Football, corporate ownership, and conflicts of interest: Dark spaces and black boxes

Abstract

In recent years, the literature on football and accounting has focused on some opaque spaces in the ownership of football clubs, as well as in the definition of collaboration and commercial partnership mechanisms that, even in the case of larger clubs, are at times misrepresented in financial reports (Chadwick et al., 2018; Sudgen et al., 2017; Holzen et al., 2019). Our paper describes the case of Italy and its main relevance lies in that spectrum of analysis; in effect, the strictly familial nature of Italian capitalism clearly emerges in the case of football, as well. The clubs are controlled by influential entrepreneurial families (often operating in the entertainment industry) who through football consolidate their image. Put in these terms, the risks of conflicts of interest and opacity in commercial formulas, already highlighted by the best and recent literature, are reflected in a system of economic and meta/non-economic returns in which the object “football” becomes an instrument of social recognition and financial growth via indirect mechanisms.