ABSTRACT
Historically, the governance of professional sport has been understood in relatively straightforward, indeed taken for granted, terms. Essentially, this has meant that association football clubs, for example – but the same is true of other professional sports clubs – have remained under the ownership of private companies or mutual associations and that these entities appropriately reward athletes of varying abilities for their role in delivering a sporting ‘product’. In doing so, they have mostly operated within systems of governance that have presented sport as something of a deviation from normal business practices, but this has meant that, as in this case, football began to constitute anything but a conventional industry. Clubs did not seek to profit maximize and did not regard themselves as part of the ‘entertainment business’, even if they did effectively provide this through their participation in various sporting competitions. Instead, ‘utility maximization’, or simply the achievement of success on the field of play, remained the key objective for most if not all clubs regardless of what levels of the professional game they competed at. For the most part, this was a relatively benign business approach because, despite many clubs ‘living beyond their means’, the financial stakes were sufficiently low that overall equilibrium was retained and the game followed a largely predictable course. However, significant and wide-reaching changes have taken place in a range of national sports settings, especially over the last two decades, which have begun to distort this picture – in certain cases dramatically so – and that, in turn, give rise to some worrying trends. This is a situation that has become especially apparent since the turn of the new millennium and has begun to raise questions about the very purpose of elite professional football clubs across Europe; in some cases this has included a debate over their continued existence.
