| RESPONSIBALL Ranking 2012 |
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We published a special edition of our annual social responsibility football league ranking – the “RESPONSIBALL Ranking” - during the Group Stage of the UEFA EURO 2012™ tournament. It’s the second time we’ve compiled such a ranking – click here to see the press release of our inaugural ranking, which was conducted ahead of the 2011/2012 season (with translations). In this edition, we focused exclusively on the top divisions of those nations competing in the UEFA EURO 2012™. We are using the ranking as an exercise to raise the profile of social responsibility at football clubs across the world, and because we wanted to collect data that will soon enable clubs to benchmark against the collective scores of other clubs. 270 clubs across 16 countries We worked together with researchers from the FIFA Master and AISTS sports masters degree programmes, to analyse the websites of every club in the top division of the 16 competing nations – nearly 270 clubs. The researchers compared the available information for each club with social responsibility indicators, and calculated the average for each league. What we found Improvements can be seen in the scores of the majority of leagues that were also featured in last year’s ranking. The English Premier League, the Polish Ekstraklasa and the German Bundesliga occupy the top three positions – in that order – as they did in last year’s ranking, only this year with improved scores for each. The Swedish Allsvenskan, a new addition to this year’s ranking, makes an impressive entry at 5th position, just behind the Dutch Eredivisie – also with an higher score than last year. Spain’s La Liga (6th), Greece’s Superleauge (7th) and France’s Ligue 1 (10th) also bettered their scores in this year’s ranking. The top club had a social responsibility score of 74 per cent and the lowest had zero (in fact seven clubs shared this score). The statistics show that the average score was 23 per cent – 4 per cent higher than last year’s ranking, the median (the middle score) was 17 per cent and the quartiles (the 25th and 75th percentiles) were 10 per cent and 34 per cent – again, all slightly higher than last year.
Wealth not a good measure of social responsibility As both Poland (2nd) and Sweden (5th) demonstrate by their ranks, wealth is not the only indicator, or pre-requisite, for prowess in social responsibility. Impressively, Poland maintains its position from last year’s ranking, sitting only 5 per cent behind England in second place overall. Sweden, a country renowned for its social responsibility, sits among Germany (3rd), the Netherlands (4th) and Spain (6th)- all with top divisions that dwarf the Swedish Allsvenskan in terms of wealth. 50 per cent threshold What is most enlightening from the results is that all leagues have social responsibility scores lower than 50 per cent, indicating that there is much potential for growth. Of the three main social responsibility components, it is the Environment score – the highest of which, 23 per cent, was achieved by clubs in the German Bundesliga – that brings down the league average. Governance and Community scores tend to be higher in most leagues. The English Premier League holds the top spot – with top scores of 55 per cent and 74 per cent, respectively – in both of these components. About the research Guidelines, from widely recognised social responsibility frameworks, such as the Global Reporting Initiative and the UN Global Compact, have been adapted to create indicators covering issues that affect football clubs, such as Health and Safety, Ticketing, Fan Work and Security, Coaching, Procurement, and Biodiversity. These issues fall under the three main social responsibility topic areas of Governance, Community, and Environment. Translations French German Greek Spanish |
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RESPONSIBALL is an initiative funded by the work of
