Football and corporate social responsability: the Superleague issue.
A few weeks ago, front pages of newspapers were entirely occupied by the football Super League matter: the prematurely dismissed project of a private closed-number competition alternative to the Champions League, which would have gathered the best European football teams. Specifically, promoters arranged a cup among twenty clubs, fifteen of which always entitled to participate – the founding clubs -, five with a qualification mechanism selected each year based on their results in the former season.
The unaffected affair was presented in the media as an attempt by the richest and most indebted clubs to devise an exclusive and closed solution that would deny any semblance of sporting merit and aspiration to the smaller teams. The rhetoric was constructed without an in-depth analysis of the championship project, which included, among other things, equalisation funds aimed at redistributing the increased revenue to clubs not participating in this international championship.
Without going into technical questions, it is worth highlighting here how the affair lends itself to analysis on more levels than those highlighted in the pages of the newspapers up to now. It is important to read the Superleague operation as a question of corporate social responsibility and, therefore, of the relevance of requests outside the restricted corporate structure. These instances, which – simplifying – coincide substantially with the interests, not necessarily economic, of the stakeholders, i.e. of all subjects, other than the investingshareholders, who are in some way involved in the business activity: from employees to members of the local community; from suppliers to customers (who, in the game of football, are the fans and enthusiasts).
About this topic, a certain amount of caution is needed, because we are analysing a very particular market segment, which moves enormous volumes of business and which today, after a year and a half of the pandemic, presents equally macroscopic financial problems (the football system, already in difficulty due to its structural imbalances, estimates losses linked to the impact of the pandemic at between 6.5 and 8.5 billion; the top founding clubs of the Superleague could lose 2.5 billion between this and next season, almost half of the total, and see their equity position worsen with aggregate net financial debts of over 3 billion). Net of this caution, the issue can be easily explained if it is considered as a contrast between the financial logic ofthe majority shareholders and the aspirations of the bearers of diffuse interests, which are normally considered erroneously irrelevant or even not considered at all, and instead are essential because they are those of the users of the final product. For the latter, balancing the budgets of football clubs is secondary compared to watching a good game played by their favourite team.
The failure of the proposal, also due to communication errors, is, therefore, to be read from the perspective of a contrast that took place, more than between the twenty big European football (and therefore the world) and the official institutions (UEFA, and firstly the British government), and firstly the British government), between the former and their base of legitimacy: the fans, who cannot be relegated, by their very nature, to pure and simple “customers” of the performance of sports entertainment.
For the fan-customer, it is simply not an alternative to choose another product of the same quality if the one he is used to is no longer satisfactory, as it might be in any other competitive market. The alternative develops between supporting that team and no longer following the sport of football. The fan, therefore, concerning his team (and it is no coincidence that in the common vocabulary we speak of “own” team, to identify an identification of the customer-fan that transcends the right of ownership in the technical sense) cannot be considered as a simple consumer of a product of entertainment because he is attracted within a community of interests that must be read, especially by the clubs themselves, as composed of real “holders of a stake”, i.e. stakeholders.
The shareholder logic of profit maximisation ultimately clashed with the aspirations of the majority of football spectators: to be thrilled by a particularly spectacular play, but above all, an unexpected victory, in the context of a sport that makes the imponderable the key to its enormous popularity. Failure to consider the football club as an aggregating entity that in itself is capable of affecting the sphere of its supporterswill result in disaffection with the same and therefore, in the long run, in the loss of value of the same and, if the issue becomes systemic, to the sport of football in general.
The case is destined not to remain isolated if the managers of the big clubs do not change the paradigm, since the pattern of the recent failure, although varying and specific, can also be reproduced in other market sectors, especially in those where non-essential goods are involved.
Mattia Facci
Further readings:
AA.VV., La responsabilità sociale d’impresa, a cura di V. Di Cataldo e P. Sanfilippo, Torino, 2013.
AA.VV., La responsabilità dell’impresa. Per i trent’anni di Giurisprudenza commerciale, Milano, 2006.
- C. Angelici, Divagazioni sulla responsabilità sociale d’impresa, in Riv. soc., 2018, pp. 1 ss.
- M. Bellinazzo, Perché è fallita la superlega, in un sistema calcio a rischio default?, 24 aprile 2021, in ilsole24ore.com, visualizzato in data 21 maggio 2021
Commissione Europea, Libro Verde: Promuovere un quadro europeo per la responsabilità sociale delle imprese, 18 luglio, 2001, reperibile al seguente link.
R.E. Freeman, Strategic Management: a Stakeholder approach, Pitman, Boston, 1984.