Samenvatting

This paper is written with an aim of decreasing the constantly growing gap between the richest football clubs and the rest. During the past few years, this growing gap has been an ongoing process in the major European football leagues. This has also been the case in the Netherlands, where the clubs Ajax and PSV are completely dominating the league. On an international basis this has become an even bigger problem, as Dutch teams are no longer capable of competing with Spanish, English, German, French and Italian teams. The focus of this paper lies in the question: ´What changes can prominent football clubs implement in their business model in order to strengthen the competitiveness? ´.
The Football industry is a wide industry, with a vast amount of money involved. Nowadays many football clubs suffer from financial problems and are unable to survive. Indeed, it is very hard to create a healthy football industry. In the Netherlands a healthy football industry can be interpreted as 36 unassisted football clubs generating profit. There are several ways of generating money for a football club. The most important revenue streams are television money, ticket sales, and merchandising and sponsorships.
The most suitable business model, the Business Model Canvas, is chosen to serve as a tool in order to distinguish between revenue streams of different football clubs. The Business Model Canvas consists of nine building blocks that clearly outline the structure of a football club. A select amount of Eredivisie (The Dutch national League) clubs have been chosen to be implemented in this model, including two of the biggest teams (Ajax and Feyenoord), two average-sized ones (Ado Den Haag and FC Twente), and two smaller clubs (Excelsior and Willem II).
As for the internal and external analysis, several interviews were held. These interviews were held in order to improve the created business model and to find out to what extent this business model could be of use for a real football club. It turned out that the main revenue streams of the business model (sponsorship, television money and ticket sales + merchandising) should become equal, all about one third of the total. It was also revealed that the business model could become a very useful tool, provided that there is strong management and the money is invested wisely (i.e. into a youth academy). Another result that arose from these interviews was the implementation of the BENELIGA (Dutch and Belgium League combination). As a consequence of this league there would be more competition due to more participants, lower costs, a larger market, and more spots would become available in the Champions League (which would mean more available money). As a result differences in the business model would become smaller.