Intellectual capital efficiency: the case of football clubs

The constant increase in the importance and popularity of sports has created an industry of a scale of billion dollars. Lately, sports clubs have extended their views by opening sports schools, facilities, stadiums, merchandise stores and even restaurants in addition to their core activities in the area. This expansion makes for the need of a professional management for sports clubs, as they can immediately be considered commercial whereas, the structure of the value added factors is rather different than that of traditional enterprises. Given that, the principal elements of the sports are the human power as executives, players, and technical committee and traditional accounting methods are very inefficient to evaluate these valuable factors. Accordingly, the intellectual capital is far more important than financial capital in the case of the sports industry. The Value Added Intellectual Coefficient (VAICTM) method that quantifies and monitors the value creation efficiency in the company by using accounting-based figures is recognized as a potent instrument to assess the intellectual capital efficiency. This work points to explore the intellectual capital performance calculated by the VAICTM method for the sports clubs along the Istanbul Stock Exchange Market in Turkey namely; Fenerbahce, Galatasaray, Besiktas, and Trabzonspor. Additionally, the impact of VAICTM on firms' leverage ratio, size, market value, profitability, and efficiency is investigated. To determine the effect of independent variables for the explanation of each performance indicator, six different multiple regression models are generated for twelve different hypotheses. Accordingly, it is found that, there are statistically significant relations between the size of the enterprise, market value and ROA; efficiency, VAICTM, and firm leverage. Finally the ordering with respect to the intellectual capital efficiency of the sports clubs is gathered. By this study it is aimed to create a map that shows the effects of the sports clubs' qualifications on the intellectual capital efficiency, on the purpose of generating suggestions that ensure development on the clubs' performance. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.