Professional football clubs. The internationalisation of Borussia Dortmund GmbH & Co. KGaA

Résumé ou Introduction

Football has long been the most popular sport in the world, regardless of whether it is played actively or as a passive participant as a spectator or fan. However, the importance of football is also increasing economically. In Germany alone, the "professional football system has grown faster than most industries and about ten times faster than Germany as a whole, with real annual growth of 6.1 percent since 2008".

The reason for this development is the constantly increasing competition between the clubs. The peculiarity of the so-called hyperactivity in sport and especially in football and the resulting incentive to overinvest leads to an increasing tendency towards commercialization. The clubs are increasingly countering the near saturation of the European home markets with a systematic expansion of their business activities into, for them, new international markets.

The fundamental potential of internationalization faces challenges and questions of strategy development and implementation on the management side. Starting with the fundamental decision to start cross-border activities, through the choice of market entry and market development forms, to the effects on the overall corporate strategy and possible adjustments to the organizational structure.

This work is therefore dedicated to the question of how far strategic approaches, especially from the areas of strategic and international management, are already being used in practice. It is examined which established concepts and theories could be part of a possible strategy development process and, following on from this, which possible adjustments to the special features of professional football clubs are necessary. The goal is to work out and show the management tasks, challenges and focal points as examples, in order to then present individual levels and issues in the analysis and strategy development process from the management's point of view.