and explain how and why these impinge on the experience of managers in Japan.

As football clubs have become luxury investments, their decisions increasingly mirror those of any other business organisation. Football supporters have been encouraged to express their club loyalty by ‘thinking business’ - acting as consumers and generating money deemed necessary for their clubs to compete at the highest levels. In critical studies, supporters have been portrayed as passive or reluctant consumers who, imprisoned by enduring club loyalties, embody a fatalistic attitude to their own exploitation. As this book aims to show, however, such expressions of loyalty are far from hegemonic and often interface haphazardly with traditional ideas about what constitutes the ‘loyal fan’. While there is little doubt that professional football is experiencing commodification, the reality is that football clubs are not simply businesses, nor can they ever aspire to be organisations driven solely by expanding or protecting economic value. Rather, clubs hover uncertainly between being businesses and community assets. Football Supporters and the Commercialisation of Football explores the implications of this uncertainty for understanding supporter resistance to, and compromise with, commodification. Every club and its supporters exist in their own unique national and local contexts. In this respect, this book offers a Euro-wide comparison of supporter reactions to commercialisation and provides unique insight into how football supporters actively mediate regional, local and national contexts, as they intersect with the universalistic presumptions of commerce. This book was previously published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

The contributors to this book argue that the commercialized PR-driven British football world has either created, exacerbated or continued to ignore serious problems of social exclusion along lines of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age.

* Contributed to by a world-class team of experts and well edited by two specialists in football management * Comprehensive coverage of all key issues in football internationally, with a strong balance of academic and practitioner analysis and comment * Presented in a clear and structured format, easy-to-use for readers with clear signposts throughout the text and online resources for lecturers

In this comprehensive Handbook, John Goddard and Peter Sloane present a collection of analytical contributions by internationally regarded scholars in the field, which extensively examine the many economic challenges facing the world's most popular

The beautiful game is big business. Football leagues worldwide are being dominated by clubs who are becoming richer and more powerful. Enormous corporate investment, deals with media giants, huge volumes of merchandising and dedicated TV channels mean that football teams are as concerned with the affairs of the boardroom as what is going on on the pitch. In this dynamic new book, Stephen Morrow examines the changing face of football, looking at issues such as the role of the stock exchange, the viability of the stakeholder approach, the 'new economics' of football including the role of media firms and the social impact of the sport.