Exploring the collaboration between football clubs and their local community for corporate social responsibility activities.

The English football league system contains a multitude of over 140 individual leagues and 480 divisions. The growth of football continues to accelerate throughout recent times and the importance of football clubs to work alongside the community in which they’re based is becoming increasingly more important. In this sense, the football foundations are using collaborations with the local community to achieve their corporate social responsibility goals. This is a process that hasn’t been extensively researched in the context of football as a separate entity, so the question therefore remains as to how exactly to do football clubs create and maintain these collaborations?

The purpose of the research is to develop an understanding of how one club conducts its corporate social responsibility activities through the use of collaborations with the local community, paying close attention to three main areas:

1. To develop an understanding of the relationships currently in place between the football clubs and their local community.
2. To understand the motivations of the foundations with regards to collaborative process.
3. To discuss the limitations the foundations face which could impact the collaborative process.

After discussing the data collected for these objectives, a fourth objective will be discussed, with recommendations being made as to the future of collaborations between the football club and the local community:

4. To provide recommendations on how the collaborative process can be managed or controlled in the future to create greater synergies between the football clubs and the local community.