Dificuldades de gestão enfrentadas pelos clubes do futebol profissional brasileiro antes e depois da pandemia da COVID-19

Abstract

The present research is the result of a conclusion work for the Physical Education graduation course at the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia. Its purpose was to describe and analyze the main difficulties, problems and challenges of administrative, financial and marketing management faced by Brazilian professional soccer clubs throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, including the consequences arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, the techniques of documentary and bibliographical research were used (LAKATOS & MARCONI, 2010). The research made it possible to verify that the historical process of the constitution of Brazilian soccer was largely permeated by development policies related to the paradigms of amateur and professional practices. These paradigms are directly related to funding policies, both for teams and their athletes, and for the institutions that emerged with the purpose of regulating, managing and coordinating the competitions and their respective clubs. As can be observed throughout this introductory study, the history of Brazilian soccer is related to management problems and unsuccessful plans that implied, throughout the 20th century until today, millionaire and even billionaire indebtedness of the main clubs in the country, a situation that was aggravated during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic that occurred between 2020 and 2022. This situation forced the clubs to adapt administratively, due to the loss of revenue from ticket sales and the loss of sponsorships that included television broadcasting rights, although these measures did not prevent the clubs from continuing with financial debts, mainly related to labor issues in the courts of the country, thus corroborating the validity of the hypothesis raised for this study. At the time this study was finished, the main Brazilian clubs continued to have financial debts, seeking ways to minimize and overcome them by professionalizing their management through the sale of the teams to private investors or by transforming the clubs into profitable companies. Apparently these management formulas adopted in Brazil, and already practiced in other countries, were beginning to show some of their financial impacts by 2023. We hope that Brazilian soccer, as a commodity, will be able to minimize its financial and management problems, while seeking to preserve the characteristics and quality of the soccer that so enchanted and continues to enchant a large part of the Brazilian and world population.