The applicability of the high performance organizations framework in Dutch soccer clubs

Soccer is the most popular sport worldwide with most participants, television exposure and viewers, and thus it has the biggest business value and impact of all sports. In view of this importance, it would be natural to assume that much research has been performed in the area of excellence of soccer clubs, both on the soccer field and in the management organization of soccer clubs. This assumption is not correct as most research into the soccer industry focuses on success factors on the sports field. In this article, the recently developed high performance organizations (HPO) framework is applied at the soccer industry to evaluate whether it can be used to identify the success factors of soccer clubs. The HPO Framework was used as this framework had been proven to be valid in many different industries and could therefore be expected to be applicable for the soccer industry. Interviews were held with experts from the soccer industry discussing aspects of high performance in relation to soccer clubs. From the interviews it became clear that the experts acknowledged that the five factors of the HPO framework are of importance to soccer clubs and can therefore be applied to safeguard the continuity of these clubs. ‘Continuity’ is used instead of ‘improvement’ because it became evident that the focus of high performing soccer clubs is on continuity, i.e. surviving both financially and on the soccer field. The HPO framework can be used to foster this continuity by soccer clubs dedicatedly working on improving the five HPO factors.