Correlation between football clubs’ sports performance and their income levels

The first objective of this work is to examine whether there exists a correlation between football clubs' results in European top competitions and the clubs’ income levels. The second objective of this work is to determine the correlation between football clubs’ results in top European competitions and the clubs’ transfer expenditures. If a correlation is found between clubs’ results and its transfer spending, and income levels, the strength of this relationship between the variables is further examined. Both objectives also aim to determine which clubs were successful and which were not when considering the ratio of results in European competitions, level of club’s income, and its transfer expenditure. The relationships between incomes, transfer expenditures, and sports results in European competitions are examined using data and statistics from the past ten football seasons. The data subjects for this analysis are clubs from the Europe’s big five football leagues – English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A, German Bundesliga, and French Ligue 1. Sports performance is examined in terms of the clubs’ results in European top competitions, which are represented by the UEFA coefficient. The concepts described in the theoretical part of the thesis are drawn from reliable Czech and foreign sources. All data used in the analysis are accessible from publicly available sources. This data predominantly comes from official websites of football bodies or associations and the documents issued by them. The compiled data are then analyzed and used to perform the correlation and regression analysis in order to determine the correlation between the UEFA coefficient and the income levels. This method is also used for the second above-mentioned objective of the work, where it examines the transfer expenditure and the UEFA coefficient. Once all analyses are performed, relevant findings and conclusions are summarized.