THE VALUE OF BRAND IN THE FOOTBALL INDUSTRY

During its existence, the football game has suffered a tremendous transformation. Football has become very much a huge business as an increasing number of football clubs are listedon stock exchanges worldwide and are generating great revenues. Given the global expansion of football and its increasing commercialisation football clubs around the world are facing numerous challenges in a complex and dynamic environment. Enormous amounts of money have been directed into football from different stakeholders such as media corporations, shareholders, or big companies from manufacturing and servicesindustries. This is why a strongbrand is often the most valuable asset of a football club. The goals of our paper are to addressthe concept of brand and to illustrate its application in the case of the football industry. To such ends, the authors used a quantitative research method. The paper demonstrated that the concepts of brand and brand value constitute an important topic both in the football industryand in the literature. Also, it showed that there are several important football clubs located in Europe that have dominated the industry in the period 2018-2020. It is interesting that the first ten football clubs by brand value were the same in this period. All of them are from the major European championships such as Premier League, LaLiga, Ligue 1 or Bundesliga. Real Madrid has remained the world’s most valuable football brand, followed by FC Barcelona in 2020 and Manchester United in 2019. However, the English football clubs have dominated the rankings with six brands in top ten.