Henning Zülch, Moritz Palme, Benedikt Kirsch

• In recent times, the management of football clubs has evolved into a notably intricate task, owing to their transformation into football enterprises and the influx of a rising multitude of stakeholders within the industry. The ability among clubs to handle this increased complexity varies, making the quality of management a key factor in whether they can cope with this complexity and have an advantage or a disadvantage in competition. This new 2023 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 Maximization and Leadership & Governance, in order to perform a longitudinal and cross-sectional analysis of the German professional foot-ball clubs’ management quality. As attested by senior executives of prominent football clubs, these dimensions possess the capability to objectively measure pertinent success factors of a professional football club (CRUZ, SCHREGEL & Zülch, 2022). Ultimately, the performance across all dimensions, collectively termed as the FoMa Q-Score, serves as an objective measurement of a club's managerial excellence. Consequently, the FoMa Q-Score has gained firm traction as a well-established management tool both in academics and in practical application, partic-ularly accentuated by the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its robust scholarly valid-ity was underscored by the inclusion of this tool in the esteemed "Sports, Business and Man-agement" journal in 2020. From a practical standpoint, it is evident that football managers with a vested interest have already started leveraging our findings, which comprehensively encapsulate the COVID-19 impacts on financial and non-financial aspects, as showcased in this latest, seventh edition. This enables them to discern actionable insights for benchmarking their club's frameworks, aiming to regain ground or uphold their competitive positions.