Goodwill, negative margins and results: some evidence from the professional football industry

Companies continuously produce an economic and a meta-economic performance, i.e. the company’s ability to achieve social and environmental objectives, competitiveness, and so on. When examining deals that occur in some industries, the meta-economic impact seems to be particulary important, and it sometimes leads to enterprise values which diverge substantially from the value of capital that is implicit in the economic fundamentals.Our paper examines a number of recent deals in the football industry in Europe, and it suggests that: a) the meta-economic performance is significantly high in the football industry, where positive enterprise values co-exist with poor or feeble financial and economic results of the company acquired; b) turnover can be used as a preliminary proxy, in the above mentioned industry, for highlighting the meta-economic performance