Purpose In 2009, the Union of European Football Associations approved the Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations. These regulations refer to the requirements of transparency and financial conditions for football clubs participating in European competitions. The purpose of this paper is to combine the managerial and the economic points-of-view in order to understand if Italian football clubs are ready to comply with the new FFP rules. Design/methodology/approach In the analysis, the authors focus on the main Italian football league, Serie A. Using business model analysis, the authors determine what the main profit determinants of football associations are, through panel data for 15 clubs from 2011-2013. The authors then try to match the statistical and managerial approach. Findings The results show that the key contributing factors to profits are on the costs side. In particular, the most relevant expenses are player wages. The core revenue for clubs comes from the net profit from player trading, while other income, such as TV rights, commercial and match-day proceeds, have no statistical significance for profit formation. Research limitations/implications The main limitation of the analysis is that the survey regarded only on Italian Championship. So it is deeply influenced by the competitive structure of the Italian league that is different from that of other European leagues. Therefore, the authors think that the future developments of this work could be the examination of another European Championship, for example, English Premier League, and the compared analysis of Italian league and other European one. Practical implications There is a close-link between costs and profitability, and especially between expenditure on players and the ability to close the financial year with a profit. Clubs must address the issue of player wages in order to follow a path of economic recovery towards profitability. Originality/value In the work the authors put together managerial point of view and economical one, in order to understand how FFP can impact on profitability of football clubs. The authors use an empirical econometrics model to test the hypothesis about business model of Italian Clubs.

This paper looks at the causal impact of residential segregation on income among migrants in Brescia, a wealthy industrial city of about 200,000 inhabitants in North‐Eastern Italy, where almost one citizen out of five is born abroad. Using a new register‐like dataset including economic and demographic microdata from administrative sources, we geo‐localised each migrant household and created for each individual an “egohood” by imposing buffer circles with the same diameter (250 or 500 m) around his or her residential location. Within this spatial area of reference, we calculated indices of ethnic segregation and exposure to Italian natives, thus measuring the individual network of potential contacts with co‐ethnics and with Italians. Following social networks and social capital theories, we expected ethnic segregation to have a negative impact and exposure to natives to have a positive impact on income and tested our hypotheses with a set of ordinary least squares and two‐stage least squares with instrumental variables regression models. Results showed a robust and negative effect of ethnic segregation on income, whereas a small and positive effect of exposure to natives was not robust to endogeneity checks. We also found substantial heterogeneity among migrant groups defined by macroareas of origin: Exposure to Italians was found to have the expected impact only among migrants coming from Eastern Europe and from the Middle East and North Africa.

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