The change of an individual holding team leadership responsibilities is a frequent and disruptive event in organizations. Such changes might influence the behavior of both the newly appointed leader and the team. In soccer, there is a common expectation that a team`s captain as a formal-transformational leader positively affects sporting performance. Despite this wide believe there is limited empirical prove. We investigate the effects of exogeneous changes of a captain on the individual and the team’s effort and performance as well as outside observers' evaluations. To test our hypotheses, we utilized individual soccer player data (N = 766) from 2,448 Bundesliga games during eight seasons (N = 48,263 player-game observations) and changes in leadership. Yet, we found that neither the newly appointed team captain nor the team itself showed higher objective effort or performance after the succession event. Nevertheless, experts rated the newly appointed team leader as demonstrating superior performance.

When a football team is experiencing a sporting downturn, there are limited short-term options available from the club's management perspective. Building a better-performing squad in the short run is not feasible. Another potential adjustment is to change the team’s head coach. This analogy can be transferred to leaders managing any organization. We focus on the question of which characteristics are attributed to a successful long-term leader. The paper investigates the impact of team performance and individual characteristics of the coach on the coach’s tenure. For this purpose, we use various data from the top five European leagues (first and second division) from the 2012/13 to the 2022/23 season. In order to adequately analyze this impact, we use elaborate competing risk models to identify the effect of cultural differences on various reasons of coach dismissals. The data is gathered at the matchday level and thus obtained a dataset covering 43,985 matchdays. To our knowledge, we are the first to simultaneously examine these effects across ten different European leagues over a decade. Just like the modern cooperation, most football teams consist of employees (players and head coaches) of different cultures producing language barriers which can particularly lead to communication and transaction costs. The unique dataset allows us to include these cultural and linguistic effects that could impact team performance, coach's performance, and ultimately, the coach's tenure.

The relevance and justification of player agencies in professional football is a frequently discussed topic beyond the context of sports science. Player agents are often perceived as cold-blooded, opportunistic figures seeking to enrich themselves from the talent and earnings of the players they manage and as challenging negotiating parties for clubs. In order to counter this anecdotal with empirical evidence and shedding light on the shadowy world of football agents, we are the first to investigate the perspective of player agents. Within the framework of a three-part survey, questions on demographic characteristics, perceptions of an ideal agent and on various performance variables were asked. With more than 450 responses, and given the fact that there are currently only around 10,000 registered player agencies worldwide, our sample is representative and allows to draw conclusions about an industry that has rarely been examined to date.

The new German Financial Literacy Initiative highlights the need to explore various institutional pathways for enhancing financial knowledge. While the school environment has frequently been the focus of research, the contribution of universities to the national financial literacy strategy should also be taken into consideration. To address this research gap, this study conducts an online survey among business administration students at a public university in Germany (N = 253) analyzing the impact of socio-demographic characteristics and educational backgrounds on students’ financial knowledge. The findings reveal a significant positive impact of previously completed academic business management courses, whereas attendance in relevant high school subjects shows no significant effect.