Enhancing sustainability through collaborative value creation in the football ecosystem

This article empirically explores the potential for enhancing sustainability through football, leveraging the sport’s widespread popularity and influence. Football functions in a dynamic, multi-stakeholder context, and this inevitably entails a wide range of challenges and considerations for all the industry actors. Football clubs and related entities possess unique platforms that can be harnessed to address environmental, social and economic challenges while simultaneously driving long-term business success. To maintain sustainability, every stakeholder needs to develop the necessary strategies to identify, interrelate and ultimately balance the value exchanges involved in the pursuit of a viable future. Methodologically, this research initially conducts a thorough theoretical analysis of the football industry to identify the stakeholders and then empirically applies a qualitative approach, gathering data through 33 semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with key stakeholders within the football industry, to recognize the distinctive values that each industry actor holds through the individual synergies within the football ecosystem. The findings underscore the significant potential for football to serve as a catalyst for advancing organizational sustainability on multiple fronts, and future research directions are presented, as well as contributions to theory and practice.