iNM Magazine Volume 7 | August 2015
Music and Sports
IT'S NOT JUST A GAME…
Anukriti Srivastava
First year, PGDM
NMIMS, Hyderabad
“Not a Game but Religion”, says every football fan around the globe.
What makes this game so special that football fans all around
the world are going loco over it? Is it the adrenaline that
attracts them or like any religion they just blindly follow it and
eventually fall in love with it? ese are the things I used to
wonder before I started watching it myself. Sitting with friends
in a bar, seeing them go crazy about Messi's dribbling skills and
Ronaldo's headers, Mourinho's tactics and Guardiola's genius.
All I could think about was, how a game could create such
hysteria that people get so engrossed in it.
playing staff (players and support staff). But this is not
the end.
Football management is a massive business industry. It
doesn't limit its scope to management of players and the
club but also focuses on how to nurture talent, mushroom
the support staff and inculcate leadership qualities in
players. In United Kingdom, you can take a university
honours degree which is a combined course of football and
management. e corporate sector is in on the game;
management consultancies, lawyers and accounting firms
are increasingly creating their own football clubs..
It was later that I realised it wasn't just the game which gets
people mesmerized but the whole package that comes with it.
Players are bought, sold and loaned to different clubs,
managers come, go and are also sacked sometimes for their
team's poor performance, the madness transfer window cause,
the furore supporters create when their favoured player doesn't
join their favourite club, the elation we see amongst the fans all
around the globe when their team wins, the atmosphere in the
stadium, the team anthems which fill the stadium with
exuberance. Everything is a part of that sweet frenzy which this
game creates in the hearts of the followers. But behind all this
glamour is a tedious process of buying, selling, merchandising
and managing all major club operations.
Unlike any other business entity, a football club is very different.
Here, the stakeholders are the fans following the club.