"A football club is a business and Romanian football clubs do not know how to make money. Shareholders should bring business managers and then let them do their work. The question football club owners should ask themselves is: 'Do I want to make money or take money out of my pocket each time?'," believes Raul Pop, 35, who worked for two years as a senior consultant for Deloitte, collaborating during this period at a restructuring project for one of the biggest football clubs of Romania, with seven shareholders.
"We managed to complete the diagnosis part and draw up recommendations, but we did not get to see them implemented," explains Pop, who worked for Deloitte from 2005 though 2007, and now is the CEO of Recolamp, an organisation managing waste from lighting sources.
A major conclusion the diagnosis team Pop was part of reached is that a football club is a media-type business.
The most valuable Romanian football club is Steaua, assessed at 32m euros, followed by CFR, with 31.4m euros, and Dinamo, with 30.3m euros, according to trasnfermarkt.co.uk.
"For a football club to turn profitable, I believe it should primarily manage each revenue flow separately (...) Last but not least, Romania's football clubs should get outside experts involved, who should know how to generate and manage these revenue flows".
Though on the marketing side Romanian clubs are not using possibilities to the maximum, the main problem is the too active involvement of shareholders in management.
"Unlike any other fields, Romania's football clubs are 100% domestic ones, no outside models have been imported. As a business mechanism, they are rudimentary".
Pop adds that during the period he assisted with the restructuring of the football club's business he saw no consistent attempts at professionalism. Moreover, the budgets of football teams in the Romanian championship will not remain untouched by the financial crisis, and teams' solidity is mainly secured by the fields the clubs' main shareholders do business in.
Steaua, for instance, is supported by a single shareholder, George Becali, whose businesses are almost exclusively related to real estate and constructions, seriously hurt now.
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