Brief history of football commercialization

Industry description

Brief history of football commercialization

In 1904 delegates from France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland established FIFA - the international governing body of soccer - to "promote the game of association football". We can start counting a modern football history exactly from this point. By the late 1930s there were 51 FIFA members; in 1950, after the interval caused by the Second World War, that number had reached 73. Over the next half-century, football's popularity continued to attract new devotees and at the end of the 2007 FIFA Congress, FIFA had 208 members in every part of the world. So if we have an organization which controls every professional football match in the world, we can speak about commercialization of football and business exciting in this industry.

There is an opinion that commercialization of football transformed what initially was a game played by gentlemen into a multi-billion dollar industry. Like a 22 multi-billionaires play a game for new billions for them and for their clubs. Maybe this opinion even make a sense, but if for football fans it is a bad sense, for us and for business environment this statement has only positive tone.

Although the commercialization of football is not a new phenomenon, the lifting of restrictions on clubs to ‘make money’ dating back to the early 1980s and the flotation of Tottenham Hotspur FC on the stock exchange, the level it has reached recently is worrying for football fans. When not entirely priced out of the people’s game by rocketing prices for match tickets and club merchandise, they feel their loyalty increasingly taken for granted. But the real time of football commercialization is 90s, when like fans said was started a time when a result became much more important than a game.