THE RELATION BETWEEN FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE AND SPORTING SUCCESS IN FOOTBALL : before and after the introduction of the UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulation

In 2011 UEFA, the governing body in European football, introduced the UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulation in order to rationalize and discipline the finances and to protect the sustainability and long-term viability of European football clubs. This research studies how the relation between financial performance and sporting success in the top-five European club football leagues has evolved from the time before to the time after the introduction of the regulation. The purpose of this study is to contribute to accounting research in two ways. Firstly, to provide understanding of the financial implications of the regulation by complementing outdated and insufficient research. Secondly, to determine whether sporting performance could be used as a tool for evaluating and estimating financial performance of football clubs. A quantitative empirical research has been conducted to determine whether statistically significant correlations exist between financial performance and sporting success. The data has been gathered between the 2008/2009 and 2018/2019 seasons, where sporting success has been defined as league position in the domestic league and financial performance has been defined as operating profit. The results show that it can be stated with statistical significance that the average profits have grown in general since the introduction of the regulation. More interestingly, a positive correlation was also found between the financial performance and both the league position of the current year and that of the previous year for the time period after the introduction of FFPR