Identifying and Ranking Factors Affecting Obtaining Competitive Advantage in Iran Professional Football Clubs with RBV Approach

The aim of this study was to identify and rank those factors affecting obtaining competitive advantage in Iran professional football clubs. The present study was descriptive-correlation conducted by mixed method. The research population included all elites who were experts in football industry in both qualitative and quantitative method. Information saturation was used in the qualitative phase; information was saturated with 13 interviews. To this end, snowball sampling was used to select the sample. Then, purposive sampling method was used in quantitative phase containing 150 sport management professors and football experts. The data were collected in quantitative phase by a researcher-made questionnaire. 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 efficiency, innovation, customer responsiveness and quality (path coefficients: 0.470, 0.239, 0.202 and 0.198) were the most important factors of competitive advantage in football clubs. Football clubs should have proper planning to achieve competitive advantage through creating efficiency, quality, innovation and customer responsiveness and relying on organizational resources so that they can be influentially present in domestic and international arenas.