STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

Strategic Management

Strategic Management

Introduction

Professional sports have emerged as a lucrative business, with many opportunities and challenges for sports management. As Mason (1999) argued, professional sports teams unite to produce a league product that has evolved from mere “entertainment for spectators” to being “sold to four distinct groups”:

1. fans who support leagues by attending games, following games on television and other media, and purchasing league- and team-related merchandise;

2. communities which build facilities and support local clubs;

3. television and other media companies which purchase the rights to show games; and

4. corporations which support leagues and clubs by increasing gate moneys, purchasing teams outright, or providing revenues through sponsorships or other associations.

The Football Industry - The Barclays Premier League

Consequently, football leagues provide that unique opportunity for management decisions and processes to occur in a range of environments and at varied levels. Indeed professional sports in general and football in particular, have become a growing segment within the broader, global, entertainment industry.

This paper provides some theoretical insight into the management implications of foreign players in the Barclays Premier League - drawing mainly from a review of the literature and other media reports. The next section provides a brief background of the league, which is followed by a discussion of migratory patterns of foreign players in general (Dobson and Goddard, 2001). The paper goes on to highlight the challenges of the football quota mechanism, which restricts the influx of foreign players in European football. Some strategy discourse is also brought to bear (Parnell, 2006; Chaharbaghi, 2007) in order to reach a sound set of conclusions and managerial/ research implications on this largely neglected - at least in management parlance - emergent epitome of globalisation.

The English Premier League - now officially known (for sponsorship reasons) as the Barclays Premier League (BPL) is the highest professional football league in England. Formed on 20 February 1992 when clubs in the football league's First Division decided to break away from the traditional Football League in order to take advantage of the lucrative potential of the growing market - thanks to globalisation and broadcasting rights, the league is currently contested by 20 club sides. The League operates a system of promotion and relegation in conjunction with the English Football Association (FA). Seasons run from August to May with each team playing 38 games each. The Barclays Premier League has since become the world's most watched sporting league (Dennis, 2002) and the most lucrative with cumulative club revenues of around £1.4billion. It is also worth noting that the league has now become a corporation in its own right with 20 clubs acting as shareholders.

From its inception in the 1992/1993 football season, a total of 40 teams have competed in the League but only four of these have actually won the title (see Table I) - Manchester United, Blackburn Rovers, Arsenal and Chelsea - and for this reason form the primary basis of this paper. Manchester United are the current champions having won the title for the tenth time ...