Pamela Wicker
Christian Weingärtner
Christoph Breuer
and Helmut Dietl

Choosing the legal structure of a sports institution is one of the key decisions that sports managers must make. Using platform theory and property rights theory, this paper shows that the choice of legal structure influences the revenue composition of sports institutions. We hypothesized that member associations should receive higher sponsorship revenues than private firms because their legal structure offers better protection against hold-up for sponsors and also for customers/members, which in turn leads to increased attention for the sponsor. We tested this prediction using...Read more

Egon Franck

Based on the analysis of the specific environment in which football clubs compete, this paper presents a comparative institutional analysis of three paradigmatic structures of football club governance: privately owned football firms, public football corporations (stock corporations with dispersed ownership) and members’ associations with an own legal personality (Verein). Against the background that “spending power” is the main driver of competitive advantage for clubs in the overinvestment environment of European football, the governance structure of the privately owned football firm...Read more