Purpose: This paper aims to analyse the relationship between ownership structure and financial performance in the five major European football leagues from 2007-2008 to 2012-2013 and examine the impact of the financial fair play (FFP) regulation.Design/methodology/approach: The sample used comprises 94 teams that participated in the major European competitions: German Bundesliga, Ligue 1 of France, Spanish Liga, English Premier League and the Italian Serie A. The estimation technique used is panel-corrected standard errors.Findings: The results confirm an inverted U-shaped curve relationship between ownership structure and financial performance as a consequence of both monitoring and expropriation effects. Moreover, the results show that after FFP regulation, the monitoring effect disappears and only the expropriation effect remains.Research limitations/implications: The lack of transparency of the information provided by some teams has limited the sample size.Practical implications: One of the main issues that the various regulating bodies of the industry should address is the introduction of a code of good practice, not only for aspects related to the transparency of financial information but also to require greater transparency in the information concerning corporate governance.Social implications: Regulating bodies could also consider other additional control instruments based on corporate governance, such as for example, corporate governance practices, corporate governance codes, greater transparency, control of the boards of directors, etc.Originality/value: This study tries to provide direct evidence of the impact of large majority investors in the clubs and FFP regulation on the financial performance of football clubs.

Research question: European football clubs are known for an institutionalized management culture which prioritizes on-field success over financial performance. This creates an extremely competitive context within which most clubs operate, producing debts and deficits. However, in order to secure clubs’ long-term financial viability, Union of European Football Association (UEFA) has introduced regulatory and monitoring processes tied to accounting data in order to assess clubs’ financial performance. This study aims to determine whether UEFA’s framework has an impact on clubs’ management policies with regard to accounting quality. Research methods: The study employs a sample of 109 European football clubs for a seven-year period, 2008–2014 (three years before and four years after the regulatory intervention), to investigate the impact of the reform upon management practices related to accounting. Following prior literature, we employ the three most commonly used proxies of accounting quality: earnings management, conditional accounting conservatism and auditor switching. Results and findings: This study demonstrates that, at the expense of accounting quality, club management seeks to promote the image of a financially robust organization in order to secure licensing and, consequently, much needed funding from UEFA. In this manner, the dominance of a management culture which impairs financial performance is further cemented. Implications: UEFA should take into consideration that, in a financially distressed industry focused on achieving success on the field of play, the imposition of regulatory monitoring tied to accounting data inevitably leads to a loss of organizational credibility and transparency. Hence, UEFA’s intervention should be accompanied by the imposition of a corporate governance framework which would aim to rearrange club management priorities by facilitating a change in institutionalized mentalities.

The scope of this paper is to analyze the impact of corporate governance quality (namely board size, board independence, managerial ownership, institutional ownership and CEO duality) on the earnings management behaviour of European Union's football clubs over the period 2006–2009. Empirical results documented that corporate governance quality mitigates aggressive earnings manipulation (income smoothing, accrual manipulation and reporting small positive income) by football managers and specifically clubs with increased board independence, managerial ownership and institutional ownership and small board size are associated with high quality financial reporting through the deterioration of earnings management behaviour. These findings dictate the necessity of sound corporate governance principles to protect the interests of shareholders and various stakeholders, and prevent the expropriation of wealth by managers and maximize the clubs’ economic results and social return. The empirical findings are robust to several sensitivity tests concerning the functioning form of the models and the measures of earnings management.

The scope of this study is to examine the impact of board gender diversity on corporate cash-holding decisions within the European sport and leisure sector. A sample of 125 unique firms was selected for the period from 2008 to 2019, and analysis was performed using panel fixed-effects regressions. Empirical evidence documented that the higher the number of women serving on the board of directors, the higher the level of cash the firm holds. This result is attributed to the critical mass theory of governance, suggesting that boards having at least two women directors are associated with higher cash holdings compared to firms with one or no women directors. Additionally, gender diversity leads to increased cash holdings for firms with lower governance quality, suggesting that women on boards perform a monitoring role within those firms with the most severe agency problems. The results remain robust after several sensitivity tests controlling for potential endogeneity among the variables and the model’s functional form.

Purpose: The main purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between human capital investments and financial performance in the professional football industry. The authors examine this association by controlling for internal (club-level) mechanisms of governance. Specifically, as they deal with a context of highly concentrated ownership and familial control of football clubs, they posit that the degree of family board representation and a dual leadership structure exert a moderating effect on the decision to spend on playing talent.Design/methodology/approach: The empirical analysis employs a fixed-effect econometric model on a panel data set of 16 Italian football clubs that spans a nine-year time period ending up with 144 firm-year observations.Findings: The main novel finding of this investigation is that clubs with CEO duality and a high degree of family board representation manage to profit from investments in player contracts as opposed to clubs which lack these governance mechanisms.Research limitations/implications: A clear implication is that the presence of corporate governance mechanisms at club level may be value-enhancing. In terms of policy direction, the finding makes the case that regulatory bodies should consider the imposition of governance mechanisms at club level as a means to promote actual financial discipline and a further ally to current regulations that are restricted to monitoring processes tied to accounting data.Originality/value: This study attempts to explain the financial outcomes of player investments by combining insights from the mainstream governance and family business literature. Prior works in the field are restricted to testing the direct relation between player investments and performance, but fail to consider the potential moderators of this association.