Where Business Meets Society: What Is a Football Club?

This chapter focuses on the role theory can play in conceptualizing contemporary football clubs and in making sense of conflicts inherent therein. Three theories are discussed, two of which have been widely used in prior research into the football business. Stakeholder theory places the emphasis on understanding how the economic basis arising from a club’s decisions and behaviour impacts its stakeholders. Crucially, these impacts need not be limited solely to economic or financial affects. Institutional theory focuses on the institutions within football and society more generally which impact upon the game’s organization and governance. Consideration of logics is central to institutional-type football studies, specifically the challenges of balancing often-contradictory demands within the institutional field. Boundary object theory recognizes that what constitutes ‘a club’ is something much more than its legally established form. Clubs are presented as sites of complex social interactions; ambiguous entities that coevolve with many social worlds, serving multiple, often conflicting, functions for different people and communities. A football club can be understood as loosely structured, multidimensional and ambiguous when viewed from a general perspective, but translatable into a more concrete, unambiguous form when viewed from the perspective of an individual social group such as supporters.