Playing for the Future: Sustainability, Governance and Long Term Value in Swedish and Italian Professional Football

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates the relationship between ownership governance structure and sustainability integration in European professional football, advancing the argument that the genuine driver of long term value creation in professional clubs is not the quality of ESG disclosure but the architecture of who decides, with what time horizon and with what accountability for the consequences of those decisions.The analysis is organised around an original theoretical framework, the SGV model, which positions ownership governance as the primary independent variable of sustainability integration, formalises ESG reporting as a partial mediating variable structurally capable of decoupling from operational decisions and identifies national institutional context as a systematic moderating variable. The model is articulated around three falsifiable propositions, tested empirically through a qualitative comparative analysis of four clubs, IFK Göteborg and Hammarby IF for Sweden; Juventus FC and AC Milan for Italy, selected according to the logic of a most different systems design. The empirical evidence combines documentary analysis of financial statements, sustainability reports and regulatory frameworks with primary interview data.The findings provide evidence consistent with all three propositions. Cooperative governance structures produce structurally guaranteed sustainability integration through the mechanism of community risk internalisation, demonstrated empirically by IFK Göteborg's 120-year financial continuity and the Allsvenskan's billion-SEK transfer record in 2024. Formalised ESG disclosure without decisional alignment produces organisational decoupling, documented through the coexistence of Juventus FC's formally advanced GRI reporting architecture and its €866 million in cumulative losses. National institutional context systematically moderates individual governance outcomes, evidenced by the structural contrast between Sweden's 51% rule systemic sustainability floor and Italy's high-variance, compliance-dependent landscape.The thesis contributes five original elements to the literature: the SGV model itself; the concept of the supporter-owner as an institutional sustainability device; the distinction between strategic and inertial decoupling; a first quantitative operationalisation of multidimensional long-term value in professional football; and primary empirical evidence triangulated across two independent interview sources from opposite ends of the governance spectrum.