Amazon.co.uk Review
As the authors of
Winners & Losers rightly point out: "football is a game, but it is also a business". Such a big business, in fact, that it is estimated to be worth around £150bn worldwide. Last year Rupert Murdoch felt that Britain's leading club (Manchester United) was worth more than £600m of BSkyB's money. At that time, the 20 UK clubs quoted on the stock market had a combined value of over £1bn, with the largest (United again) constituting one of the largest 350 quoted companies. Such a large business has long deserved rigorous examination in its own right and while Szymanski and Kuypers are not the first authors to have written about the business side of football, their analysis provides the first comprehensive application of aspects of business theories to the football industry. The key distinction is made by the authors between football and many other forms of business; while clubs compete not only on the field, but also off it to generate revenue, they must also co-operate with each other in the form of a league or some other organised competition in order to create the end-product of football matches. Building on such a framework and drawing on an extensive set of data, the authors are able to use business strategy to analyse the relationship between clubs' policies on expenditure (in transfers and wages) and their success on the pitch. While the approach is somewhat academic, the style is readable and the content is sure appeal to fans and business strategists alike. Excellent throughout, Szymanski and Kuypers' book represents the best yet on this subject. --
Trevor Crowe
Product Description
This text uses extensive statistical and documentary evidence to illustrate how football works as a business, and the techniques of business strategy to explain why some clubs are winners and others are not. After a historical description of football's finances, it moves to a contemporary analysis of the current state of the game financially, and also provides a number of general questions that should be of interest to students of business and economics. Embedded in the text are various analyses of the modern English game, including a league table of major teams that compares success on the field with that off the field since the war.
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