Financial cycles in modern football: the arrival of Chinese investments. How they behave and how they changed football.

Abstract

The present work wants to stress the importance behind the Chinese investments project, analyze its implications and speculate about what the future is leading to in one of the present’s biggest international markets, football. Football is a representation of a period of time. It is never the same, it has a past and will have a future, it is always the landmark of an evolution. Analyze its history means to gather/pull together society, cultural behaviors, economic implications and great men in a unique mix. Football has gone through a never-ending transformation since the dawn of its earliest stages up until nowadays, but the one thing that didn’t change was the fact that constantly lures thousands and thousands of people and day after day the generated turnover keeps growing bigger: ticket sales, merchandising, television rights and so on. It’s clear that football in the last decades became one of the biggest industries in the world. As an industry, it has its highs and lows but it’s beyond any doubt that a lot of investments in this field are reaching now a peak never even thought before, from football player quotations to raising ticket prices for football matches, everything is leading to an entire commercialization of football.