The impact of COVID-19 on the European football ecosystem – A Delphi-based scenario analysis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2021.120577Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Social-economic impact of COVID-19 crisis highly relevant for football ecosystem.

  • Experts see opportunities and threats for football ecosystem caused by COVID-19.

  • Stakeholder groups differ in assessment of consequences of epidemic disease.

  • Participants' deep-level characteristics/sentiments impact valuation behavior.

  • Expertise, level of optimism and affective wellbeing can be proxies for sentiment.

Abstract

COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on the world's society and economy. This also applies to European football; the continent's largest professional sports ecosystem has millions of employees in football-related jobs and even more people emotionally attached to the sport. To account for stakeholders' unprecedented level of uncertainty regarding regulatory, economic, social, and technological implications for their business, we systematically examine how COVID-19 will impact the future of the European football ecosystem in the short, medium and long term. We present a Delphi-based scenario analysis with 110 subject matter experts who assessed 15 future projections both on a quantitative and qualitative basis. We find that, for example, a salary cap for players would have the highest impact on the ecosystem, but it is unlikely to be implemented, while an increased awareness for social responsibility would be the most desirable effect of the crisis. To refine the results, we account for surface-level and deep-level characteristics of participants and find significant effects in both cases. We identify three different clusters of projections and discuss the potential threats and opportunities of COVID-19 for the European football ecosystem to contribute to the scientific discussion and to provide guidance for policy- and decision-makers.

Introduction

On May 6, 2020, the international daily newspaper Financial Times ran the headline “Coronavirus threatens €10 billion hit to football transfer market” (M. Ahmed, 2020). While the transfer market is only one component of the football industry, this headline representatively demonstrates the drastic impact of COVID-19 on the entire ecosystem. As with all other industries, the outbreak of the epidemic disease was unexpected for European football, and it instantly confronted stakeholders with extreme ambiguity in terms of regulatory, economic, social, and technological consequences.

Especially in the period between March and May 2020, managers and authorities had to make directional decisions despite a maximum degree of uncertainty (Parnell et al., 2020). For example, governing bodies such as associations and leagues had to decide on a potential continuation of sports competitions; thus, on March 17, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) decided to postpone the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship by 12 months (UEFA, 2020b). Similarly, most national leagues decided to interrupt their domestic match schedules until further notice, particularly to avoid large gatherings and the potential risks associated with travel activities (Nakamura and Managi, 2020; Ozili and Arun, 2020; Tovar, 2020). While postponements of sports competitions were largely inevitable from a health perspective, associations and leagues simultaneously had to deal with further challenges, such as re-start strategies or broadcasting compensations (Q. A. Ahmed and Memish, 2020; Reade et al., 2020c). However, other stakeholders of the European football ecosystem were also heavily affected by the consequences of COVID-19. Clubs faced financial threats because matchday, and sponsoring and broadcasting revenues were at risk, while player and employee contracts remained in place (Duarte Muñoz and Meyer, 2020; Fühner et al., 2020). Coaches and managers, in turn, had to ensure the physical and mental fitness of their players to be prepared for a possible continuation of competitions under aggravated conditions such as extended health precautions or games behind closed doors (Mohr et al., 2020).

Given the complexity of the situation, our study aims to identify and assess possible short-, medium-, and long-term effects of COVID-19 on the European football ecosystem. Taking into account different stakeholder perspectives, we asked subject matter experts from different countries, backgrounds, and occupations to evaluate the expected probability, desirability, and impact of possible future developments. Using both qualitative and quantitative survey data, we elaborate on different viewpoints and reasons for dissent regarding the consequences of the pandemic to better understand diverging views within the industry (Warth et al., 2013). Moreover, we enrich these findings by additionally investigating the experts’ sentiments to account for the fact that their mood during the lockdown may affect valuation behavior (Loye, 1980). Finally, we aggregate our findings in fuzzy clustered scenarios and reflect on their practical implications (Curry, 2007; Wilkinson, 2009).

Our study contributes to the existing body of research by providing a comprehensive and multifaceted view of the possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the European football ecosystem. While scholars have mostly offered theoretical considerations on subareas of the football industry thus far (Duarte Muñoz and Meyer, 2020; Evans et al., 2020; Mohr et al., 2020), we integrate regulatory, economic, social, and technological perspectives to draw a more complex picture. Hence, we pose our research question as follows: How will COVID-19 impact the future of the European football ecosystem in the short, medium and long term? To derive an objective, credible answer to this question, we develop Delphi-based scenarios (Nowack et al., 2011). We use a Delphi survey for data collection because this method allows the collection of both qualitative and quantitative input from a heterogeneous expert panel (Grisham, 2009). The survey itself was organized in a real-time format (Gnatzy et al., 2011; T. Gordon and Pease, 2006). The methodology has proven to enhance the validity, acceptance, plausibility and consistency of future-oriented studies by allowing experts to effectively discuss complex matters in a structured and anonymous group communication process (Belton et al., 2019; Linstone and Turoff, 2011).

Section snippets

Relevance of the European football ecosystem

Sports and sportive competitions have always been part of human society (Coakley and Pike, 2001), and most people regularly engage in sports – either actively as professional or recreational athletes or passively as sports spectators (Leeds et al., 2018). In recent decades, the sports industry has seen exceptional growth, leading to a social-economic impact that also reflects in numbers (Eurostat, 2019; Siegfried and Zimbalist, 2006; Southall et al., 2003). According to the European Parliament

Research methodology

For our study, we used a real-time online Delphi survey to be able to both collect reliable data for scientific analyses (Aengenheyster et al., 2017; Flostrand et al., 2020; Gnatzy et al., 2011) and practically facilitate a valuable expert debate in midst of the COVID-19 crisis (A. V. Gordon et al., 2020; Kavoura and Andersson, 2016). To ensure the quality and validity of our Delphi results, we applied the approach proposed by Roßmann et al. (2018), which is illustrated in Fig. 1. First, we

Descriptive statistics

To ensure a reliable data quality for further processing, all expert inputs were checked for errors before analysis (Häder, 2002). In addition, we tested for the existence of a potential non-response bias by splitting participants into two groups (the first 20 respondents and the last 20 respondents). Given the not normally distributed data, we then conducted post-hoc Mann-Whitney U tests for all relevant dimensions of our survey (Belton et al., 2019). Since the results did not show significant

Scenarios and discussion

The fuzzy clustering approach led to three clusters consisting of five, four, and six projections. Table 8 shows the individual degrees of membership (between 0 and 1) for all projections and clusters, which are graphically displayed in Fig. 5 (Bezdek et al., 1984). A visual inspection indicates that the clusters are strongly characterized by the corresponding rating on the desirability dimension. We consider this insight in the following discussion.

Conclusion

This paper presents multifaceted insights into the question of how COVID-19 will impact the European football ecosystem in the short, medium, and long term. The Delphi-based scenario approach allowed the investigation of 15 future-oriented projections in detail and the discussion of three overarching future scenarios. The results reveal a set of topics clustered into "potential opportunities arising from COVID-19." While most of these potential developments with regard to regulatory, economic,

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Daniel Beiderbeck: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Project administration. Nicolas Frevel: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation. Heiko A. von der Gracht: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Sascha L. Schmidt: Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision. Vera M. Schweitzer: Formal analysis, Data

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jun.-Prof. Dominik Schreyer and Christoph Schlembach as well as three friendly reviewers for their supportive and constructive comments on previous versions of this manuscript. Furthermore, we sincerely thank our interviewees and participating experts for sharing their insights with us. Particularly in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, this dedication is not to be taken for granted.

Daniel Beiderbeck is a doctoral researcher at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, Center for Sports and Management, in Germany. His research interests lie in technology forecasting in the context of football and leadership in times of uncertainty. He graduated from RWTH Aachen University and holds a Master of Science in Industrial Engineering. His work has been published in books and the Centre for Technology Management Working Paper Series at Cambridge University.

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      Both committed and uncommitted fans have an interest in the uncertainty of the outcome. To account for stakeholders' unprecedented level of uncertainty regarding regulatory, economic, social, and technological implications for their business, Beiderbeck et al. (2021) systematically examine how COVID-19 will impact the future of the European football ecosystem in the short, medium and long term. Another very interesting paper on the impact of COVID-19 on European football is the piece of Hammerschmidt et al. (2021).

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    Daniel Beiderbeck is a doctoral researcher at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, Center for Sports and Management, in Germany. His research interests lie in technology forecasting in the context of football and leadership in times of uncertainty. He graduated from RWTH Aachen University and holds a Master of Science in Industrial Engineering. His work has been published in books and the Centre for Technology Management Working Paper Series at Cambridge University.

    Nicolas Frevel is a doctoral researcher at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, Center for Sports and Management, in Germany. His research interests lie in forecasting at the intersection of technology and sports. He holds a Master of Science in Management from the University of Mannheim, Germany, and a Master of International Business from Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. His work has been published in book and peer-review journal outlets.

    Heiko A. von der Gracht is Full Professor of Futures Studies and Foresight at Steinbeis University, School of International Business and Entrepreneurship (SIBE), in Germany. Before he was Associate Professor at University of Erlangen–Nuremberg. He holds a PhD in Business Studies from EBS University of Business and Law, Germany. His research interests encompass corporate foresight, the Delphi and scenario techniques, foresight skills and education, and quality standards in futures research. His works have been published in several books and peer-reviewed journals, including Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Journal of Business Research, and Journal of Supply Chain Management.

    Sascha L. Schmidt is a professor, chair holder and director of the Center for Sports and Management (CSM) at WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management in Dusseldorf, Germany. At the same time he is the academic director of “SPOAC - Sports Business Academy by WHU” and affiliate professor at the Laboratory for Innovation Science (LISH) at Harvard University in Boston, USA. The “Future of Sports” is one of his key research areas. He is author of the book 21st Century Sports: How Technologies Will Change Sports in the Digital Age and published his work in several books and peer-reviewed journals, including Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Journal of Business Research, and Applied Psychology.

    Vera M. Schweitzer is a doctoral researcher at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, Chair of Leadership, in Germany. Her research interests lie in psychological processes and behavior in organizations. She graduated from Ruhr-University Bochum and holds a Master of Science in Psychology.

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