Determinants of coopetition and contingency of strategic choices: the case of professional football clubs in France

ABSTRACT

Research question: The research aims to identify the determinants of ‘coopetitive’ strategies compared to more competitive or cooperative ones, while examining the contingency of strategic choices to strategic groups. The focus is on French professional football over the 2006–2017 period. The contribution to the literature comes from using strategic groups and breaking down specific characteristics of player transactions in this industry.

Research methods: The methodology is based on an exploratory statistical analysis composed by cluster analysis. First, a Pearson's principal component analysis (PCA) is conducted, before using K-means classification.

Results and Findings: Results provide empirical evidence for a high contingency of strategic choices. The taxonomy found is closely related to the economic, financial and sporting characteristics of a club. Belonging to a specific class highly influences the strategy a club can implement. In addition, the diversity of club behaviours in the league are highlighted.

Implications: Our findings bring relevant information for practitioners about their strategies and the managerial implications of a potential reform of player transactions between teams. Indeed, FIFA is working on a reform to limit the number of outgoing loans that a team can use and better control the transfer system.

KEYWORDS:

• Coopetition
• strategy
• contingency
• strategic group
• football

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 National Direction for Management Control as translated from French by Dermit-Richard et al. (2019).

2 Former organisation reuniting 14 (then 18) European football clubs.

3 We use a simple average of points per game (total number of points/total number of games).

4 International Centre for Sports Studies.

5 “Development of the regulation of loans of players for the purpose of youth development as opposed to commercial exploitation. The number of loans per season and between each club shall be limited and bridge transfers and sub-loans shall be prohibited” (FIFA, 2018).