Identifying Marketing and Earning Capabilities of Human Resources in Iran’s Football Professional League Clubs and Designing Model

Through the qualitative research that uses the grounded theory and the Glaser approach (1992), this work identifies the marketing capabilities of the human resources in the Iran’s Football clubs. Analysis of the data collected from 15 interviews shows that the human resource marketing capabilities consist of the managers, players and coaches, staff and logistics, celebrities and pioneers, and club leaders marketing capabilities. Thus, by utilizing these capabilities, the clubs can improve their marketing and revenue conditions.

Undoubtedly, manpower is the most important factor in the production, and plays a key role in providing services and can be said to be the most important asset of an organization. On the other hand, all the ways of earning money in organizations in general, and football clubs in particular, go beyond the context of the marketing activities that are the responsibility of the human resources. Therefore, the research works on the human resource capabilities such as the marketing capabilities is very important. Much research work has been done on the importance of manpower in the financial and marketing performance such as Odumeru and Hesanmi (2013), Baker et al. (2016), and Vorhies et al. (2009). Thus, the aim of this work was to identify the marketing and earning capabilities of the human resources in the Iran’s Football Premier League clubs and designing a model.

This was a qualitative research that used the grounded theory and the Glaser approach (1992). The population included all the club managers and sport management faculty members who were selected by the theoretical and snowball sampling. In order to collect the data, interviews by open-ended questions were used.

The data collected from 15 interviews was coded and analyzed by the grounded theory. In total, from the analysis of the interview data and the background of the research, 426 open codes were obtained. After extracting the same codes, 134 distinct codes were obtained, and in the axial coding step, 21 codes were obtained. In the next step, the axial codes were categorized into five groups of selected codes from human resource marketing capability consisting of the manager marketing capabilities, player and coach marketing capabilities, staff and logistics marketing capabilities, celebrities and pioneers marketing capabilities, and club leader marketing capabilities. The final model based on the connections between these five groups of the human resource marketing capabilities was designed in a circle in which the manager marketing capabilities were placed at the center and the other capabilities in the circle environment. The proposed model can be used as a tool in order to identify the human resource marketing capabilities in the soccer clubs; and by utilizing these capabilities, it helped marketing and earning. On the other hand, by planning and organizing these capabilities and developing them in a logical and principled way, it helped the financial independence of the clubs and solved the problems in this field