Staging and managing match events in the English professional football industry: an SME learning perspective

Abstract

The English professional football industry has attracted considerable academic interest in relation to the tragedies that occurred during the 20th century. However, the bulk of this work has focused on historical, social and economic factors rather than match processes. Consequently, an in-depth view of contemporary football match event management processes does not exist. This paper aims to address this by examining small and medium enterprises (SME) and event literatures in order to surface the SME mentality evident in the majority of clubs. A Football Match Event Lifecycle Model is developed and then used to provide an insight into contemporary football event management issues and processes and demonstrate how clubs can generate, transfer and use knowledge to learn from the mistakes of the past. The paper adopts an interpretivist methodological approach and utilises qualitative primary data from semi-structured interviews and non-participant observation.