The Conscious Prediction Model of Crisis in Sports: Professional Football in Iran

Crisis is known as an extraordinary disorder in standard operations that threatens the safety and success of an organization. Before the crisis, there is an opportunity to prevent some serious damages by predicting and managing possible crises. The gap of conscious prediction of crises in professional football of Iran is clear. Therefore, the current study set to propose a model of conscious crisis prediction for professional football of Iran.

A qualitative study was conducted, selecting a constructivist approach of the Grounded Theory strategy. Exploratory-fundamental data were collected using targeted, snowball sampling technique based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 19 experts of sports management familiar with sports crisis.

Theoretical saturation of open codes is the beginning of centralized coding. Afterwards, the primary axes were identified, i.e. after transcribing about 197 sentences of the interviews and excluding duplicates, 121 primary concepts and categories were obtained in the initial coding, and then 31 centralized codes were obtained; finally, the main categories were presented in seven central codes.

The root of all possible crises likely to occur in Iran's professional football must be determined. Afterward, the pathology of crises should be indicated, taking into account that today's world is full of different uncertainties, abundant complexities, ambiguities, and uncontrollable fluctuations. Then, conscious prediction should be applied to design different scenarios associated with every crisis.