Footballpreneurship : The role of scouting and youth academies in football entrepreneurship and value creation from young talents: A case study on AFC Ajax and Borussia Dortmund

Abstract: Background: The football industry has been rapidly evolving. The value of transfer market has increased astronomically, thus sealing a transfer deal has become pricy. In the meantime, the gap between rich and low budget clubs keeps increasing. UEFA released new regulations called “Financial Fair Play” (FFP), which aims to curb financial differences amongst football clubs. Hence, football clubs adopted new entrepreneurial approaches such as scouting and youth academies to improve their financial situation. Purpose: The main objective of this paper is to understand football teams’ entrepreneurial reaction towards FFP. The purpose is to examine the strategies of value creation from human capital like talented young players, in terms of scouting and youth academy, and explain the relationship between football and entrepreneurship in context of the business model framework. Method: The research is conducted by secondary data collection through online resources. We used the secondary data analysis method to analyze our data and carried out a representative case study based on the theoretical framework of this master thesis on two football clubs, AFC Ajax and Borussia Dortmund, to understand the problem more comprehensively. Conclusion: The results of this study demonstrate that the FFP regulations affected the entrepreneurial structure of football clubs. The data suggest that both clubs intensified their scouting and youth academy activities, as a result they generated more transfer revenue through selling the players that they recruited at their youth academies or scouted. Hence, this new entrepreneurial approach that the football clubs adopted provided a significant benefit for them. We call this concept that football meets entrepreneurship as “Footballpreneurship”.