Nowadays the world of football has become more commercial than before. As a result of this the clubs' financial status is getting more and more important. Therefore the UEFA has given the national federations a specific task to make sure that the clubs from each country follow certain standards of maintaining the football credibility. The Swedish federation has decided that the Swedish clubs must follow the so-called “elitlicensen”.
The purpose of this essay is to investigate what type of organizational control mechanism developed by Ouchi (1980) the Swedish clubs prefer. The different mechanisms are: bureaucracy, clan and market. Bureaucracies are characterised by rules that state what one is allowed to do and what consequences it will have if one does not follow them. Markets rely on competition to neutralize opportunistic actions. Individuals that want the same thing and therefore have made common standards that they follow build a clan.
To come up with a conclusion to our statement we have used metaphorical thinking. We think of Football Europe as a concern. The UEFA is the parent company, the national federations are subsidiary companies to UEFA and the clubs are in their turn subsidiary companies to the nationell federation.
We have interviewed one representative from each club by phone and let them answer seven different questions. We wanted them to decide which of the organizational control mechanisms they preferred in each question.
For each mechanism we had an alternative.
We found that the clubs do not prefer the same mechanism in all the seven questions. The answers varied depending on which type of transaction the question concerned. However, there were a majority of bureaucratic answers and the clubs wanted rules that control their and other clubs' actions. They did like the existing system, elitlicensen, however preferably they wanted to add some criteria, such as for example prognoses.
The dissertation is written in Swedish.