Disclosure and performance on sports organization: an empiric study about football clubs

In Brazil several football clubs of centennial tradition cannot manage to accomplish their financial duties. It seems that an overall reform in Brazilian football's business model is urgently needed. When business models are reformed, governance formats must be altered correspondingly. This paper intends to illustrate that corporate transparency may be required from those new business models without clubs being deprived from neither efficiency nor effectiveness. With the help of financial statements data relating to a convenience sample of clubs, disclosure indicators are first defined and measured, and then correlated to some performance indicators. The null hypothesis of no correlation between disclosure and performance was tested via rank correlation. Findings indicate that the more disclosure a club chooses to provide, the better their performance, both in the national championship and in financial terms. It may be suggested that corporate transparency is compatible with modernization and with open governance models for football clubs.