No abstract

Theoretically, professional coaches should improve team performance through a sustained, progressive, and structured training and competitive program. Nevertheless, the reality poses different expectations around football activities in Brazil, where coaching spells have lasted on average 65 days during the domestic league season. Adopting the conceptual foundation designed by the International Sport Coaching Framework (ISCF), this research aims to examine the competences perceived to be important for professional football coaches and compare them to the ISCF. This study asks the following research question: what coaching competences are expected and valued in Brazilian football, and how do they compare to the ISCF? Qualitative, semistructured interviews were conducted with 29 head coaches and 30 staff members. A directed content analysis yielded similarities around the ISCF’s functional competences, while also outlining one additional category: deliver short-term winning results. The findings reveal a set of subcategories that support the contextual idiosyncrasies of high-performance football in Brazil. Within their domestic territory, elite coaches must navigate across a puzzle of nonfootball demands to adapt to their social and political reality which apparently ranks short-term game results above the essence of sport coaching practice.

A superficial attitude in football insists on blaming head coaches when games are lost. Controversially, however, whereas decision-makers in professional football clubs claim to seek successful outcomes on the pitch, they often favor questionable judgements that affect their organizational sustainability by recycling coaches without substantial analyses. Albeit scholars have stressed potential causes and consequences of coaching turnovers, specific knowledge is needed around the recruitment and dismissal steps faced by professional coaches, and to what extent their experiences mirror the theoretical background of human resource management in sport. This study poses the following research question: how do football clubs actually handle coaching recruitment and dismissal processes? Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 elite coaches from Brazil, who had collectively been employed by all 43 clubs that participated in the Brasileirão from 2003 to 2020. Based on a deductive-inductive approach, the content analysis framed two categories (recruitment and dismissal stages) with three main themes (methods, decision-makers, and decision-making), which were sustained by specific subthemes. The results suggest how the recruitment, assessment, and replacement of head coaches neglect both a strategic and a sustainable rationale towards human resource management in Brazil’s elite football.

This study investigates the relationship between state politics and sport governance based on an institutional framework and the concept of spillover effects. Specifically, it examines whether spillover effects occur from state parliament and government composition to board gender diversity within sport governing bodies. Organizational-level data from German national and state sport governing bodies were collected (n = 930). They were combined with state-level data on the government composition by gender and political party (parliament, ministers) based on the location of each sport governing body’s headquarter. The results show that on average 20.1% of board members in sport governing bodies are women. Regression analyses indicate that the share of parliamentarians from the Social Democrats and the Green party is positively associated with the share of women in sport governance, while the share of Liberals in the parliament is negatively related. The share of women parliamentarians from the Social party and the share of women Conservative ministers are negatively related to women in sport governance. The findings indicate that women representation in sport governance is linked to state politics, suggesting that spillover effects occur from an organizations’ political environment.

Gender equality in leadership positions is important for sport organizations to achieve economic and social sustainability. Based on a multi-level framework, this study examines spillover effects from economic and social state-level factors in sport organizations’ environment on critical masses of women on their boards (in terms of share and numbers) and board gender diversity (reflected by different types of boards). Data of national and regional sport governing bodies in Germany were collected (n = 930), with variables capturing organizational characteristics (e.g., board composition) and economic and social factors at the state level. The results of regression analyses show that women’s attainment in tertiary education increases the likelihood of a critical mass of at least 30% women on the board, and a higher divorce rate increases the likelihood of a critical mass of three women on the board. Sport organizations in states with a higher gender wage gap are more likely to have balanced boards, indicating that volunteering might be a substitute to paid work. The findings suggest that the presence of women in sport leadership is affected by economic and social conditions in the organizations’ geographical surroundings and that spillover effects occur from the state level to the organizational level.