The Football Club as an Economic Enterprise - Essay Example

All this has resulted in football getting metamorphosed into a large industry, falling largely in the realm of entertainment, but also encompassing a whole gamut of other business and industries like sports gear, sports merchandize, event planning, media management. Like any other industry, the football industry needs to be competitive as it requires fans and their money and time to remain viable. In an age when the overall entertainment industry has grown to monstrous proportions with multiplex cinemas and theatres, theme parks, amusement parks, and scores of other outdoor and indoor activities, the football industry needs to remain highly attractive for the customers to spend their time following the football game.

While there is an inherent lure for the fans to watch the games of their favorite teams, and this is all the more evident in the case of Europe where over eighty percent of the population follows this sport (Leigh, 22), there is still a need to manage the football industry professionally just like any other industry. The football industry is faced with the task of taking a marketing approach to promote itself. It requires determining the objectives, key success factors and also evaluating the marketing tools that are to be used in a cost-effective manner.

The dynamic nature of professional sports now ensures that match performance – win or loss – is not the only determinant of profit or loss. Instead, sports clubs need to manage the entire show – from scheduling to buying players, to arranging the stadium to delivering the performance – in a manner that generates more revenue and opens up more sources of income for them. The current paper, therefore, proposes to evaluate the existence of a marketing outlook in the football industry and to assess the various marketing tools that are already being employed by the European football clubs.

More specifically, it will study the TSG 1899.