The role and function of digital technologies in the sustainability perspective: Evidence from the football organizations in the Italian context

Abstract

This paper investigates the Italian football clubs adopting a double perspective: the point of view of sustainability and technology innovation. In the last decades, the increasing implementation and spread of digital technologies worldwide in any economic settings, including the sport industry, especially the football business, has been playing a crucial role in supporting managerial, work out and training processes and making them much more competitive and high performing. At the same time, sport organizations, including football clubs, must achieve the UN Agenda 2030 with its 17 SDGs trying to improve their performance in the sustainability perspective. This paper, through a multiple case study of the Italian football clubs in the Serie A for the year 2021/2022, provides a portrait of these sport organizations and their way to be sustainable and much more technologically advanced in one specific county, where football industry has high relevance for volume of affairs and impact on sustainability. Thus, we match the two perspectives especially considering the role and function of digital technologies in making football clubs much more sustainable. After a brief review of the literature on the topic, we investigate the Italian football clubs mapping them considering their degree of sustainability and technology orientation. Our qualitative research provides useful insights about specific technologies able to improve the overall performance of the sport organizations, as well as knowledge about best practices already adopted by organizations for being sustainable, creating a kind of guideline for operators in the football industry.