Economic Models of French Amateur Soccer Clubs. From One Crisis to the Other: Which Transformation?

Abstract This article presents economic models at work in French amateur soccer clubs playing National 1 and National 2 tiers. Teams’ sporting performance and clubs’ financial results as well as their revenue and expenditure statistical distribution are analysed by means of Principal Component Analysis. Then a k-means methodology is implemented in view to defining archetypical clusters that characterise French amateur soccer clubs during the 2008-2020 period. The latter span of time opens a window of opportunity for understanding transformations in club economic models since the subprime crisis and up to current global economic recession triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Following the club taxonomy, a comparative static analysis shows that more amateur soccer clubs are in more satisficing financial shape at the dawn of the sanitary crisis than when they have been facing the subprime crisis. The so-called “virtuous modesty” cluster includes a greater number of clubs in 2019/20 than in 2008/09.