The Ultimate CRM Buyers Guide for Football Clubs
Reading time:
12 mins
Why do some clubs grow fast but burn trust, while others grow slowly and survive crises?
Prof. Dr. Henning Zülch is one of the leading academic voices on football governance, ownership models, and the economics of legitimacy. His work cuts through the usual fan vs. investor narratives and focuses on the structural risks clubs build into their organisations over time.
In this interview, he explains why very different governance models can all be commercially viable, how fan participation functions as an economic stabiliser rather than a romantic ideal, and why the tension between capital and culture isn’t something clubs can resolve but only design for.
Our findings show that commercial viability in professional football is compatible with very different governance models. Clubs across Europe and beyond—from member-led associations to fully investor-driven entities—can create economic value. The decisive trade-off therefore does not lie between success and failure, but between economic flexibility and organizational legitimacy.
High levels of fan participation structurally embed legitimacy, cultural authenticity, and internal accountability. This strengthens long-term stability and trust, but often constrains managerial speed and strategic optionality, particularly when clubs pursue controversial commercial initiatives. Investor-oriented models, by contrast, benefit from faster decision-making, easier access to capital, and greater strategic agility, yet frequently operate with thinner legitimacy buffers and higher exposure to reputational and stakeholder risk.
Over time, these trade-offs accumulate. Flexible models may scale more rapidly but tend to be more volatile, while legitimacy-driven models grow more incrementally yet display greater resilience across sporting and economic cycles. Internationally, clubs are therefore not choosing between growth and legitimacy—they are choosing which form of risk they are structurally willing to bear.
One frequently overlooked mechanism is the institutionalization of constraint. Where fan participation is embedded in ownership rights, voting mechanisms, or credible collective action, it directly shapes which strategic options are feasible. Certain revenue models, ownership changes, or partnerships become structurally unavailable—not because they are unprofitable, but because they conflict with legitimacy thresholds. This channels value creation into more path-dependent, brand-consistent strategies and fundamentally alters a club’s investment profile and risk perception.
A second mechanism lies in demand-side stabilization. Fan inclusion strengthens identification, loyalty, and trust, which stabilizes revenues such as attendance, merchandising, and sponsorship—especially during periods of sporting underperformance. Clubs that systematically exclude fans often compensate through higher reliance on external capital or global market expansion, increasing exposure to macroeconomic volatility and performance shocks.
In this sense, fan participation is not symbolic. It operates as a structural determinant of whether clubs pursue organic, legitimacy-based growth or capital-intensive, higher-risk expansion models.
Our evidence suggests that a meaningful middle ground does exist, but it is neither automatic nor stable. Hybrid governance models demonstrate that fan participation and investor involvement are not mutually exclusive; however, they function less as equilibria and more as managed asymmetries.
Successful clubs do not attempt to fully align fan and investor interests. Instead, they differentiate roles: fans provide legitimacy, identity, and social anchoring, while investors contribute capital, expertise, and strategic reach. Where this translation works, fan legitimacy reduces long-term governance and reputational risk, creating a more predictable environment for capital deployment.
That said, such arrangements remain inherently fragile. They depend on transparency, procedural fairness, and continuous dialogue. Clubs are therefore not escaping tension—they are institutionalizing it. In global football governance, sustainability is less about eliminating conflict and more about designing structures that allow capital and culture to coexist without undermining each other.
This interview resonated with me on two levels.
Professionally, because I’ve spent years working with finance, investment logic, and risk models. Personally, because I’m a football fan who deeply values fan culture, identity, and what clubs mean beyond balance sheets.
What Prof. Dr. Henning Zülch articulates so clearly is that this isn’t a moral debate. It’s a risk allocation problem.
Clubs are not choosing between being “romantic” or “commercial.”
They are choosing which type of volatility they are structurally willing to accept.
Investor-driven models optimise for speed, capital access, and strategic optionality. The trade-off is exposure: reputational risk, stakeholder backlash, and higher sensitivity to sporting or macroeconomic shocks.
Fan-inclusive models, on the other hand, institutionalise constraint. They move slower, but they embed legitimacy, trust, and internal accountability. Over time, this produces resilience rather than acceleration.
The part that resonated most strongly with my own work is the idea of demand-side stabilisation.
Fan inclusion is often framed as symbolic or ideological. In reality, it is economically functional. Identification, loyalty, and trust stabilise revenues from attendance, merchandising, and sponsorship, especially when sporting performance drops. Clubs that systematically exclude fans tend to compensate elsewhere: external capital injections, aggressive global expansion, or financial engineering. That doesn’t remove risk. It shifts it by often amplifying volatility.
This aligns directly with how I think about CRM and marketing automation in football.
For me, fan inclusion is not in tension with commercial success. It’s one of its most underused assets.
Well-designed CRM systems don’t extract value from fans. They reduce uncertainty by understanding behaviour, needs, and context better. They help clubs listen at scale. They make loyalty visible, measurable, and actionable. In that sense, CRM becomes a risk-reduction mechanism, not just a revenue tool.
If you genuinely understand your fan base, you don’t need to chase short-term spikes as aggressively. You can plan. You can absorb downturns. You can build predictable demand rather than volatile dependence.
That’s why I strongly agree with the idea that successful clubs don’t try to fully align fan and investor interests. They differentiate roles. Fans provide legitimacy, identity, and social anchoring. Investors provide capital, expertise, and reach. The mistake is trying to collapse these into one logic.
Sustainability in football doesn’t come from eliminating tension. It comes from designing systems, being it governance, CRM, communication, that allow capital and culture to coexist without eroding each other.
Seen that way, fan inclusion isn’t a brake on growth but clearly a stabiliser in an otherwise highly volatile industry.
