For ‘love’ and money: a sports club’s innovative response to multiple logics

Abstract

This article builds on prior theory and research on institutional logics and shows how a multisports club changes during its organizational life from an all amateur or voluntary logic to embody multiple logics simultaneously with different subunits being aligned with different organizational fields. The emergence of the professional logic for elite soccer in the presence of a volunteer logic caused a change in the structure of the club whereby all the units in the club became economically and legally autonomous. Soccer was divisionalized into soccer for everybody and soccer for the elite. The creation of a shareholding company and the use of an investment company which introduced the commercial logic were the next steps. This paper extends the literature by suggesting that different and opposing institutional logics such as the amateur, the professional, and commercial logics can coexist within a multisports club or, to put it another way, that the multisports club may belong to several organizational fields.