"The origins of Professional Association Football in Spain"

To be presented in Spanish
The main beneficiaries of the accelerated globalization of football have been mainly the professional players and, especially, the big stars. This is not the case for the football clubs, which have many problems to convert the great availability to consume football into income and, above all, into profit (Gillett and Tennent, 2017). One of the reasons is the characteristics of a public good which define football, leading to the emergence of the problem of “appropriability” (Buchanan, 1965; Demsetz, 1970; Coase, 1988). Another lies in what has become known as the “economics of superstars” (Rosen, 1981), since extremely talented football players have a disproportionate bargaining power. This happens because owners of professional clubs tend to prioritise sporting success over profit (Sloane, 1971). As football has become liberalized, the capacity to attract the great figures from this sport is what has created the distinction between the clubs that have become global and those which have remained as local, the competitive capacities of which have declined significantly. The aim of the proposal is to study the establishment of a professional football league in Spain in the 1920s and how the involved football clubs evolved their management and organizational structures to deal with the professionalization of football players. The main objectives of this session are twofold: Firstly, to examine the history of sport (often looked at from a sociological or cultural perspective) through the business history lens, thus contributing to a developing stream of research including Dizin et al (2004), Walters and Hamil (2013), Gillett and Tennent (2017) and Fernández-de-Sevilla (2021). Secondly, following Gillett and Tennent (2020) to broaden the realm of business and management history by providing opportunities to look at themes such as project industries, or the role of not-for-profit organisations in business.