3 - RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
3.1. Information required for the research
According to the objectives listed in part 2.5., the information
required was important to find which stakeholders were considered important to
the football clubs, what nature of power they had on the club, how did it
affect the clubs' strategy, how did the clubs manage those stakeholders and if
there were differences in managing stakeholders between important and less
important clubs, also between French and English ones. It is essential to
define an `important' football club. A football club is considered to be
important by analysts and journalists if it has finished the league ranked in
the five first teams for the past three (or four) years. So these teams are
supposed to have more employees than others and to be better organised. A less
important club was, for this study, a club which evolved in second division
(Division One in England) but did not access to the elite or regress to a lower
division for the last three or four years. This definition is relevant for both
French and English leagues. This research had to take in account studies about
football clubs' management made by universities (mostly from Liverpool and
Leicester ones), articles in the specialized magazines (France Football and
442), reports on the football market (Mintel and Emerald) and football clubs'
annual reports. This information gave an overview of the football business but
nothing concrete on the stakeholders' management. The most important resources
came from French and English football clubs themselves, so primary data had to
come from interviews conducted with football clubs' managers. Then, Archer's
model (1995) and Polonski's one (1995) were applied and adapted to the football
sector, thanks to the data collected.
3.2. Research approach
3.2.1. Inductive or deductive approach?
According to Saunders (2002), the deductive approach needs a high
quantity of quantitative data for the researcher to be able to generalise its
results. So with this approach based on scientific principles, an important
sample has to be used. This is the main reason
How stakeholders influence football clubs' strategy ? September
2003
why this approach was not used during this research. In fact,
England has about ninety-six professional football clubs and in France only
thirty-six exist. Taking in account that the average response rate for a
questionnaire is rarely over ten percent, this research would have been based
on eleven answers maximum. Everyone agree that this is not enough for an
efficient research using the deductive approach. The inductive approach seemed
more adapted to this study. Still according to Saunders (2002), this type of
approach is based on qualitative data and a close understanding of the research
context. The need to generalise the results is not compulsory. Concerning
football clubs, it is difficult to understand the context and to answer the
research question only with questionnaires. It is a complex and permanently
changing sector where each club is managed its way and evolutes in a different
environment. So, an inductive approach using qualitative data seemed the only
way to understand football clubs'stakeholders' influence.
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