The Organisation and Governance of Top Football Across Europe

An Institutional Perspective

Hallgeir Gammelsæter, Benoit Senaux

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415883788
• eBook ISBN: 9781136705328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Sociología

This book aims to provide an extensive overview of how football is organized and managed on a European level and in individual European countries, and to account for the evolution of the national, international and transnational management of football over the last decades.

1 Perspectives on the Governance of Football Across Europe

Hallgeir Gammelsæter and Benoît Senaux

The number of organisations involved in top football has increased enormously since seven national football associations (FAs) founded Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) in 1904. In 2010 the membership comprised 208 national FAs. Particularly, over the last 50–60 years football has increasingly become constituted as a community of organisational actors that establish, maintain, and transform the rules of the game. The Union des Associations Européennes de Football (UEFA) was formed in 1954 and European male tournaments were set up from 1955.¹ Fédération Internationale des Footballeurs Professionels (FIFPro) was founded in 1965 to coordinate the activities of the national players’ associations. The proliferation of organisations in the sport also includes other vocationally based associations, the many fan based clubs, league associations, etc.

The proliferation of sporting organisations is however only one side of the development pattern. Another is the emergence in the field of large commercial sponsors, investors, consultants, player agents, civil regulatory bodies, and, unfortunately, illegitimate betting syndicates and mafia-like mobsters (Hill, 2008), yet the most conspicuous is perhaps the commercial media corporations that have seen live football as effective bait in attracting viewers and advertisers (Gerrard, 2004). As a result, broadcasting has become one of football’s largest revenue sources, as will be illustrated in this book.

The apparent predominance of commercial actors in the field emerged out of a context of extensive political changes. Symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Iron Curtain that had divided the East and West in Europe collapsed, and previous communist states embarked on an uncertain political and economic future. Concurrently the European Economic Community, borne in 1957, continued to develop in breadth and depth, and by means of the Maastricht treaty in 1993 it transformed into the European Union (EU). The formation and gradual extension of a European market heavily impacted on sport, particularly along two tracks: the transformation of the broadcasting industry in Europe from state monopolies to fierce competition between private providers, and the definition of professional sport as an industry comprised by EU regulation. The latter was materialised in the Bosman ruling in 1995 that forced UEFA to abide with EU law on the issue of worker mobility. The settlement that sports clubs within the EU and European economic area could not deny players with expired contracts to change club freely and free of compensation immensely increased the trading of players across nations. The verdict also powerfully weakened the sport’s own regulating bodies by restricting their possibilities for regulating the sport.

Despite the enormous influx of capital football is widely reported to be economically unhealthy or non-profitable at the club level (e.g., Lago, 2006; Sloan, 2006; Dietl, Franck, & Lang, 2007; Lago, Simmons, & Szymanski, 2007; Beech, Horsman, & Magraw, 2008; Bosca, Liern, Martínez, & Sala, 2008).This, ironically, seems to be one of few features most clubs and leagues hold in common, because when we look at the history of football’s organisation in Europe a picture of heterogeneity seems to emerge. Although systematised knowledge is lacking we know that in Eastern Europe football clubs used to be run by different arms of the communist state (Levermore & Budd, 2004; Riordan, 1991) and that they are now run by the nouveaux riches; that in Latin countries affiliations between politicians and football have sometimes been close, also in clubs organised as voluntary associations (Burns, 1999; Hare, 2003; Armstrong & Mitchell, 2008); that in continental Europe some clubs were closely attached to large manufacturing companies and their owner families (Hare, 2003; Morrow, 2003); that states have interfered to either introduce (García & Rodrígues, 2003; Ascari & Gagnepain, 2006) or regulate the formation of companies in professional football (Amara, Henry, Liang, & Uchiumi, 2005; Senaux & Margaine, 2006); that the non-profit voluntary association persisted as the organisational template for the organisation of clubs in Northern Europe until the 1980s or so (Wilkesmann & Blutner, 2002; Gammelsæter, 2009); and that clubs in the UK have been organised as shareholding companies as far back as the late 19^th century (Szymanski & Kuypers, 1999). Despite the standardisation of the rules of the game, the organisation of the game across Europe over the last centuries reflects different regional or national cultures.

The question we pose in this book is whether this is now changing. We pretend to give an account of the changes in organisation forms and networks of top football across Europe. We want to map the varieties across nations and clubs and connect this to developments in the way football is managed at the European level. We are curious to know if the pattern of development in the organisation of top football across Europe is pointing towards increased standardisation and if national idiosyncrasies and autonomy now give way to more governance from above.

From Description to Understanding

We are aware that the data provided by the contributions to this compilation do not lend itself to nomothetic comparative analysis. We are also aware that a core problem of ideographic studies, which many chapters in this volume resemble, is to move beyond the descriptive emphasis of the historical specificity of the cases and to achieve validation across cultures (Henry & The Institute of Sport and Leisure Policy, 2007). Despite the fact that this anthology is not based on a systematic research design that meets the requirement of strict empirical research, whether nomothetic or ideographic, we believe the contributions in this volume provide us with richer details that render it possible to tentatively develop our conceptual understanding of the recent developments of the governance of European top football and its organisation. To inform such a tentative analysis we below briefly outline a theoretical approach based on institutional organisation sociology. Hence we suggest that the questions raised in this volume can adequately be studied through the lenses of several institutionalist perspectives.

Broadly speaking, institutional explanations emphasise the preeminence in communities of cultural-cognitive, normative, and regulative pillars as guidelines for social behaviour (Scott, 2001). Hence these guidelines vary to the extent they are formal and deliberate (regulative), informal yet recognised (normative) and taken for granted (cultural-cognitive). Accordingly, institutionalism highlights how actors—individuals, groups, and organisations—are restricted and guided in their actions by the fabric of social guidelines in the contexts in which they live their lives, how institutional contexts embed actors in taken-for-granted schemes, logics, values, norms, routines, and rules. Institutionalism hereby radically contrasts theories that explain action as the outcome of individual rational choice or the instrumental functionality of systems. While rational-actor models ask what is rational to do, institutionalists argue that rationalism (and utility) is not given but itself a socially produced construct or norm. Thus what decision makers do, albeit sometimes unconsciously, is asking what action is expected of them. To abide with logics, values, norms, and rules is to act legitimately and legitimate action is believed to be the most basic premise for organisational survival. Organisations must therefore comply with the institutionalised beliefs and norms of their environments.

Below we flesh out alternative lenses from institutional sociology through which we can analyse and understand the changes (or inertia) of the way top football is being organised and governed across Europe. First, we introduce the idea that sport can be conceptualised as an institution in society alongside other core institutions such as the state and the market. Second, we will see how the nation can be conceptualised as perhaps the most important level of institutional study, explaining why forms of organisations may not spread easily across national borders and thus sustaining national idiosyncrasies. Third, we utilise the concept of organisational field to understand how organisations may be embedded in social contexts that at some point extend beyond national borders and give rise to cross national diffusion of organisational forms and to transnational governance of the organisational field.

Institutions and Institutional Logics

A basic idea in the institutional logics approach is that society comprises core institutions which are each dominated by a central logic that constrains means and ends of individual and organisational behaviour. Friedland and Alford (1991) pointed to the capitalist market, bureaucratic state, family, democracy, and Christian religion as the core institutions of society, whilst Thornton (2004) after reviewing empirical studies named six, adding corporations and professions. From a European perspective it is interesting that these North American sociologists “ignore” civil society (other than religion and family) and sport as social institutions, but this perhaps testifies to the constraining powers of institutional logics as sport in the United States are subsumed within the market (professional sport), corporations (leagues), the state (inter-collegiate), and the family (often individual athletes). In contrast we know that in large parts of continental Europe sport is rooted in the non-profit sector. In any case, the concept of institutional logic needs to be confined neither to the society level nor to lists coloured by ethnocentrism; rather it can be applied to a variety of levels of social inquiry (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008), such as European top football, whether this be defined as a sport, a sector, or perhaps an organisational field.

The central principle in the institutional logics approach is that to understand organisational behaviour we must understand how it is located in a context of institutions that both constrains behaviour and provides possibility for agency (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008). Decisions and their outcomes result from the interplay between institutional structure and agency. This means that agency is embedded; it is both constrained and enabled by institutional logics. This capacity stems from the understanding of institutions as both interdependent and in contradiction. Actors, be they football associations, clubs, player associations, or sponsors, are simultaneously attached to and dependent on contradicting institutions such as the civil sector, the market, the state, and the sport itself. Hence organisations are influenced by contending logics of different institutions, and key constructs in their understanding of their worlds are not neutral but shaped in the confrontation between these institutional logics. To illustrate, top football may depend on the non-profit sector to develop talent and enthusiasm for the sport among the young and their parents; on the market for commercialising the game; on states to provide facilities and security for officials, players, and audience; and on the ethics and rules of sport itself to secure the integrity of the game. However, the contradiction between these institutions would hardly allow the market to train the youngest talent (if defined as child labour), the state (or the market for that sake) to change the rules at the field, volunteers to coordinate the police force at high risk games, etc. Still, embedded in these contradictions is the potential for shaping our understanding and constructs. That is why the markets do in fact train the younger players when their parents pay them to attend summer football schools (hence they are “customers”), or the clubs’ youth academies (hence they are “pupils”), etc.

In the interstices of the institutions constructs are always potentially open to question, but constructs and norms are also confining structure. The norms against child labour, for instance, constrain the way clubs can train young talents in the same way the norms and regulation of EU labour rights constrain the football authorities’ regulation of player transfers. Such constraint is not absolute, however, as illustrated by the negotiation regime established between EU and UEFA on the future of football (Garcia, 2007). Illustrative is also the issue about the rights of rich clubs to reap the smaller clubs of their young talent which can be translated into an issue of whether it is market logics or sport logics that should apply on youth players, or more precisely, what constructs, norms, and regulations that develop in this contested terrain.

The institutional logics approach sensitises us to question which institutions and institutional logics in society impact on top football; what characterises these institutions; what are the alignments and contradictions between them; and how is change shaped in the interstices between the institutions. Is it adequate to define sport itself, or football, as a social institution? What, in that case, is the logic of football, its means and ends? Is practicing sport an end in itself or can it be fully commodified in the service of profit making (cf. Walsh & Giulianotti, 2007)? And further, what are the institutions and logics it depends on? Is it the market where football is a means to accumulate profit; the state bureaucracy where football is a means to national integration and control; is it politics where it could be a means to power and privileges or to realise the will and welfare of the people?

The concepts of institutions and logics are broad categories that must be specified and developed in order to guide empirical research into how they influence the organisation of football. By tracking down the interests that flow from diverse institutions and logics we can however hope to arrive at junctures that illuminate contradictions and alignments between them and study how constructs and practices are developed and legitimised. How do parliaments, the state bureaucracy, and private owners of capital engage in football in diverse countries and how does football’s organisations call upon their attention and respond to their efforts without compromising their autonomy? And further, how and to what extent is the sport institution able to keep its house without being helped out by the other institutions. The process behind the founding of WADA as an agency outside of sport control (cf. Hanstad, Smith, & Waddington, 2008) illustrates how sport sometimes fails to manage problems that contradict with logics in sport and in the democratic state. Will football be able to successfully fight economic unfair play, match fixing, child trafficking, and corruption without state intervention?

The institutional logics approach encourages investigation across levels of analysis such that it makes sense to study the organisation of football at the European, national, club, and even individual levels simultaneously although this is a challenging effort. This said, the Bosman case could perhaps successfully be analysed through the lenses of institutional logics, showing how an individual succeeds in bringing together the contradictory logics of professional football and the state bureaucracy at the European level (interestingly, according to Garcia [2007] it was the judiciary and not the Commission that “flipped the coin”). The result was that the depths of professional football’s set-up shook bottom-up. Whilst we know that the repercussions went across the European football world we do not have systematic knowledge about how diverse nations and clubs adapted to these changes and how different institutions were mobilised and changed.

National Embeddedness

In his study of the railroad industry in the 19^th century, Dobbin (1994) showed that different “political cultures” could explain the development of divergent models of organising, funding, and state involvement in the United States, England, and France. Political cultures, comprising practices and their meanings, had emerged historically and gained institutional form within each nation’s political system. These socially constructed logics of state action “shaped new industrial and economic strategies principally by determining the kinds of economics and industrial problems nations would perceive and by delimiting the solutions that nations would conceive to those problems” (Dobbin, 1994, p. 20). These national political cultures were used to explain initial differences amongst nations and the subsistence of these differences over tim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1. Perspectives on the Governance of Football Across Europe
• 2. Decisive Moments in UEFA
• 3. The Influence of the EU on the Governance of Football
• 4. History, Longevity, and Change: Football in England and Scotland
• 5. Organising and Managing Football in Ireland
• 6. Diverging Scandinavian Approaches to Professional Football
• 7. Swiss Football: Finding Alternatives to TV-Rights Revenues
• 8. Belgian Football: A Uniting Force in a Two-Track Policy?
• 9. The Regulated Commercialisation of French Football
• 10. German Football: Organising for the European Top
• 11. When Stoplights Stay Orange: Control Issues in Dutch Top Football
• 12. The Organisation and Economics of Italian Top Football
• 13. Commercialisation and Transformation in Spanish Top Football
• 14. The Organisation of Top Football in Portugal
• 15. The Battlefield of Greek Football: Organising Top-Tier Football in Greece
• 16. More Serious Than Life and Death: Russian and Soviet Football
• 17. From Bohemian Rhapsody to a New World: The Organisation of Football in the Czech Republic
• 18. Socio-Cultural Organisation of Hungarian Football: An Overview
• 19. Understanding the Governance of Football Across Europe
• Contributors
• Index