CSR in Professional Football in Times of Crisis: New Ways in a Challenging New Normal

Many thanks to the authors for possibility to review this well-structured article. The article was smooth to read and fits into the current debate in practice and theory. However, there are a few points that stood out to me that I think will benefit the article.

Thank you.

The literature review describes very well the current discussion in the CSR literature. However, the article is mainly contextual. I think the literature analysis should deal more with football and the covid crisis. So far, both blocks of topics are underrepresented. The paper deals heavily with the realities of football (and covid), and these should be worked up more clearly in the literature review beforehand. I recommend the following literature for this:

Szymanski, S., & Weimar, D. (2019). Insolvencies in professional football: A German Sonderweg. International Journal of Sport Finance, 14(1), 54-68.

Hammerschmidt, J., Eggers, F., Kraus, S. et al. Entrepreneurial orientation in sports entrepreneurship - a mixed methods analysis of professional soccer clubs in the German-speaking countries. Int Entrep Manag J 16, 839–857 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-019-00594-5

or include coping stragies like sport entrepreneurship:

Hammerschmidt, J., Kraus, S., & Jones, P. (2022). Sport Entrepreneurship: Definition and Conceptualization. Journal of Small Business Strategy, 32(2), 1–10.

Thank you for these observations and for the helpful literature recommendations.

We have sought to strengthen the material on the nature of football clubs, including their objectives, financial performance, and related resource implications. This has been included in section 2 (p.3).

Section 2.2 (pp.4-5) on Strategy has been strengthened, with a new section linking the social nature of sport with sports entrepreneurship. There is also a sentence added in section 2.2.1.

Section 2.4 (p.7) has been developed to say a little more on the realities of covid for football, clubs, and CSR, specifically drawing on the work of Hammerschmidt et al. (2021) which was the first paper to consider the impact of Covid on football club CSR.

The methodology is described in detail in their part, but the significant literature on semi-structured interviews is lacking for the method used. I recommend the authors to compare influential recent articles that have chosen a similar methodology, such as:

Breier et al., 2021, The role of business model innovation in the hospitality industry during the COVID-19 crisis, International Journal of Hospitality Management, Volume 92, 02723, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2020.102723.

Additional detail has been provided on the use of semi-structured interviews, detailing the approach adopted to coding, the level at which this took place and data consolidation (pp. 10-11).

In addition, the qualitative data situation is weak. Only 4 interviews were conducted, which came from clubs of different sizes, but seem too few for valid and, above all, reliable results. The preceding content analysis enhances the methodology but is independent of the fact that the significance of the interviews is limited.

We acknowledge that the number of clubs and interviews is limited. However, in the revised paper (pp. 10-11, including new Table 1) we have articulated in more detail the purposive approach to club selection adopted, and explained why we believe the sample to be representative of the league as a whole and hence to provide significant findings, particularly when combined with the league-wide content analysis.

The discussion is detailed and responds well to the findings. Some practical contributions are outlined. However, I miss theoretical implications, as the study offers much potential for detailed analyses of CSR structures and their theoretical influence on the situations described. It also lacks reference to the existing literature. Also, the study has some implications for future work. The discussion is currently the weakest part of the paper.

Thank you for these helpful comments.

The discussion section has been amended, making greater reference to existing literature and providing greater analysis of our findings. We have explained our view that the foundation structures coupled with the institutional nature of Scottish football have implications for theory and practice and have helped create a context for the innovation and responsive management identified.

In addition, the quality of references should be revised. Some sources, such as BBC sources, or books, are appropriate for the flow of the article, and could be recognized as adequate in the context of soccer and its media reach in individual cases. In principle, however, these are neither current enough nor reliable enough to suffice for a high-quality, scientific article.

We believe that the paper is well grounded in the relevant academic literature, which has now been strengthened on the basis of the helpful suggestions above plus a number of additional references we have added in. There is a range of time periods identified in the papers identified in the bibliography, including many contemporary papers and several important older papers.

The BBC references primarily identify real time coverage of football business news (e.g. a club being placed into administration). We see no issue with their reliability nor currency in that context.

With the exception of the reference to the Saunders book on research methods (now removed), we believe that the small number of books identified are recognised as research monograph type books or handbooks reflecting contemporary academic work.

The paper reviews the evolution of CSR during the pandemic in Scotland. In particular, it uses the Scottish Premiership Football club’s charitable foundations to study corporate social responsibility. The topic is relevant, it is properly motivated, and the presentation is well organized. I also found very useful and complete the literature review and the description of the Scottish scenario.

Thank you.

My main comment relies on the methodology. The authors use a two-step approach. First, they rely on publicly available information to explore the foundations. Then, they interview representatives from a selection of sized-balanced clubs. Two issues arise from this approach.

First, although it is a case study, the pandemic was a worldwide event; thus, one wonders what the uniqueness of the Scottish case is. I am aware that the authors cannot review other cases, but they can check secondary literature on what was going elsewhere, England, for instance. They should also discuss what the Scottish specifics can imply in their findings. For example, these are clubs over 100 years old, and although the charities are much younger, the connection with the community in Scotland is probably, only paralleled in a few European countries.

Thank you for this comment.

We have sought to be more explicit about the importance of the institutional nature of Scottish football have for our findings (p. 16, p. 19).

In addition, we have placed the Scottish response in a wider context, by discussing in more detail the response by Austrian, German, Swedish, Swiss and Dutch clubs (in particular Hammerschmidt et al., 2021) (throughout the paper but p.7 in particular) and also English clubs (drawing on Plumley et al.’s (2022) recently published report).

Second, having such a strong connection with the community, the authors should interview beneficiaries from the club’s charities. I would understand that they focus on the clubs they have already interviewed. Still, they should interview at least two or three people per club, considering individuals that benefited from the charity before and after the pandemic, as we as those that benefited before, but had no connection afterward. This latter categorization may be open to interpretation, but I consider this a must to have a comprehensive view of the problem the authors are trying to explore.

We acknowledge that beneficiaries of the club foundation’s charities would add an extra dimension to the study and make it more comprehensive, a point we had noted in our limitations.

However, the focus of this study was on clubs’ responses to the pandemic in terms of their CSR activities.

Moreover, notwithstanding our comments (pp. 19-20), we have some doubts on the practicalities of engaging beneficiaries and indeed on the reliability of the data which could be collected given that it is likely we would be reliant on clubs identifying individual recipients for us. In addition, given the number of recipients and the diversity of ways in which different individuals engage with clubs’ CSR activities, interviewing only a small number of individuals might be considered partial.

Overall, the paper is valid; it has an interesting perspective of how Covid hit Scottish charities and how they reacted. But, first, it must convince the readers that the current findings are complete. For instance, how novel was the response during the pandemic when comparing what other similar institutions did. 

See comments above on the Scottish significance and the activities undertaken elsewhere.