Professional football clubs and empirical evidence from the COVID-19 crisis: Time for sport entrepreneurship?

•Highlights the role of crisis and financial management on clubs’ strategic behaviour within the professional football sector.•Demonstrates how variations of stakeholder management impacts financial stability.•Emphasizes sport entrepreneurship and innovative behaviour as successful approaches to overperform competitors during recessions.•Shows clear and significant differences in entrepreneurial behaviour in times of crisis.•For policy makers: perceives professional football clubs as businesses that contribute significantly to the economy.•For associations: Integrate a minimum of liquidity into license agreement to improve the overall financial health and stability of football. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has spread worldwide in a short period and has developed into one of the biggest public health issues of the last decade. The actions initiated by governments to minimize person-to-person contact have also severely affected professional football clubs (PFCs) in the season 2019/20. Given the role of football in Europe, football clubs gained massive public and political attention during the COVID-19 crisis. Based on an exploratory multiple case study approach involving PFCs from five European football leagues, this study investigates the responses of these clubs to the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings show the relevance of solidarity with certain stakeholders during the pandemic, but also reveal the fragility of PFCs due to their financial structure and underdeveloped managerial and entrepreneurial strategies to cope with the crisis. This study contributes theoretically and empirically to the literature on the entrepreneurial behavior and crisis management of elite sport organizations and illustrates a holistic map of a dense, high solidary stakeholder network.