Henning Zülch, Moritz Palme, 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 in-dustry. The clubs’ capabilities to handle the increased complexity vary, turning management quality into a crucial competitive (dis-)advantage. This new 2022 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 Per-formance, Fan Welfare Maximization and Leadership & Governance, in order to perform a longitudinal and cross-sectional analysis of the German professional football clubs’ manage-ment 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 well-established management tool in science as well as in practice in recent years, even more so in light of the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. The high scientific quality has been confirmed by the publication of this tool in the internationally renowned sports science journal "Sports, Business and Management" in 2020. From the practitioners’ perspective it can be observed that interested football managers are already making use of our findings, which now also re-flect the COVID-19 effects on financials and non-financials in this latest, 6th edition, and derive specific actions to benchmark their club’s setups in order to make up ground or defend their competitive positions.