Complexity in Sport System: Context Specific Elements in the Football Industry Dynamics

Football clubs, facing frequent challenges and intense competition, exhibit unique managerial and organizational complexities. Their environment is marked by weekly competitions, and thus, it is possible to distinguish football clubs from non-sports businesses. This distinctive environment necessitates a deeper exploration of elements qualifying football system complexity as context-specific, setting it apart from non-sports businesses. The scope is to explore the interplayed objective functions, where it seems evident how dependent and independent variables are mutually conditioned. The study adopts a mixed research approach, combining an analysis of complexity-related literature, with a focus on football as a complex catalytic system. An exploratory theoretical study on the concept of complexity in the sports business is developed through analysis of the academic literature on theoretical causes generating complexity. The results outline context-specific factors shaping football system complexity, highlighting its distinct operational environment compared to other industries. Football clubs exhibit unique complexity, sourced from economic, financial, sporting, competition-related aspects, injury risks, and the presence and the fundamental impact of two kinds of errors (both positional and situational) able to affect the objective functions. The football system, functioning as a dynamic system, showcases complexity through reinforcing mechanisms and continuous feedback loops, adapting to evolving circumstances. The study identifies three autocatalytic circuits: 1) sports and economic-financial results, 2) budgeting and sports results, and 3) competition and sports results. The study’s limitations rely on its theoretical nature, which requires exploratory insights and empirical validation across multiple football clubs. The paper analyses the complexity of the football system through literature analysis and suggests research paths for empirical exploration. A qualitative analysis, using a voluntary sampling method, is currently underway, targeting top managers and executives in Italian football clubs. Further empirical contributions will be presented at the EURAM Conference. Implications include interpreting football business critically, enhancing understanding of organizational models and managerial strategies in football clubs. This offers new pathways for value generation from different perspectives, contributing to improved comprehension of sports industry strategies. To date, no studies – from a managerial perspective – have examined the elements qualifying the complexity of football industry as context specific, by a multifaced perspective.