French amateur football clubs’ finance and revenue volatility: the determinants of demand shocks

The article addresses financial troubles in French amateur football clubs and their origins. Previous literature has demonstrated that–in particular in French football–club bankruptcies are triggered by demand shocks. The present research intends highlighting the determinants of demand shocks on those clubs playing French amateur football top two tiers with a longitudinal analysis (2009/2010-2019/2020). Various exogenous elements that influence club demand (i.e. revenues) are taken on board, namely, macroeconomic variables, such as the variation of GDP growth rate between two football seasons, a dummy for the Covid-19 sanitary crisis, and a sport dummy for the effect of the French national team winning the 2018 male football World Cup. The latter is used to check a potential trickle-down effect on amateur elite football. None of these variables do explain demand shocks except if the heterogeneity of clubs’ economic models is taken into account. The determinants of shock demands appear to be clubs’ strategic orientations (towards win maximization vs. a stable economic organization). © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Economic Models of French Amateur Soccer Clubs. From One Crisis to the Other: Which Transformation?

This article presents economic models at work in French amateur soccer clubs playing National 1 and National 2 tiers. Teams’ sporting performance and clubs’ financial results as well as their revenue and expenditure statistical distribution are analysed by means of Principal Component Analysis. Then a k-means methodology is implemented in view to defining archetypical clusters that characterise French amateur soccer clubs during the 2008-2020 period. The latter span of time opens a window of opportunity for understanding transformations in club economic models since the subprime crisis and up to current global economic recession triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Following the club taxonomy, a comparative static analysis shows that more amateur soccer clubs are in more satisficing financial shape at the dawn of the sanitary crisis than when they have been facing the subprime crisis. The so-called “virtuous modesty” cluster includes a greater number of clubs in 2019/20 than in 2008/09. © 2021 Global Alliance of Marketing & Management Associations (GAMMA).