Regulatory intensity in English and German professional football: A comparative analysis of national requirements for ensuring financial stability

In order to secure a proper execution of sporting competitions, national governing bodies of professional football leagues apply specific regulatory procedures. In this context, special focus is placed on requirements that are supposed to ensure financial stability of clubs. They, in turn, help avoid negative economic externalities, i.e. the problem that financial difficulties from one club can affect other clubs and stakeholders due to the interdependent relationships of the competition. These regulations on a national level in European professional football leagues show several significant differences. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to comprehensively analyze financial regulatory procedures of professional football leagues to generate possible improvements of the regulations in detail.

Using a document analysis of the regulation books of the English Premier League and German Bundesliga (BL), this study compares the regulatory procedures of those important European professional football leagues. Further evaluation was performed through a qualitative content analysis to develop a category system including six categories with 72 criteria from deductive and inductive procedures. For more advanced coding, an assessment scale was integrated.

Compared to the Premier League, the regulation of the BL points to a more intensive regulation in all categories and across all analyzed indices. The results of both leagues partially reveal that assessment and monitoring requirements tend to be ineffective, which can substantially endanger the achievement of the whole monitoring process’ aims. The intention to ensure the financial stability for securing the league competition can be missed in such a situation and negative economic externalities cannot be prevented effectively.

For the first time, this study includes all relevant requirements of financial club assessment and monitoring. Thereby, an abstract comprehensive and systematic structure for professional team sports leagues is described and allows for a concrete international comparison of two European professional football leagues. At the end, several approaches to improve the regulatory framework are provided.