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The English Premier League is regarded as one of the most prominent sporting competitions in the world. In the last decade the league (and by definition it’s member clubs) have become highly attractive to wealthy foreign investors, having taken ownership of a number of clubs across the league. This thesis seeks to investigate the motivations and consequences behind this foreign direct investment (FDI). The study uses a multi-method approach not commonly found within the sports economics or FDI literature combining both quantitative and qualitative methods. The thesis has generated responses from ‘elite’ level respondents at Premier League clubs together with members of the supporters’ movement. Existing data from club sources and market reports has been collected in order to assess the motivations and consequences of FDI. The thesis finds the motives behind football FDI to be somewhat different to those held by other forms of business organisation. Football is a mostly loss-making industry, but despite this weakness, some investors have purchased Premier League clubs for economic reasons. The importance of non-economic motives, such as profile enhancement, and the notion of the trophy asset were also found to be influential motives behind some football FDI. These aspects are not strongly reflected in the FDI literature, and they imply football is different to other forms of investment. FDI is shown to be mostly beneficial for the clubs receiving the investment, but for non-acquired clubs negative consequences are found in terms of wages, transfer costs, profits, and debt. For the Premier League itself, FDI has been positive in terms of enhancing the league’s stature, revenues, and the quality of matches. Some benefits were found at the regional level. This thesis covers the gap within the literature surrounding FDI and football, and also raises wider points about the generalizability of FDI theory to all industries.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-25T16:45:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Robert Alvarez Fernandez.pdf: 1537881 bytes, checksum: c9c3e39718f66d8d42566e6ccd435410 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-11-11 / This research, an exploratory study, had been reaching for the understanding of the football clubs business environment regarding the marketing administration and the diverse strategic possibilities in revenue obtaining. To achieve such target, besides the marketing and strategy bibliographic research and more specifically in the sport marketing area alongside the analisys of secondary data of the sport industry, a comparison with English football clubs was endevoured. In the empiric phase, two Brazilian football clubs and two English clubs were studied in depth; that made possible the usage of multiple case studies methodology approach. At the research end, the efforts made possible to conclude that a limited market view prevails in the Brazilian market leading the football clubs to neglect important revenue sources not olny on their quantitative aspects but regarding the building of a solid relation with the fan and consumer. It is believed that the analysis peformed in this research and the correlations stablished with the financial data presented may bring contributions both to the academic study of sport and to the Brazilian clubs when rethinking their relations with the fan and carry out actions to bring the fans back to the stadiums. It is believed that the analisys performed in this research may contribute both to the advance of the academic research on this industry but also to the Brazilian Football clubs by leading them to rethink their relationship with their fans and bring them back to the stadiums with all the benefits but simply matchday revenue / A presente pesquisa, de cunho exploratório, buscou entender o ambiente de negócios dos times de futebol no que se refere à administração de marketing e a diversidade de estratégias para obtenção de receitas. Para tanto se optou, além da pesquisa bibliográfica no âmbito do marketing, da estratégia e, especificamente, do marketing esportivo, e de análise em fontes de dados secundários do setor esportivo, por uma análise comparativa com clubes do futebol inglês. Na fase empírica foram estudados em profundidade dois clubes de futebol no Brasil e dois na Inglaterra, o que possibilitou a aplicação da metodologia de estudo de casos múltiplos. Ao final da pesquisa foi possível concluir que há uma limitada visão de mercado no cenário brasileiro, além da negligência dos clubes nacionais para com fontes de receitas importantes não apenas em seu aspecto numérico, mas, sobretudo, no que se refere à construção de relacionamento com o consumidor/torcedor. Acredita-se que as análises feitas nesta pesquisa e sua correlação com os números apresentados trazem contribuições tanto para o avanço da pesquisa acadêmica sobre o tema como também aos clubes brasileiros no sentido de repensarem sua relação com o torcedor de forma a trazê-lo de volta aos estádios o que, certamente, poderá gerar novos recursos que vão além da simples receita de bilheteria

Thesis "Data Mining in the Field of English Football League Third Division's Betting Odds" deals with data mining referring to acquiring knowledge from data. The main objective of this work is to develop data models for prediction of match results and to compare these predictions with a chosen strategy of betting. The selected betting strategy is based on betting single bets with odds belonging to chosen intervals, which generate a profit. These odds intervals were discovered by analyzing 2006-2009 football matches in a created simulator. On the basis of these odds ranges data models were constructed. Each data model contains a hypothesis which is generated by SD4ft procedure of LispMiner based on all football matches played in seasons 2001-2008. Developed data models are tested afterwards using 2006-2009 football matches data. Results show that all derived data models are profitable in all four seasons under consideration. More than half of them successfully predicted 2009 matches as well. The analysis showed that betting agencies offer mostly odds which make it almost impossible to be profitable while betting on matches according to their odds. In spite of this fact I identified some odds intervals with which you can success while betting single bets on home-team, draw or visitor-team with odds falling within these intervals. Association rules with reasonable confidence and support can generate high profitability. It is important to realize that there are no data models which guarantee a certain profit. Most of developed data models are not applicable in the real world, some of them can actually generate a loss. Nevertheless there are data models to be found that could generate a profit in the real world.