Managing the European football industry: UEFA’s regulatory intervention and the impact on accounting quality

Research question: European football clubs are known for an institutionalized management culture which prioritizes on-field success over financial performance. This creates an extremely competitive context within which most clubs operate, producing debts and deficits. However, in order to secure clubs’ long-term financial viability, Union of European Football Association (UEFA) has introduced regulatory and monitoring processes tied to accounting data in order to assess clubs’ financial performance. This study aims to determine whether UEFA’s framework has an impact on clubs’ management policies with regard to accounting quality.Research methods: The study employs a sample of 109 European football clubs for a seven-year period, 2008–2014 (three years before and four years after the regulatory intervention), to investigate the impact of the reform upon management practices related to accounting. Following prior literature, we employ the three most commonly used proxies of accounting quality: earnings management, conditional accounting conservatism and auditor switching.Results and findings: This study demonstrates that, at the expense of accounting quality, club management seeks to promote the image of a financially robust organization in order to secure licensing and, consequently, much needed funding from UEFA. In this manner, the dominance of a management culture which impairs financial performance is further cemented.Implications: UEFA should take into consideration that, in a financially distressed industry focused on achieving success on the field of play, the imposition of regulatory monitoring tied to accounting data inevitably leads to a loss of organizational credibility and transparency. Hence, UEFA’s intervention should be accompanied by the imposition of a corporate governance framework which would aim to rearrange club management priorities by facilitating a change in institutionalized mentalities.