Henning Zülch, Moritz Palme, Sébastien Jost, Benedikt Kirsch

• Managing a football club has become much more complex in recent years, as the clubs 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 2021 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 football clubs’ management quality. As confirmed by high-level football club executives, these dimensions are able to objectively quantify relevant success factors of a professional football club (ZÜLCH, CRUZ, & SCHREGEL, 2021). Ultimately, the performance in all dimensions, referred to as FoMa Q-Score, indicates a club’s management quality. Consequently, the FoMa Q-Score has become a wellestablished management tool with high practical relevance in recent years, even more so in light of the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Interested football managers can make use of our findings, which now also reflect the initial COVID-19 effects on financials (for months of Mar20 - Jun20) and non-financials (for the full season 2020/21) in this latest edition, and derive specific actions to benchmark their club’s setups in order to make up ground or defend their competitive positions.