A Theoretical Analysis of the Influence of Money Injections on Risk Taking in Football Clubs

Third party money injections of benefactors (sugar daddies) function as a bailout mechanism for otherwise insolvent football clubs. The successful implementation of the new UEFA "financial fair play" regulations will abrogate this bailout mechanism. We develop a theoretical model of a representative club and a sugar daddy to study the adverse incentive effects produced by the money injections of sugar daddies. We show that the existence of a sugar daddy induces the club to choose a riskier investment strategy and the more the sugar daddy commits to bailout the club, the more the clubs' optimal level of riskiness increases. Moreover, a private sugar daddy bails out the club less often than a public sugar daddy. Our model further shows that a "too-big-to-fail" phenomenon exists because it is optimal to always bailout a club if its market size is sufficiently large. Finally, we derive conditions under which the FFP and the pre-FFP regulations, respectively, are desirable from a welfare perspective.