1.3.4. Increased competition

The competition among European football clubs recently has increased drastically. This is largely depicted by transfer expenditures last season: cumulative expenditure among top-7 European top championships has reached 1,7€ billion¹⁸. Especially, large figures are shown by English Premier League, Spanish Primera Division and Italian Serie A. Top clubs of these championships, like FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, FC Chelsea, Manchester City, Juventus Turin, AC Milan are performing better and better in terms of sport results as well as in terms of business. Surely, sponsorship and ownership inward cash flows play a great role in financing these results, but there is a change in the pattern of top football clubs development – infrastructure is being improved, youth academies are being developed, commercial function is paid a lot of attention in most of top clubs. So, these massive investments will surely start paying off in several years.

From international prospective – it really sufficient to maintain strong positions in European tournaments and at the same time, to take part in those tournaments it is necessary to show high results in domestic championships. Without that it is completely impossible to maintain high level of costs that top football clubs currently have.

Also, it is worth mentioning the development of clubs that do not belong to the cohort of top clubs. For example, Portuguese Porto has shown high results on international arena, beating many of honored opponents, and at the same time – largely, their success is not so much connected to external funding.

2. Football as a business market

2.1. Brief history of football commercialization

In 1904 delegates from France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland established FIFA - the international governing body of soccer - to "promote the game of association football". We can start counting a modern football history exactly from this point. By the late 1930s there were 51 FIFA members; in 1950, after the interval caused by the Second World War, that number had reached 73. Over the next half-century, football's popularity continued to attract new devotees and at the end of the 2007 FIFA Congress, FIFA had 208 members in every part of the world. So if we have an organization which controls every professional football match in the world, we can speak about commercialization of football and business exciting in this industry.

There is an opinion that commercialization of football transformed what initially was a game played by gentlemen into a multi-billion dollar industry. Like a 22 multi-billionaires play a game for new billions for them and for their clubs. Maybe this opinion even make a sense, but if for football fans it is a bad sense, for us and for business environment this statement has only positive tone.

Although the commercialization of football is not a new phenomenon, the lifting of restrictions on clubs to ‘make money’ dating back to the early 1980s and the flotation of Tottenham Hotspur FC on the stock exchange, the level it has reached recently is worrying for football fans. When not entirely priced out of the people’s game by rocketing prices for match tickets and club merchandise, they feel their loyalty increasingly taken for granted. But the real time of football commercialization is 90s, when like fans said was started a time when a result became much more important than a game.