CSR in professional European football: an integrative framework

Abstract

The increasing importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in professional football leads to the demand for a sector-specific framework for strategic CSR integration that takes the particularities of football into account. Based on CSR frameworks and a literature review, we analyse 72 academic papers on CSR in football and sports to develop our integrative framework. The framework consists of four dimensions that reflect values-based management: a normative, a strategic, an operative and a superordinate level. We find that a broad variety of drivers push clubs to develop CSR strategies. Despite this heterogeneity in drivers, the six key areas of CSR in football we identified are: (1) communities, (2) human capital, (3) fans and members, (4) the commercial environment, (5) compliance and (6) the ecological environment. Our contribution provides future studies with a framework for investigating CSR in football, and clubs with a concept on how to integrate CSR strategically.