Henning Zülch, Moritz Palme, Sébastien Jost

• Managing a football club has become much more complex in recent years as they have turned into football companies and a growing number of stakeholders have entered the industry. The clubs’ capabilities to handle the increased complexity vary, turning management quality into a crucial competitive (dis-)advantage. This new edition of the FoMa Q-Score ranking builds on the framework established by ZÜLCH & PALME, 2017, which comprehensively assesses management quality along four dimensions, namely Sporting Success, Financial Performance, Fan Welfare Max-imization and Leadership & Governance, in order to perform a longitudinal and cross-sec-tional analysis of the German professional football clubs’ management quality. In fact, filled with meas-urable key performance indicators (KPIs), these dimensions intend to objectively quantify the rel-evant success factors. Ultimately, the performance in all dimensions, referred to as FoMa Q-Score, indicates a club’s management quality. Football managers concerned can make use of our findings and derive specific actions to benchmark their club’s setups in order to make up ground or defend their competitive positions.