Yann Carin

European football in general, and French football in particular, is experiencing huge financial difficulties and insolvencies. This paper analyses the bankruptcy of French football clubs between the 2008/09 and 2015/16 seasons. Various prediction models were used over the period 2008/09 and 2013/14 to create a model applied to French football and to provide regulatory bodies with an additional tool that could be used to evaluate clubs. A validation test was made on the 2014/15 and 2015/16 seasons. This paper shows that a prediction model for bankruptcy cannot be generalized to apply to all...Read more

Stefan Szymanski and Daniel Weimar

There is a common perception that the German football system is financially more stable than other European football league systems. However, we show that the German football pyramid is no more immune to the problem of insolvency than other European football league pyramids. We provide evidence to show that insolvency occurs in German football at a frequency comparable to the English and French leagues. We also show that the pattern of insolvency is consistent with the experience of English and French football identified in Szymanski (2017) and Scelles et al. (2018). Using season-level...Read more