ANNUAL SUMMARY – 2024

1. Introduction to Elite Football

Exploring the Dynamics of Elite Football is one of the first works to identify and elaborate on the key dimensions of the increasingly interdisciplinary and international research agenda on elite football. Via a journey through its 13 chapters, this work presents, through theoretical elaboration and empirical investigation, the underlining economic, political, sociological, cultural and technological dimension in six emergent themes: The footballization of society and the desocietalization of football, commercial activity in elite football, the virus of greed and risk in elite football, elite football inequality, politics and power in elite football and football and the digital revolution. As a collective effort framed onto a socioscapes interdisciplinary approach to research, what we present is a pioneering work, with some limitation but hope, to serve as a transdisciplinary map for the development of emergent themes in elite football research.

Elite football is currently at the top of a complex global market process reflected through an increase in the overall volume of transactions and business revenues and in the development of a number of niche markets. The footballization of society and the desocietalization of football have widened the consumption pattern surrounding elite football to a number of consumers that have diluted its original purpose. Yet, being at the forefront of this consumption trend is hardly a positive, being elite football today regarded as a gambling business that produces increasingly uncertain outcomes for its consumers. Less directly, this commercial pattern has positive and negative feedback mechanisms reflected in the regulation and repression of players and fans' activity. Recent events related to the dawn of the digital revolution, the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine have put a number of dilemmas into the elite football business model. Quite on the contrary, national governments and international organizations, using elite football as a political and power marker have been repositioning their priorities.

2. Historical Overview

Despite the huge amounts of money generated by elite football worldwide today and its significance in the media-based experience economy, relatively little attention has been paid to how the dynamics of elite football have been shaped over the years. Admittedly, within the sociology of sport, there have been attempts to discern the origins of the modern game as well as to scrutinize what is claimed to be a fundamental change in the dynamics with the commercialization of football. However, their concerns are mainly on the rediscovery of the pace of change in the origins of football and, in particular, the commercialization aspect.

Not unlike similar findings in several art forms, there seems to be limited awareness in the elite football industry that the commercialization rush is nothing new. The enormous audiences generated by elite football were largely based on its grounding on long-standing traditions. Some of this relates directly to the rituals and local traditions of ancient Britain. Later, utilizing these traditions, elite football has sentimentalized itself not only in regard to its supporters and local history, but also by gate revenues, some of which have been invested back into the local area. These traditions have recently been rediscovered in terms of the need to “put something back” into local communities. A home market for corporate social responsibility lies here rather than overseas, where grassroots community club connection is historically weaker, which has been a valid criticism in the face of globalization of elite football.

3. Key Players and Their Impact

Football is often regarded as a "players' game," as 22 players influence the pace and outcome of a match. However, the relationship between players and football as a whole is even more complex and multifaceted. Individual players influence not only the match outcome but also the public perception of the game as an expression of their time, politics, and national identity. Key players elevate the game's aesthetic value and excitement level. They make people pay to watch, often subjecting themselves to censorship and nationalistic hostility. In short, they are among key drivers of the game's lucrative commercialization.

The footballing elite is a rotating cast of players high on talent or charisma. Most observers would agree that, for the last 30 years, this group has been headed by just a few people, who have secured an emotional, long-lasting bond with the spectator. In fact, it is enough to look at the list of winners for the prestigious award. Established talent contest winners and record-breakers have influenced football's development with endearing exclusivity. Their most internal rivalries have traditionally occurred in opposite game systems: one team's possession style and another's counter-attack-based approach. With the global reach of major tournaments, the public is forever exposed to this rivalry, increasingly promoted and marketed by the footballing business.

With its growing visibility and commodification, elite football has defaced much of its spontaneous, organic, and unfiltered character. However, it retains a certain capitulating, spiritual quality. The feelings inspiring the notion of "sacred and enchanted" refer not only to the fans rejoicing and sacrificing. They also come alive in the outsider stance taken by the players who are devotees of aesthetic football.

3.1. Legends of the Game

Over the years, elite football has produced an imposing number of legendary players, who made several significant contributions to the beautiful game. Their talent, skills, trademark moves, and ability to influence decisive moments on the pitch are just a few characteristics that enabled their rise to elite status. We have known players from various generations who could have made the cut. From the skillful myth of “the Wizard” in a ball-dominated universe: the Brazilian Garrincha, to “the Black Pearl”, Pele, for many the greatest player of all time; Diego Maradona, the exquisite provocateur of extravagance, rebelliousness, and glory; to the skillful Express Train from Portugal, Eusébio, with his mastery of the art of goals; the genius of precision and creativity we had the chance to enjoy in Johan Cruyff; followed by the Spanish acrobat with talents of regeneration: Alfredo Di Stéfano; from the elegant Flying Dutchman Marco Van Basten, to my personal favorite: the Argentine goal artist, out of this world, who made football an art: Lionel Messi; to the complete package, the legendary Brazilian: the uncatchable Ronaldo Nazário.

This group brings together players who have done extraordinary things on the pitch, superb goals, amazing technical skill, and tremendous magic. The advantage of football in relation to other team sports is that the probability of a single player earning the game is far more superior. Goals win games, and at the same time, some players appear to have in their DNA a natural talent: a unique ability to intuitively read strategic solutions for intricate problem situations within a unique time-space architecture. Those players depart in their unique way of “solving” football games from the mass of extremely talented individuals that produce perfect team dynamics but are in the end slowly erased by history.

3.2. Current Stars

Since the mid-1990s, many stars have been in the focus of elite football. These elite players come from various parts of the world, although Europe is well known for this: Northern Europe has famous players like Marco van Basten, Patrick Kluivert, and Football Association legends like Gary Lineker and David Beckham from England. From Eastern Europe, there are well-known players like Andrey Arshavin and Gheorghe Hagi. The Southern European countries have had players like Ruud Gullit, Roberto Baggio, Michel Platini, Marco van Basten, Ronaldo, Diego Maradona, and Franceso Totti. What brings Europe such star players? The answer in our opinion is that talent comes from footballing tradition, experience, and success in youth competitions. What brings them to become stars is not just mere talent, but also continuity, experience, motivation, understanding the game, structure, and training at the best clubs and the coaching staff to perform into a reasonably stable trajectory.

Elite players come from different parts of the world. From South America, there are famous players like Marta Vieira da Silva, Lionel Messi, Diego Maradona, Ronaldo, and Ronaldinho. From Africa, there are famous players like George Weah, Didier Drogba, and Samuel Eto'o. From Asia, there are famous players like Hidetoshi Nakata, Park Ji-sung, and Yuto Nagatomo. From North America, there are famous players like Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey. While different traditions go along with these players, and problems that come with them solvent, star players perform similarly on the pitch.

Within these global superstars are important players for their national teams. While they are famous beyond their countries borders, they also deliver major services to bring trophies back home. These are the players that, in addition to signing contracts that are worth millions per year, through good feelings, bring value added to clubs, sponsoring companies, and events.

4. Tactical Evolutions

Elite football is in constant development, and how players move with and without the ball is usually at the center of that. Tactical evolutions are responsible for what we call the dynamics of elite football, that is, the models of how the game is played, which are the main factor behind the variability of match statistical data of the world’s top teams and leagues. The presence of more capable teams within a game of a wider disparity of resources tends to change the way games are played, namely the dynamics, more than competitive balance.

This section looks at tactical evolutions through two roads: the types of formations that have been more successful through time, and the interest in coaching strategies as the main selection force that shapes the changing of team formations through time. The first approach, dealing purely with tactical choices, has been much used to study elite football. It is based on the relatively simple idea that teams usually adopt what are the formations and strategies that worked best recently. The other approach, which is relatively new and resorting to the idea that teams are the units of selection that shape tactical evolutions, has only been used in a more limited way to study tactical evolutions. However, starting from different perspectives, the two approaches converge to point forwarding and backwards in time to the same moments in elite football. For that reason, their combination in the study of tactical evolutions has much to gain from both simple and more sophisticated models.

4.1. Formation Trends

In discussing formations, we prefer to adopt the nomenclature and more conventional identifications of shape. Namely, we prefer to refer to formations as a certain number of numerical identities, being the number of players positioned in attack and the number in defense respectively; such as: 4-4-2, 4-3-3, 3-5-2 etc. Additionally, describing formations in solely positional terms sometimes relies on adopting a highly theoretical view of the pitch, which often disregards the fact of the utilizing of three-dimensional positioning among nine players, plus the goalkeeper, which cannot occupy the same spot on the pitch in a two-dimensional mathematical diagram. Such theoretical assumptions can misrepresent the physical reality applied on the pitch by utilizing different perspective points. The general shapes and the point of views put forward in the following charts, where we identify formations without position identification, will fully rely on the most common defensive shapes that influence directly on the balance of attacking and defensive movements leading to goal effects.

Our discussion contains three types of shape diagrams: A formation pirouette across a two-vertical points size pitch; a formation pie chart directionally divided in points size area segments according to attacking sizes and emphasis of formations; and the abovementioned attacking towards formation deployment pitch graphic. The deployment chart utilizes a type of origin diagram with thin black arrows indicating the most common attacking or defensive player movements from each position; a type of chart that does not fully acknowledge the three-dimensional positional polymorphism of the majority of player movements during a match. Each diagram is physically numbered and better described in their following paragraphs.

4.2. Coaching Strategies

One of the ways to study tactical developments is through the analysis of coaching strategies. And, like we said before, the managerial position has changed, and the professional evolution of coaches has diversified their ability to design training programs, conceive training sessions, and elaborate game models. In the last decade of the twentieth century, there was a subversive tactical trend that became manifest in a certain number of teams modeling a game system of a few tactical references, an especially visible phenomenon in the Netherlands national team. Because of this lack of a rigid game model, great groupings of the players' position on the field were recognized and analyzed.

This allowed the development and reasoning of some pertinent ideas: tactical schemes should not be made too complicated but made use of, should not be definitive, the positional areas should not be defined, the defense should take on a structuring character, a good organism of relations should be constituted for the verification of the pre-established goals, the tactical scheme need to be sufficiently flexible to allow for a functioning that can be adapted to the opponents and their tactical models, any group of players can be puppet to only one tactical schema or a small number of tactical schema. So the contribution of a coach during a World Cup had a likeness for to some stylistic restriction of the coach during his World of other tournaments. The model developed at the time was based on a game organized around 5 players whom he guessed could best interpret this idea.

5. Economic Aspects of Football

Most social agents in professional football are in search of economic wealth. This goal is investigated in this chapter through the analysis of club finances and player transfers. While section 5.1 presents club finances in a rather straightforward manner, section 5.2 is more complex in its interpretation of real-world economic events.

5.1. Club Finances

Professional football clubs surface in the media for their supporting of (more or less) positive sporting results and as market actors for sponsorship deals or the negotiation of player transfers. Most of the time this presentation uses normal form language; is it a win-win solution? The present section focuses on the finances of professional clubs in a dynamic fashion, mainly asking who earns what, where does the money flow and when?

5.2. Player Transfers

But the big money is in player transfers. Examining the data reveals that much of the wealth that is created especially by the few wealthy and successful clubs is not kept but transferred out of the club by paying players. Many players are very young when they make a significant amount of money with a contract for a club. Nevertheless they transfer only a small share of the total receipts from TV without being risk players. With the traditional club background-produce-content for the own particular market, they would mature further inside the respective club without big money rewards. How does this new business model with pre-mature player transfers which go into positive financial balances instead of gambling on the success of more mature players evolve and what consequences does it produce for the involved markets? Which business strategy do the clubs pursue?

5.1. Club Finances

Association football is an exclusive domain of the wealthy. A club that aspires to be successful needs to have access to substantial financial resources to invest, primarily in players' wages. These club expenditures can increase to very high levels, but there is a time lag between clubs spending and seeing the positive impact of increased performance and revenues. In addition, many clubs qualify for participation in the Champions League for only a few years in succession; club owners willing to finance deficits are few and often far between. Not surprisingly, many clubs have incurred significant losses. Yearly operating results are considered a good indication of football clubs' sustainability. Unsustainable clubs need to be set in order and will return to profitability sooner or later, while those clubs that are already able to generate profits are usually financially very healthy.

However, these new rules compressed the costs of clubs in the first European League. On the long run, this would be beneficial for both clubs and football fans as clubs could finally stop their never-ending struggle for superiority. New rules have been introduced, limiting the amount of money a club can spend, compared to the club's financial earnings every year. The system is called "Financial Fairplay". It is planned to use it for the next couple of years to stabilize and improve the situation in the European leagues.

5.2. Player Transfers

Player movement between clubs is a manager's decision and is an essential part of a club's operation, as it impacts on sporting success and on revenue generation through success on the pitch and through transfers of players. Clubs are able to transfer players only if a contract binding them to the former club is pending and if the activity is considered as a breach, unless they receive a fee for the player concerned. It is therefore almost exclusively a decision of the new club, and clubs want to avoid an accumulation of players with less than one year left on their contract, as this situation may lead to a large number of free transfers. A club officer generally attempts to secure a large number of players at any moment without the option of transferring them to another party for a substantial period of time. Since there is a consensual decision between the buyer and the seller, the second priced auction mechanism may provide a fair outcome. However, it is possible that bidding competition becomes too important for several market participants. A club which currently is performing badly may not have sufficient pulling power due to noncompetitive wages, but, as salaries are typically set for an entire season, provocation can be a reason to increase the weight of a transfer to move away from an unattractive location and thus to risk the failure of the bidding competition.

Purchases of other firms are almost always made to improve the product. Sports teams transfer players for various transactions. The external market for transferring sports players is similar to any market. The laws of supply and demand govern the market price of a player's services. In the supply and demand process, the marginal costs for acquiring additional services affects the current and future supply of players for any possible team and the demand for the services of players from a team at a point in time. The current supply of players is composed of the players already in a league, which does not change in the short run, and the number of players currently in the labor force while at the same time not being signed to a contract with a club.

6. Fan Culture and Engagement

Governing sports is complex, but elite football takes complexity into a reputation realm of its own. Passionate fans professionalise the passion of affinity development, but because they've had an appreciation dynamic relationship with the club for many decades, powerful and maybe unpredictable at coercion, supporters are asking for engagement. Like relationship marketing, it also respects both exchanges correctly, meaning that through service, the customer would buy more and deeper and visit more frequently, being satisfied and loyal over time. But supporter groups maybe don't see it that way. Instead, they see their artistic work as an essential element of the tribe as a whole, including all other cohorts, and they believe the club has a responsibility to protect and sustain this artistic work.

Such cultural or art expression can take many forms, like chants and messages, both audible or visible on in- or outside stadium, graffiti, videos, clothes, or smoke bombs. But not all of these artistic expressions are embraced, as some are either way too radical, politically or socially oriented, or commercially exaggerated, as when it is paid for by frontline paymasters. And there are many varieties of supporter groups, which mirror the diversity of customer segments, from local to global prisms, from 'red tradesmen' to high-profile corporate customers, from middle adults to young teenagers on social media. As mediation hardly records all forms of artistic expression supporting a group has ever developed, usually based on pride, loyalty, and respect, the relationship with the club through the years can develop asymmetry dynamics depending on how the club is fed as an organisation and on what side loyalty has been built. Such lines, transfer areas of trust, which want to be nurtured to provide both with a real and sustainable competitive advantage: trust.

6.1. Supporter Groups

Surrounding a football club, there usually exists what we can term a supporter base, made up of regular match-goers as well as casual onlookers who engage with a team’s activities primarily over the course of the season. This supporter base can be informal, random and devoid of any structure, or more elaborately organized under the guise of a supporter group or fan club, containing an international section as well. While supporter groups exist, in various forms, around different sports worldwide, it is an especially European phenomenon in the case of football. Originally made up of a core group of locally entrenched individuals, following a club throughout its lifetime, these supporter groups more often than not have a local touch to it, seeking to preserve certain traditions and sieving through various socio-cultural lenses that characterize different cities and regions. For instance, the Scousers of Liverpool, originating from Liverpool city, tend to embrace a mix of Celtic and Viking influences, whether in their music, accent or attitude. The Swiss-German-Viking mix stemming from Geneva, however, would manifest itself rather differently.

A look inside some of these supporter groups essentially brings to light how the socio-cultural and psychological factors described define many facets of not just a club’s identity but also its supporter base’s. These identity traits are what differentiate Lübeck from West Ham, Eintracht from Chelsea, and Wolves from Barcelona, not just in football but also sport in general. Enthusiastically championing the ‘Club’ leads these supporters to spend much time and resources towards supporting the team and abandoning any other activities on match days. Without them, the sense of community, of belonging that local people feel towards their club, and the culture that underlies its core principles and dictates its ethos, would be non-existent. These supporters who, no matter the results, assemble at the stadium passionately clad in the club’s colors chanting their own songs and those of the players, truly create an atmosphere that is unique to a particular match.

Supporter groups tend to be tightly knit and work long and hard to defend their specific identities and off-pitch advantages, often clashing strongly with the more quantitative, results-oriented club management. Their heightened level of involvement in not just their own community but also club affairs, gives them a very specific power, both on and off the pitch, making them influential players within the football business space. Analyzing how these supporter groups have formed and their current relevance level in the football stakeholder hierarchy is a fundamental point of entry for determining the place of football clubs within a city and region’s identity and the parameters under which it can thrive.

6.2. Social Media Influence

With the rise of the Internet, mass communication, and globalization, football has substantially changed both economically and socially, and these changes have demanded responses from those organizations involved in the game. Once an era when broadcast and printed media dictated fan engagement, the development of newest communication tools, especially social networks, has changed the way clubs communicate with their audience. Today topical moments of the match or broad news from the club, as well as informal interactions with fans or communication on sensitive issues, can be seen daily on the pages of clubs. In this sense, the need for clubs to have an informal and close relationship with fans is strengthened. In fact, clubs’ communication on social networks—their informal style—help them to improve their image and get closer to supporters.

Followers of football clubs on social media are a different kind of consumer. They not only purchase memberships and expensive tickets for the best places at the stadium, they also buy uniforms full of sponsor logos, watch games on Pay-TV, and so on, but they are also virtual supporters who visit the virtual pubs before and after matches, who comment and tweet, send funny memes to groups dedicated to football, who have a conversation about analysis and betting on forums. The goal of football clubs’ communications on social media is to generate a close relationship with these persons, as it is for all the brands becoming aware of the importance of building and creating a relationship with consumers through social networks. Team creative use of social media favors the creation of community and change their relationship from merely economic into relational.

7. Media and Broadcasting

Football in general, like films and videos in general or some sports in particular, became "television" sports. The impact of television on spectatorship and the commercialization and professionalization of sports is significant. In the 1970s, empirical insights into the demand for sports on television were provided, using economic models borrowed from the research on the demand for and supply of theatre tickets. The extended income and substitution effects of the impact of more games televised on the spectators who attend in person are as "obvious" as for the impact of more films distributed by television broadcast on the viewers who attend in cinemas.

This situation used to be granted in the early 1930s, and still it slightly is, in so far as the film industry loses clients due to illegal download. Television rights for a match or a tournament are, for a national competition, or for club teams, a source of important income, both for a sports federation or for a league, and for clubs participating in that competition. In particular, such rights take the lion's share of a league's or a federation's global income. External observers tend to consider the income generated by television rights as a gift from above, in the sense that clubs and players do not deserve a reward of such an extent. However, it is not really a gift but comes from a sort of monopoly supply of a spectacular show that has popularity for most sporting competitions adapted to such a model.

7.1. Television Rights

In football, various composition laws determine how much, when, and how to compete. Some of these rules are determined by sport authorities and applied to all teams. These include the rules negotiated with the players and the rules that establish how to distribute the income derived from the transfers of players between clubs, and those that negotiate with the various partners of the championships and leagues.

Concerning the audiovisual right, this is negotiated directly by the League in most markets, in line with the requirements of the general law. In theory, this is done to favour the entire system of clubs and thus help smaller clubs, which have difficulty negotiating with the various broadcasters. In practice, however, this situation produces considerable differences in revenue per club, depending on the popularity of the different clubs compared to the entire championship. Those who generate the most interest from the public receive the highest revenues.

This is justified by the fact that the bigger clubs create more interest because they have the best players. However, we have to consider that a company that invests a fair amount per year must earn in proportion to what it is investing. These negotiations obey a worldwide trend. It is known that resources in the car market, for example, come from companies that sell at ok prices. The advertising of companies that sell at higher prices has lower resources. The first set pays for the support of all advertising on TV, the second set of soccer fans pays for the support of the advertising billed by the companies that sell at higher prices. In this case, it is the logical market that decides.

7.2. Impact of Streaming

In general, any disruption in the value accruing to incumbents that gives rise to streaming companies would lead to a sustained decline in demand for sports broadcasting via conventional channels. For that reason, revenue teams have long been involved in negotiations with the intermediaries they rely on for that access. Addressing how surplus is allocated requires maintaining a balance between the benefits of continuing access to relatively simple but relatively expensive packages and the benefits of renegotiating at lower prices as streaming competitors emerge and the price of access technology drops relative to the costs of traditional intermediaries. If such balance is disturbed in a way that leads to a drain from conventional providers, then the steeper crisis likely to follow would lead to deeper cuts to affiliate and producer margins. Beginning in 2021, it became possible for clubs to join other European leagues and offer their content directly, but they sought to safeguard their revenues rather than drop their prices. In the mid 2020s, once scarcity passes, the demand facing these leagues is likely to be relatively price inelastic, and demand from diminishing quality competitors will remain high enough to keep prices high relative to those now offered by streaming companies.

Concerns that streaming would disrupt the economics of sports broadcasting may prove more founded in particular segments of the demand facing Serie A. In the United Kingdom, Italian Serie A was able to take advantage of the high demand facing its best clubs and avoid exposing its fixtures to a splintered audience at depressed prices, before experiencing declining ratings as the glamour and quality of the key derbies faded. Interest in Europe may be short-lived in the sense that the purported benefits of greater competition between clubs will be realized only when traditional bidding rivals get involved in league matching, and not as direct competition mean nothing for Italy.

8. Globalization of Football

Today's world is marked by growing globalization as markets, people, and ideas are more frequently exchanged across borders. Football is no exception to this process. Various aspects of globalization can be found in football, from national teams playing in distant regions of the world, to transfers of players in and out of the Europe-dominated international club market, to millions of television viewers and social media followers interacting with players and clubs from different countries. Where next? This section discusses some recent characteristics of, and factors behind, the globalization of football.

International Competitions

Football globalization involves a considerable increase in international competitions in recent decades. The Olympic and World Cups have always had an international character. More recent tournaments with national teams taking part are the UEFA Nations League, the African Cup of Nations, the Gold Cup, the Asian Cup, and the Copa America, among others. On the club side, the UEFA Champions League and aggregated club football tournaments in Asia, Africa, and North America have increased in number and economic importance. The traditional European champion clubs draw substantial crowds and immense television audiences when they travel to distant regions of the world to play in friendly matches. They have also internationalized their activities and pool of fans by opening affiliate clubs in various regions of the world, and by recruiting foreign players, coaches, and managers, especially when the domestic pool is viewed as being deficient. At the same time, these clubs are highly sensitive to any increase in international competition which threatens their "leverage" and commercial interests.

8.1. International Competitions

Being a world-class football club belongs to the dreams of all young local players. This dream joins them together and pushes them every day to win local competitions and join the ranks of those teams. Winning the UEFA Champions League, passing through the group stage and the first eliminatory round, just three matches for the club, to arrive at the final on Saturday night which brings together more than a hundred million viewers around the planet, are glorious moments, honestly sought after and giving them an extraordinary return. This return is both financial and reputational. The facilities of the locals are multiplying. Their players are recruited for the senior teams of their clubs after deinvestment to win Champions League Finals. The sponsorship contracts of their big brands multiply. Their shirt can be bought at any street corner in these countries. The television stations compete to buy the broadcasting rights and take to the antenna in the early afternoon these matches put on time for their privileged markets.

Of course, the organizers are rubbing their hands at the sight of the incredible revenues generated in their coffers thanks to this unequaled demand. And they are redoubling their imagination to find still unreleased football products capable of maximizing their revenues with this audience. Thus, the exclamation "Small is Beautiful" is reversed on the football pitch. Fewer and fewer players from the small clubs who participated in the brilliance of their local competition can go to the rich clubs thanks to their apprenticeships. And because of the changes reflected in the legal, sporty, and common labor fields, this purchase and sale of players are losing a lot of value.

8.2. Emerging Markets

In the last decades football has seen substantial structural changes due to an impressive economic growth, an increasing concentration of income, and accelerated globalization processes. Emerging markets, defined as the countries of the world that are not the most developed, have become ever more important as they open up and create new spheres for investments. Quick and profound structural changes encourage the hopes and the investments of football entrepreneurs. Multinational football companies view emerging markets as new areas for the expansion of their business. In the past, European and U.S. multinationals moved into emerging markets and promoted basketball, baseball, and American football at the cost of traditional sports. The Western model of sports, similar to the American model, is exported to emerging markets where significant new business areas and investment opportunities appear, such as the creation and development of professional leagues, sponsoring possibilities, merchandising, and the construction and management of stadiums and sports infrastructures.

These new dynamics have provoked many changes in the management of football companies as well as in the organization of the matches, in the marketing strategies, and in the financial relationships between different actors. At the same time, the entry of debts and deficits characterizing certain leagues and clubs in the European and U.S. markets has influenced the emergent markets as well. Thus the First World cannot resign itself to having a merely vertical influence on the less prosperous countries. These countries are important for the supply of sport players, and hence clubs and federations cannot limit their ambitions to conquering an ever greater share of the global revenues. Rather, they must consider the opportunities for an equitable partnership with respect to the business development of the emerging markets, beyond the allure of easy profits and temporary sources of revenues.

9. Technology in Football

Modern football utilizes advanced technologies to enhance player and team performance, reduce injuries and risks, improve fan experience, and streamline match officiation. VAR, the Video Assistant Referee, has been a hot topic in football ever since it was first trialed in select tournaments, and its introduction to FIFA World Cup for official use. Opinions and fan reactions generally vary between supporters, seeing it as a remedy to match-changing referee errors, especially those regarding goals and penalties, and detractors, who label it as a disturber of the game and, in particular, as an aggravating factor for the fun of the “live” match experience, where the atmosphere during a celebrated goal or victory penalty is interrupted and ruined by waiting for VAR verification. Moreover, defender Reilly expresses skepticism suggesting that VAR technology may not always be able to determine objective wrongs, and it might never have the capacity to determine “the spirit of the law” associated with certain referee decisions.

Various performance analysis tools are used to streamline a broad array of practical decisions a club must make, such as: Development of players and teams; Strategy generation; Match day preparation; Opponent preparation; Individual player preparation; Monitoring the mental and physical state of players. The football analytics spectrum ranges from the use of computer simulations and scientific methods for decision and strategy making, to tactical television analyses and all-in statistical reports that provide the coaching staff of the match day team with sufficient information on pre-game analysis, to pre-match systems and planning.

9.1. VAR and Its Controversies

Football has experienced a gradual transformation, both in terms of the impact of increasingly advanced technology and in terms of the interactions and relationships with other components of the dynamics of elite football. One of the most controversial innovations in recent years is definitely the Video Assistant Referee (VAR). Shareholders, owners, sponsors, fans, players, and managers may be impacted by the enhanced level of accuracy of the referee's decision. The acceleration of information dissemination, linked to digitalization and technology, favors the verification of decisions taken by referees, especially on the most important plays that influence the result of the game. The need to respond to this pressure induced the introduction of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR). Using technology, the objective is to increase the accuracy of the match refereeing.

On 5 February 2016, the International Football Association Board authorized the usage of tests in selected competitions, and the first tests were conducted at the beginning of 2016. On 21 March 2018, the Board authorized competitions to implement VAR systems and started its official application in the World Cup in Russia in 2018. The idea of VAR is to help the referee manage the most important plays that have an influence on the result of the game: to verify whether a goal is legalized or not (including verifying fouls during play), to verify whether the referee has sanctioned a foul in the penalty area or not, to verify whether it is a red-card offense or not, and for red cards directly or who has committed a mistake when applying the offside rule. By the end of 2022, 79 competitions had implemented the VAR and it appeared that VAR had a positive impact.

9.2. Performance Analysis Tools

Video analysis systems are used by several professional teams to analyze match and training performance indicators. The repertoire of tools available for this purpose is extensive due to the demand and financial revenues involved. Software packages combine video editing tools with tagging (manual or automatic) and have emerged as a current standard in many professional clubs. These packages generally require one or two cameras positioned in strategic areas to compete with the perception capabilities of human analysts. Companies collect not only video, but also position data from several sources to offer a more complete analysis solution.

According to training needs, video analysis may include components such as technical analysis, tactical performance analysis or sports pedagogy. During the last decades, the use of video analysis has grown exponentially. Nevertheless, the impact of that growth on coaches' education remains unclear. Video analysis may be integrated into different areas: as a performance enhancer tool without reducing physical training; as a methodology tool in coach training programs; as a tool to optimize feedback between coach and athletes; as an objective evaluator of specific training effect; as a sports pedagogy tool; or as a technical analyst tool.

Data collection has undergone a data-merging revolution driven mainly by the sport academic community and involved mostly with consistent data abstraction processes. The model, covering the complete match trajectory as a sequence of states, allows for the specification of a variety of event-related descriptive rules, such as technical events, body actions, positional data, time tasks, gameplay dimensions, and match context. This model serves several purposes, such as objective-quality match study, automatic-action coding and tagging, habitual player performance index, gaming system, opponent system, and team-performance indicators.

10. Health and Fitness

Injuries are an unfortunate part of elite football. Acknowledging that, this chapter discusses some aspects of how injuries might best be prevented. These aspects include training methods and how strength and conditioning coaches focus on minimizing injury risks. We begin with a brief overview of the common injuries in elite football. By breaking recovery, rehabilitation, and prevention into different separate sub-explanatory modules, including easy and practical suggestions on how elite teams or coaches should approach physical fitness, especially injury prevention procedures and strategies, we provide an overall understanding of commonly accepted current procedures and philosophies. In doing so we aim to allow coaches and practitioners to implement our presented procedures to best develop injury-resistant players and create the highest possible probability of injury-free training on a year-to-year, month-to-month, week-to-week, or daily basis.

Injuries should be avoided at all costs. From a player's creative point of view and from a financial point of view the costs of low-performing injured players are high. In fact, elite football players age 27 or more miss on average about two months of playing time every season, amounting to 15 percent of the whole calendar year. For clubs that accrue only 35 to 40 million euros of profit, each month-long injury typically costs around three million euros, as overhead and additional costs for the injured player are said to equal about 70 percent of a normal player's salary per month.

10.1. Injury Prevention

Introduction: The sports of professional football players involves the critical risk of severe acute and chronic traumas. Injury effects are detrimental to both players and clubs. The management of injuries is expensive. It reduces clubs’ profits and gives financial support to clubs or federations for their players’ rehabilitation and medical treatment. Our chapter focuses on the importance of preventive measures. They must be a priority among medical staff, football. We will propose some general guidelines for injury prevention, which should be included in regulation, preventing accidents. Injury risk is daunting for many health professionals involved in monitoring and guiding professional players. But if you invest energy and resources to create a specific prevention program for each player and club, the health and wellness cost will be reduced.

Health and fitness terms are very simple to define. But a lot more complicated is to include their meaning and importance. All types of professional sports players require keep themselves healthy for the less injuries. Basically, health is our full neuro-psycho-physical condition. On the other side, fitness is our functional capacity to do activity. It means that health is the aim and fitness is the instrument to reach this important objective. Health professionals, like doctors, often think the health of all players regards only at the public health. This point of view is also true. It means that both public or private health must prevent everybody from acute or chronic diseases. But health for pro-players is that they come back fit after pathological stress and they are able to sustain a long and intense training before the season. The risk of both conditions is the injury. So injury prevention must be a priority. Because of the importance of the objectives and the resources involved, it is vital to conduct and implement studies and projects whose outcome is based on scientific evidence. Therefore, the plan of success is to identify the sources of injuries. It means knowing its incidence and prevalence, severity, risk factors. Then predict their possibility.

10.2. Nutrition and Training

Football is a tough sport physically and mentally at all levels of the game. It is considered that a pre-requisite for elite performance in football is the ability for the players to spend a long time on high intensity efforts with short recovery breaks. In order to perform well in football, players must be in an optimal fit condition and require good speed and agility, strength and power, aerobic fitness, muscular endurance, task- or match-specific fitness, and recovery after training and match play. Moreover, proper sport nutrition plays an important role in recovery and fitness of athletes.

A good diet that contains adequate macro and micronutrients coupled with an efficient training strategy is essential for football performance and will also help with injury prevention and rehabilitation. Fat is mainly used in the muscle during low intensity exercise but carbohydrate is the main fuel which is used when exercise intensity increases due to the limited stores of glycogen. Carbohydrate and glycogen stores are depleted after approximately 90 minutes of strenuous exercise, with the rate of depletion increased during high intensity efforts. Supplementation with carbohydrate during prolonged exercise helps to maintain glucose availability. Protein is important for muscle growth and repair and is used in the muscle when the diet is low in carbohydrate. The amount of protein needed has been debated for many years but it is generally agreed that strength and power athletes need more protein than endurance athletes. A condition diet that is specifically designed for an individual player will be helpful in maximizing the player’s body composition and performance.

11. Youth Development

Youth academies constitute an important unit in the usual football club structure. Clubs dedicate considerable resources to training younger players in the hope, or expectation, that some of them will develop into professional first-team footballers. While the sheer cost of youth development implies a kind of market failure, preventing clubs going it alone, success in this area often plays a role in cementing the stranglehold that elite clubs have on the transfer market. Youth development might mean that the elite club has at least some of the world’s best players wearing its shirts. But it doesn’t end there. Trained from an early age to the club’s style of play, these players will require little or no adaptation time when they are drafted into the first team. Essentially, the club gets to buy a half-finished product, with the economic return, to some extent at least, thinned out by the necessity of paying compensation to the club supervising the player’s training. The elite club is also able to bolster its finances by selling to other clubs all over the world the players it has developed, but which are surplus to its requirements. In this way there is a supply-side reason explaining why a significant number of top professional clubs carry the expense associated with the training of talented junior players. Second, there is a demand-side rationale. At the elite level of the sport, physical traits such as speed, agility, strength, and endurance have an ever-increasing importance to success. It is therefore no surprise that a lot of effort is devoted to identifying from an early age those young prospects who have the best chances of possessing the right physical attributes. The process begins by scouting schools, youth leagues, and even playground matches for the most promising kids – the diamond in the rough. If they pass this initial screening process, these talented kids may then be drafted into one of the club’s youth teams. At the same time, undergoing a higher level of training, these youngsters are also subjected to close monitoring in order to help the scouting network weed out all but the most promising.

11.1. Academies and Training Programs

It is widely understood that elite football players do not simply appear out of nowhere, representing the fruits of a fully developed system. As talented players make the jump from youth development to fully professional status in senior squads, observing such transitions or, indeed, the players available in youth squad settings, prompts questions about the whole system of youth coaching. Beyond the footballing skills undeniably necessary to reach the elite level, the vast majority of players in senior squads have made the journey from childhood in a particular place with experiences and contacts, perhaps including those with the right influential people, who have guided them by choice and chance to recognition for their talents in the first place. What is the minimum length of time to facilitate the transition from youth to senior level among elite players? How early in terms of years from birth do young players, likely to make the eventual transition, need to focus their training? What kind of specific training is required comparing relative specialization across cognate sports and across the best players within these sports? What regional and national hierarchies of elite clubs and academies exist, and what is the demographic and economic background of the young players involved?

Relatively new questions such as; What and how should elite clubs and academies teach players; where, when, and with whom should players train? provide a basis for an increasing volume of research efforts to seek answers to the increasing complexity of youth coaching and development. At the same time, and what cannot and should not be overlooked, clubs or academies are operating within a wider context of society formed by increasing and competing elite demands across educational and economic resources and cultural influences. Compared to elite development in many other sports, demand for places in football academies is enormous and specified at a very young age, with identifiable pressure notwithstanding the clear differences in years between entry and later transition to elite squad life. These pressures have consequences for the players chosen and not chosen and for coaching practice within the academies.

11.2. Scouting and Recruitment

While we acknowledge that youth development is the most important aspect of this process, we cannot overlook the fact that there are innovative and successful recruitment strategies able to unbalance Scouting and Recruitment towards the advantage of organized teams. For instance, at the amateur and semi-professional levels in certain countries, clubs could take place in competitions with financial incentives like winning prizes or Olympic Games, which are normally a privilege of the national teams, and they recruit players disregarding their search for a professional contract or pay them a very small amount of money. We consider recruitment focused on specific tournaments, national origin, or player characteristics, which are able to filter certain groups of players, during certain periods in the players’ age and of a certain quality, to be differential. From these pools of experiences, it is possible to elaborate recruitment models like those employed in their recruitment for Central American clubs.

Based on these recruitment models, clubs would recruit talent, considering the following characteristics: Players would be between 17 and 19 years of age. They would possess a particular soccer talent and specific characteristics according to the position they play. They would have sport experience and a professionalization process that allowed them to overcome the emotional and psychological traumas of early adolescence and become adjusted to youth football in Europe. They would have been trained during early childhood, doing sociocultural experiences in teams and specific tournaments that would help to identify their possible potential. These would be amateur clubs and/or reserve teams and their families would be able to provide support for the long journey of their son’s advancement at the elite level.

12. Women's Football

Over the last years, there has been a marked increase of interest in the elite of women's football, matching to a certain extent, that of men's elite football. The results of the US National team have created an increased market for the image of women in football, and larger companies have invested in the women's leagues, but, what should we really expect from women's football in the future? Despite the unprecedented recent growth, and an increasing amount of companies interested in taking advantage of the women's football audience, the introduction of the first European competitions in the 2000s, along with the huge success of the last Women's World Cup have shown to the world that women's football is on the right track towards growth, recognition and structure. The new generations of players, and especially their performances and dedication, are finally being watched and recognized by the public, and are consolidating a spectacle that is gradually distancing itself from the idea of a sport to be ridiculed.

Nonetheless, women's football is still a monster to be tamed. Behind the scenes, there are still tournaments lacking the minimum guarantees, and under risk of being canceled, such as the Copa America, which these past years, has put a spotlight in women's football. Both the clubs and the sports associations are still not capable of holding secure, professional competitions for the women's teams, and there are many issues such as differential treatment in wages, benefits, sponsorship by huge companies, as well as training facilities that have not been changed in over 30 years. Time will tell if the leagues, clubs and associations will be capable and willing to put in the effort to secure the future of women's football.

12.1. Growth and Recognition

Women's football is a dynamic, growing sport that is increasingly getting the recognition it deserves. Research in the field has emerged strongly in recent years, providing stimulating and wide-ranging insights into the socio-cultural, political, commercial, aesthetic and medialized contexts, as well as the sporting-specific dimensions, of women's football. Particular emphasis has been placed on studying the factors that contribute to the growth of interest in the sport, with significant fluctuations in its popularity at national and global level. It is critical to understand both the origins of this growing popularity, as well as its breadth and limits, in order to better conceptualize women's football, potentially repositioning it in the long-term as an autonomous and recognized sector of the sport system, preferably with a focus on the sporting-specific aspects.

Although women's football has origins already in the beginning of the 20th century, with teams competing in England, it has long suffered from neglect and many institutional barriers, both inside and outside the sporting system. In many countries, the sport was sanctioned and actively limited for decades, to the extent that the first Women's World Cup, which took place in 1991, seemed above all an exotic event. Some 30 years later, with the 2019 Women's World Cup, it was the first time that economic operators and media organizations felt the potential of the sport, registering a record number of viewers and followers, creating new sponsorships, and visibly flooding the virtual platforms. Such recognition also produced intangible outcomes, such as the visibility of women footballers, with the emergence of role models in popular culture.

12.2. Challenges Faced

The development of women's football has been associated with the pursuit of equal rights for women, but it has also faced serious challenges due to the persistence of traditional conceptions about women's appropriate roles, especially regarding their involvement in sports. In this respect, the notion of hegemonic masculinity has been examined to explain why certain sports are dominated by men and why women who participate in them are subjected to scrutiny. This concept has been influential in researching gender relations within sports and interpreting the marginalization of women's sports.

Alongside the struggle for equal rights in society at large, the institutionalization of women's sports must fight against female domination, the gaze of women as imperfect reflections of men, infrequent or distorted representations, promotion and visibility of values and female background instead of traditional stereotypes and sexualization. Moreover, field theory helps to understand how the relative autonomy of sports transforms the structures of power relations that exist in other fields, such as politics, media, and education. Without denying these challenges, which need to be addressed by feminists involved in women's sports and sports organizations, women's football has witnessed an unprecedented growth and transformation in the last decades.

13. Ethics and Governance

The value of competition in football derives from its novelty and unpredictability, from the passion it invokes and the collective experiences it generates. Football is a game but it is also big business, and as the former approaches the latter more closely, issues of accepted rules, ethics and code of conduct take on an important dimension. Over the years, governing bodies of the game around the world have developed exhaustive, complex and very detailed rules that cover all aspects of the game, from branding and marketing, the handling of contracts, client relationships, technology work rules, to player transfers and solidarity payments. Rules on eligibility for players and clubs in international competitions, post-match regulations, regulations on match-fixing, strict rules for agent activity, and revenues found from Coaching License rules have been established. The game has been supported by the large cash flow it generates to assist smaller countries.

Universities use sporting events as promotional tools to recruit students, while sponsors use events to associate with an image that has the power to flow brand recognition and loyalty. The financial magnitude of the interactions and the very nature of the actors involved lead to distortions and deviations from the ethical principles that usually govern the interactions between an institution and its sponsoring companies. The growing interest in sports of national and regional governments, the media and sponsors have in some cases exacerbated these deviations. And in recent years, the framework designed to guarantee the fairness of this sector has reported different critical issues and some cases of corruption that have led to the revocation of the mandates of important international figures. Football has for some time been at the center of a series of accusations and legal disputes, followed even more closely by the media than the matches and tournaments themselves.

13.1. FIFA and UEFA Regulations

As an international given, elite football is not subject to territorial laws which the correspondent nation is entitled to decree in the use of their sovereignty. The governing bodies issue specific statutes, which all their member nations’ Federations have to abide by. These statutes deal mainly with event organization issues, sport justice matters, and questions of corporate governance applicable to the Federation members.

The purpose of the statutes is to promote the sport of football and act in the interests of its member associations. The ethics are not only applied through legislation, but basically sourced from ethical business beliefs. This has been going on for over a century, and football has mostly undergone wrestling two world wars, plus smaller worldwide armed conflicts. From football’s origin as a way of entertainment, up to its use, decades later, as a hard power tool, for strategy purposes, the statutes have organically evolved to meet back in the purely ethical terrain, imposing the greatest responsibilities on its decision-making bodies and on national associations and clubs’ officers. It decisively states that members shall not be involved in any activity which is detrimental to the interests of the governing body.

13.2. Corruption Issues

There is much debate about universal morality and whether public choices are driven more by rationality than innate moral code. Still, wrongdoing exists in society, including in elite football. At the local level, corruption was defined as a misuse of public power for private gain. At the supranational level, corruption means a violation of laws or regulations that act to protect the public interest from fraud and abuse. Laws are needed to bring about the social contract between citizens and government. Such laws do exist in elite football, including FIFA and UEFA regulations, but they are either not widely known or are largely ignored. We know there is an issue with corruption, as several high-profile individuals have been prosecuted and sanctioned. For example, in 2015, FIFA indicted former president Sepp Blatter and banned him from football for six years; in 2017, former UEFA president Michel Platini was banned from football for four years; in 2019, former president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation and member of the FIFA Executive Committee, Fouzi Lekjaa, was banned for three years, as was Sergio Jadue, former president of the Chilean Football Association.

The full scale of corruption in international football is likely to be much larger. FIFA and UEFA regulations list a range of offences that could bring sanction from a warning to being banned from participation in football. For many offences, the responsible agent is not a football player but other agents; mainly match officials, associations, or clubs. Still, only a small number of these cases have, to date, been published. Some would argue that clubs and players are involved in these other violations. Paying or receiving a bribe is another example, yet the same cheating could happen if association officials or referees are offered gifts. Few of these cases are publicised.

14. Environmental Impact of Football

Sustainability has been brought to the forefront in the public discussion about elite football due to the large consumption of energy and the large quantity of waste created by stadiums during match times and by the transportation of fans and football teams. The increase in accessibility to air transport, including the onset of low-cost airlines, has exacerbated the situation with respect to the distance traveled by fans and teams. Additionally, the visibility of elite football on a global level through the diffusion of broadcasts and live streaming has emphasized the consumption of electricity and the damage to natural environments that many host countries suffer. In the case of Qatar, for example, concerns related to natural water consumption for building lawns in a desert country and the waste of energy for conditioning stadiums and fan transports during the summer months were raised as early as the start of the bid campaign for hosting the World Cup.

These aspects are likely to become key levers in the bigger picture of competitive balance. In particular, investments in sustainability, greater fan engagement on the environmental side, the desirability of parks for the youth that are affected, as well as the ability of elite teams to reduce their footprint, could all contribute to their differentiation, affecting their market access to talent and prestige, as well as their relative competitive balance. In this chapter, we will analyze these issues in relation to the effects of environmental sustainability on fan engagement, club reputation, ticket pricing, and – more generally – business profitability as well as competitive balance. Attention will not only be on elite football but also on the grassroots level, where the consequences for health and well-being and the involvement of local youths demand a total approach to sustainability development – not only on the environmental side but also in social terms - in the different models of hosting and managing small football facilities.

14.1. Sustainability Initiatives

Sport is often credited as one of the most significant areas of creation and recreation of social capital. Social capital refers to the actual and potential resources available to an individual or social unit, through the use of social connections – the value of which is derived from the ability to induce cooperation to achieve a common goal. In the last two decades, research has increasingly focused on the social role of sport. The social effects of spectator sports are being recognized, as the tangible and intangible benefits of sports on a city are acknowledged, and elite sport clubs in their respective cities are reshaping their roles for the better. As a response to this worldwide trend of super-diversified and globalized social capital, within nation states and local communities, it seems that elite football (and sport in general) also needs to become sensitive to a new agenda of social capital creation. Following this rationale, this section focuses on initiatives that football clubs have adopted and are adopting in order to become more sustainable in their territories, since the recognition that cities need to enhance their tangible and intangible capital is becoming increasingly acknowledged.

All over the world, elite football clubs are trying to become more socially responsible. Their actions and their rhetoric testify to this. In this paper, we provide a first attempt to analyze the clubs' social initiatives. Discussions are at these different levels – player, team, and club levels – since clubs aim to create an internal identity affiliated with the social programs, executed both internally and externally; only in this way will clubs be able to reduce the perception towards them of being large companies that are only interested in profit maximization. At the elite level, football is a very profitable sector; on the other side, the majority of elite sports clubs operate in cities in which a non-negligible share of the population is either in poverty or in an economically vulnerable situation.

14.2. Stadium Construction

Like other large scale venues, football stadiums are through the ongoing operational and construction driving forces zones of high environmental impact that reach across many systems and processes on a local, regional, or even global scale. The vision of such venues is to operate in a manner that has as little negative impact as possible on the environment, ideally resulting in no negative impact at all. Seeking carbon-neutral venues should complement the aim of becoming greener in other respects such as through waste reduction or increasing the use of renewable energies during lifetime operations. The footprint of football venues goes beyond the vertical plane of the structure and includes horizontal influences, the chosen location or waste disposals during service lifecycles. For example, various decisions which focus only on short term investment cost savings can result in continuing negative environmental impacts long after investment recovery. These can arise from increased energy consumption through inefficient heating, cooling, or ventilation systems, while negative impacts on supporter enjoyment also create issues. Priority decisions must be made during the design stage such as which construction materials are chosen. As a result, those materials should cause the least chemical or ecological pollution during manufacture, transport, assembly procedures, and also disposal at the end of service life.

It must be noted that the construction and operation of stadiums is accompanied by high energy demand and consequently, carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions on local and global scales. However, once the carbon footprint is established, then a transparent strategy can be created that offers certification for voluntary carbon balance operation. In contrast to other voluntary certification schemes that take carbon balance into consideration among other criteria, with a valid and certified project, the stadium is allowed to operate according to a net resulting zero carbon footprint.

15. Future of Football

While there can be few certainties about the future, there are potential trends which will shape the continued evolution of elite football. This chapter sets out two areas of speculation: potential changes in rules, and upcoming trends to watch. First, the future of football is very much a microcosm of the future of sport. Issues external to sport will increasingly shape the future of football. Sociological trends relating to changing working practices, such as the shift to increased freelance working in a gig economy, with its resultant changes in time-off patterns; changing attitudes toward mental health; and group identity are all likely to impact on the way football is consumed. This is a time when personal fulfilment is key to many people, in a way that it has never been before. Increased diversity in the consumption of football will require diversifying both the product on the field; and the stadium experience, and this development may well lead back to similar diversifying trends to those of the mid-twentieth century; the stadium event becoming more family-friendly, and more prominent again in the cultural life of the community.

There will be a number of consequences of the growing emphasis placed on Wellbeing in the physical and mental lives of players. Soccer has long prided itself on its physicality, yet increased emphasis on injury prevention and recovery means that greater leniency in the laws may have to be applied toward those who tend to disproportionately suffer from condition fatigue such as concussion – such as goalkeepers; and/or a levelling of the physical playing field by means of technological enhancement. The ruling of 2022, which allowed greater flexibility in terms of the number of substitutions for teams in recognition of the higher numbers of matches played during the plague, may continue into the future. Along and coming on the heels of these changes in technology are changes that technology is already creating and that it is likely to continue to create in the near future, particularly with regard to video evidence and effect changes in the way that football is played; the consequences of which are yet to be fully determined.

15.1. Trends to Watch

Elite football is in constant evolution, with new trends becoming visible with every season. This brief section shortly presents what some of those trends, more or less hidden, with more or less clarity, may be in the near, or mid-term future. This early list is by no means definitive or complete, for it exhausts neither all relevant aspects nor the most subtle and complex way such aspects interrelate. Claiming otherwise would mean to ignore the complexity of football and sport in general.

Traditional tactics in football focused on passing, ball possession, and tactical drilling of players by specialists. Recent years have instead drastically emphasized the role of the head coach in defense and attacking all phases, all attempts to control the game of elite football from the football school formations to the professionals through strategic game plan execution, plus the importance of fitness for both success and injuries. All have helped bring the price of skilled players on top of mind today’s football authorities, teams, and fans, as has the seeming conveyor-belt production –with ups and downs, to be sure– of brilliance-paid players, the faux high art yet surprisingly entertaining circus that is modern soccer. This success story’s detractors recall the school formations’ apparent exposure to elaborate tactical offensive plays. Uncertainty looms, however, regarding how to respond to the offensively intoxicating performances needed to silence any talent-to-coach tactical gap. The next few seasons may tell, with more skilled players, new coaching ideas, and better fitness reducing the ever-present injury risk.

15.2. Potential Changes in Rules

This section explores how rules could be modified to help football regain its status as the primary sport. Such updates could increase efficiency, shift fan power, address common complaints, and address some of the financial inequalities that have grown in the sport. While these recommendations do not guarantee equality or supremacy, they could make it easier for teams from different financial levels to be competitive during one or more seasons and suggest more exciting games, regardless of the teams on the field. Changes that improve the quality of play include goal size, use of technology for offside and handplay, size of the team — or squad — to register and the size of the matchday squad, size of the salary cap, the imposition of a limit of three substitutes per game, the duration of extra time and penalties, the limits on leniency for fouls within the last minutes of the game, criteria and payment of agents and the search for solutions of the current debt of some clubs with the Treasury, within which the salaries of players are included. These changes address complaints such as the ineffectiveness of technology, addressing some fouls that go beyond the clean intention to seek the ball, the number of possible replacements with enough skill to lift the play by fixing an injury, the amount offered for the hiring of agents and the need to settle debts, in some cases, given that it could be as catastrophic as that of some clubs if made public.

16. Case Studies

The thematic analysis outlined some important themes present in the interview data, which we now illustrate with case studies. The case studies are divided into two main categories: successful clubs and failed projects. The successful clubs represent how the use of NERD can help clubs create positive dynamics, while the failed projects showcase how not to use NERD. The reasoning behind this choice is twofold. First, the positive examples can easily be summarized. Second, the negative examples are cautionary tales that focus more on the challenges of using analytics. Case studies are a compelling way to illustrate academic insights and ideas, whether it concerns concepts we are passionate about, theoretical models or explanatory and predictive models. In this case, we believe it is vital to create a niche for NERD in the ever-expanding space of analytics solutions available to elite football clubs.

Successful Clubs

The use of NERD by football clubs is non-linear, and patterns can be established to avoid pitfalls during the creation and reshaping phases. We identify approval, transparency, and stability as three elements that create a virtuous path where clubs implement NERD to help the players and increase the likelihood to be more successful on the pitch. The challenge of feeding the information flow during the creation and reshaping phases might make these projects falter, but, after a few years, the clubs that create a structured and organic NERD project attract the brightest and best creative minds who add to the clubs’ overall success and truly connect the last meters to football performance. It becomes their main focus outside of the sporting activity and the analytical output is less and less requested in the decision-making meetings. This is what we identify as the ideal scenario for having a dedicated NERD project, where the burden of generating specific insights has become less demanding while increasing the request for creative reconnection of the NERD work with actionable insights in decision-making processes of all actors.

16.1. Successful Clubs

As noted above, two of the crucial aspects that have been highlighted as influencing the mapping of the boundaries of football clubs are the success on the field and the financial resources that are available. Successful clubs normally have a higher level of financial resources. In this section, we highlight the main aspects related to some successful clubs, which are closely related to both factors. More specifically, they have achieved long and continuous successful periods and at a relatively international level, although we have aimed to emphasize the diversity that the differences in the countries where the clubs operate and the levels of the football leagues can impose.

To avoid some degree of bias regarding the analysis of the leagues that are taking place, we decided to focus on those clubs that have been most constantly successful in the domestic league where they are inserted. More specifically, those that have achieved the highest number of titles in the league in the last century, using the national league as a reference. However, with the more recent developments in the internationalization of the economic and social impacts that clubs have been creating, the idea of the concept of success has also been changing. Nowadays, success is more than just a series of domestic trophies, as demonstrated by clubs with recent international successes. It is important to stress that clubs such as Manchester City, Chelsea, and Nottingham Forest FC, to name just a few, have had recent success on an international level. However, long periods of domestic league and national cup success should also be taken into account when defining the idea of long-term success.

16.2. Failed Projects

Clubs like FC Sunderland and the various attempts in England and other European countries to bring “new” football on a club level on a similar stage like European football are absolute failures which probably result from a clear ending of a club’s value creation process. In-house discussions and visions at the beginning of those projects sometimes sounded like copies of the missing strategic thinking, mercilessly broken down by practical reality. Clearly influenced by the media interest in stretches of “asset stripping”, local individuals who invested in clubs with a negative club valuation strategy then suddenly believed in their impact on the global business.

When FC Sunderland had to be relegated into the lower divisions for finishing the Premier League six points behind and with additional losses, they showed a football situation which made them less valued as the championship clubs. They offered a significant amount for the English football hero to work for the club and to lead them back within the next couple of months into the Premier League. But during the months of waiting, the club had no other “useful” job than sitting quietly at home. Starting again as a coach after such a long time break was not an easy task. On the one hand, the individual generated an interest like no other in global media.

There’s hardly something a second league club can do to generate global media interest- guiding it like a market interest at low cost for a tourism event open to whole England and the world. But on the other hand – what should the individual basically do with a project where a couple of potential “investors” were leaking millions in losses? Would it have really helped to take the club on a higher stage again? Would you afflict a real football expert in an environment like this? This is the sad reality FC Sunderland and clubs like it are afflicting now.

17. Conclusion

In recent decades, elite football has become not just a fun game, a source of entertainment, or a business; it has evolved into a hypercomplex web of mutable relationships connecting persons and things, economic and political powers, finance and sports, technologies, cultural references, and personal destinies. For some people, especially in the richest parts of Europe, North America, and Asia, the media and international events have tended to transform football into a mirror of life; the pitch, where millions of fans pour their emotions during a match day after day, is in fact, for most supporters, just an extension of a different life, lived almost every day with the same characters in front of a TV or computer screen. For many, life would seem sad without being able to live that moment of communion when the players of the favorite team make their entrance into the pitch; this is the moment that initializes a drama, where the moment of victory and the moment of defeat follow one another with rhythm and speed.

But this has not always been the case. Over the past 150 years, elite football has lived cycles of innovation and stagnation of market growth as well as cycles of investment and financial wisdom. It is, therefore, as if it behaved like an economic cycle that underwent periods of prosperity and periods of crisis. As such, there are situations that must be interpreted to either learn from mistakes in order to avoid repeating them in the near future or to forecast what difficult times lie ahead based on inherent imbalances or pressures. But, unlike a simple economic cycle, the financial performances of the participants in this business and the relationships among these organizations are capable of putting several elements at risk, including the sport's legitimacy in the eyes of the many fans or supporters.