The impact of nationality over football club’s performances

Após a implementação da Lei Bosman em 1995, a diversidade cultural global nos clubes de futebol profissional na Europa melhorou consideravelmente, de modo que o recrutamento de jogadores em todo o mundo, independentemente de suas nacionalidades, permitiu que os clubes de futebol fizessem parte de um conjunto global de talentos, associando tendências específicas de indivíduos de diversas origens culturais. Assim, a partir do momento em que tais clubes passaram a ser compostos de jogadores que falavam línguas diferentes e que possuíam filosofias de futebol diversas, houve a necessidade de se buscar adaptações às consequentes barreiras culturais que passariam a ser enfrentadas. Com esse cenário em mente, o presente trabalho visa analisar a relação entre a diversidade cultural sob a perspectiva da nacionalidade e língua falada, e os desempenhos dos clubes de futebol, com indicadores de dados financeiros e marketing esportivos, coletados das equipes com melhor desempenho nas cinco principais ligas da Europa, a fim de se definir o impacto da diversidade cultural sobre vários fatores de desempenho de tais clubes. Conforme será claramente demonstrado no desenvolvimento do trabalho, verificou-se a existência de um impacto positivo da diversidade cultural sobre o desempenho financeiro e de marketing, todavia, o mesmo cenário poderia não se repetir quando a análise é realizada sob o ponto de vista de desempenho esportivo. Nessa linha, a pesquisa busca verificar as origens e implicações que tais fatores geram nas equipes multiculturais e os desafios que atualmente os clubes possuem para realizar o gerenciamento de suas equipes.

Palavras-chave: Cultura, diversidade, times multiculturais, performances de clubes de futebol.

After the implementation of the Bosman rule in 1995, the overall cultural diversity of professional football clubs in Europe has considerably improved. Thus, recruiting players around the globe regardless of their nationalities allowed football clubs to be made of a global talent pool and to associate individuals’ specific trends from various cultural backgrounds. In the meantime, these clubs have been brought to face new challenges of having players with different football philosophies and speaking different languages creating cultural barriers as a consequence. Thus, this research aims at analyzing the relationship between cultural diversity from the perspective of the national diversity and the language heterogeneity, and football club’s performances. Using Financial, marketing and sports data indicators, collected from the most performing teams within the top 5 leagues in Europe, we test the impact of national diversity over various performance factors. We find as explained hereafter a positive impact of national diversity over financial and marketing performance while the sports performance seems to be negatively affected as higher is the national diversity. We derive implications for research on multicultural teams and for the management of national diversity.

Keywords: Culture, Diversity, Multinational teams, Football clubs’ performances.

1 INTRODUCTION, 12
1.1 OBJECTIVES, 17
1.1.1 General objective, 17
1.1.2 Specific objectives, 17
1.2 JUSTIFICATION, 17

2 LITERATURE REVIEW, 19
2.1 MULTICULTURAL DIVERSITY, 20
2.1.1 Cultural Diversity, 20
2.1.2 Cultural diversity management, 24
2.1.3 Cultural diversity management in sports organizations, 26
2.2 PERFORMANCE & SPORTS, 28
2.2.1 Financial performance, 28
2.2.2 Marketing performance, 33
2.2.3 Sport performance, 38
2.3 RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DIVERSITY & PERFORMANCE, 42
2.3.1 Diversity and team performance, 42
2.3.2 Model and hypothesis, 43

3 METHODOLOGY, 45
3.1 RESEARCH INSTRUMENT, 45
3.1.1 Qualitative approach, 45
3.1.2 Quantitative approach, 46
3.1.2.1 Sample, 48
3.1.2.2 Data collection, 48
3.1.2.3 DATA Treatment, 48
3.1.2.4 Method of data analysis, 52

4 DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS PRESENTATION, 53
4.1 RESULTS ANALYSIS AND SELECTION CRITERIA, 53
4.1.1 Quantitative approach, 53
4.1.1.1.1 National diversity’s measurement, 53
4.1.1.1.2 Financials’ performance measurement, 55
4.1.1.1.3 The measurement of marketing performance, 55
4.1.1.1.4 The measurement of sport performance, 57
4.1.2 Qualitative approach, 62
4.2 TESTS PERFORMED, 68
4.2.1 Factor analysis, 69
4.2.1.1 Considerations, 69
4.2.1.2 Factorial reduction test and results analysis, 71
4.2.1.2.1 Descriptive statistics, 71
4.2.1.2.2 Correlation matrix, 72
4.2.1.2.3 KMO and Bartlett’s tests, 73
4.2.1.2.4 Anti-image correlation matrix, 74
4.2.1.2.5 Total variance explained, 75
4.2.1.2.6 Component coefficient score matrix, 75
4.2.2 Regression test, 76
4.2.2.1 Model summary, 77
4.2.2.2 ANOVA, 78
4.2.2.3 Coefficients, 79
4.2.2.4 Conclusion, 80
4.3 OTHER RESULTS, 81
4.3.1 Marketing performance results, 81
4.3.1.1 Considerations, 81
4.3.1.2 Factor analysis results, 83
KMO and Bartlett’s tests, 83
4.3.1.3 Regression test, 84
4.3.1.3.1 Equation description, 85
4.3.1.4 Conclusion, 86
4.3.2 Sport performance results, 87
4.3.2.1 Considerations, 87
4.3.2.2 Factor analysis results, 88
KMO and Bartlett’s tests, 88
4.3.2.3 Regression test, 89
4.3.2.3.1 Equation description, 90
4.3.2.4 Conclusion, 91

5 CONCLUSIONS, 93
5.1 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS, 93
5.2 CONTRIBUTIONS, LIMITATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH, 94

6 REFERENCES, 96