3.3.3. Sample selection
To conduct face-to-face interview is costly, so the sample had to
be quite narrow but representative. This confirmed the case study approach. To
have a representative sample, important and less important clubs had to be
studied as well as French and English ones. So the simplest sample was to
select two French clubs (one important and one less important) added to two
English representatives. According to the budget needed, the geographically
closest clubs (from the author's home) were favoured, what Saunders (2002)
calls a convenience sample. Another element has been taken in account was the
availability of the managers. Some managers were too busy to meet students.
Stoke City F.C. and Liverpool F.C. were chosen as English representatives. They
had the characteristics required. Mr Fuller, managing director of Stoke City
F.C., was available. Mr Weathley, financial director of Liverpool F.C., was
difficult to convince but accepted to give an interview. Paris S.G. was first
chosen for the French part of the sample, but the president and most of the
club's staff has been fired at the end of May 2002. Because of this event, R.C.
Lens
How stakeholders influence football clubs' strategy ? September
2003
was picked up with Amiens S.C. Mr Bigeard, marketing manager of
R.C. Lens and MrBuquet, president of Amiens S.C. welcomed this interview.A
sample of four clubs was the minimum to give a pertinent view of football
clubs'stakeholders' management and to compare French and English systems.
3.3.4. Interview preparation
These four interviews were realized in a short period: between
April and July 2003. It was very important to conduct them at the same time to
catch the managers' methods at this moment. As football is a changing sector,
this way of collecting data made them comparable. It was important to prepare
some questions to guide the interviewees to answer this research's problematic.
Only open questions were asked in order to lead managers to develop their
answers. It was also required to learn the right vocabulary because these
interviews have been done in two different languages: English and French.
Thanks to the analysis of secondary data, the interviewer had a solid knowledge
about the situation in each club studied. The clubs had to talk about the
twelve stakeholders' groups retained by Polonsky (1995). The first question was
to ask who were considered as the three groups with most interest in the club.
Then, for each chosen group, the managers had to explain how they can influence
their club's strategy and where their source of power came from. Concrete
examples of this influence were also asked to illustrate the research and to
confirm this power on clubs. A last question was how and how often the club
communicate with those chosen groups. After the three most important
stakeholders' groups were studied, the same questions were asked about the nine
other stakeholders' groups. As face-to-face interviews are time consuming, the
explanation about these nine groups could not be as developed as the three main
groups have been. Then, these data were typed and analysed.
3.4. Method for analysis
The data collected from the four interviews were analysed through
a reflection process. The basic theoretical framework came from Polonsky (1995)
and Archer's (1995) models which allowed the author to develop theories. Data
were used to answer the different objectives. An explanation approach has been
used to explain how football clubs managed their stakeholders. This approach is
linked to the case study method of analysis. To increase this study
reliability, primary data were compared to secondary data, to find chains of
evidence that justified what emerged from the interviews. The last step was to
compare the results between important and less important clubs from the same
county, then to compare similar clubs from different countries (France and
England). This method highlighted the differences between the clubs composing
the sample. This last step allowed the author to find some similar elements and
to evaluate if football management is converging or not between those two
countries.
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