Explanatory Model of the Effects of Organizational Resources and Competitive Advantage on the Profitability in Iranian Professional Football Clubs

The purpose of present research was to investigate organizational resources and competitive advantage on the profitability in Iranian professional football clubs. The present research was descriptive-correlative done with mixed method. The research population included all of the football industry informant elite in both qualitative and quantitative method. Information saturation was used in the qualitative phase that information was saturated with 14 interviews. To this end, stratified purposeful sampling was used. Then, purposeful sampling was used for quantitative phase containing 100 football experts and university professors in sport management. The instrument used to collect data in quantitative phase was a structured questionnaire that its content validity was approved by eight sport management professors. Also, Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability were used to determine the reliability of variables that it was found that the data had good reliability. Content analysis was used to analyze the interviews with experts and structural equation model using Smart PLS was applied to evaluate the model. The results showed that in the format of research model, the organizational resources and competitive advantage had significant influence on the profitability of professional football clubs. Therefore, it can be inferred that the organizational resources and competitive advantage can greatly improve the profitability of professional football clubs in Iran. So, it is recommended that Iranian football clubs develop the status of the organizational resources and competitive advantage to reach profitability.