Purpose – The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to highlight the heterogeneity of the organizational aims within the professional football teams in Ligue 1. Second, to understand why some teams swing from a win orientation toward a soft budget constraint from year to year, and vice versa.
Design/methodology/approach – Financial data from annual reports for the period 2005/06 – 2014/15 was collected for the 35 Ligue 1 clubs. To define the compliance degree of the intended strategy of those clubs, an efficiency analysis was conducted thanks to the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method. This performance measure was supplemented with the identification of productivity and demand shocks to build a theoretical model. It allow to precise nature of the evolution of the win/profit tension in the utility function related to the gap expectation/performance.
Findings – The paper suggests that a team can switch from one archetype to another from year to year due to the stochastic nature of the sport industry. The club director’s utility function could also be maximized under an intertemporal budget function to adjust the weight between win and profit according to the opportunities in the environment.
Originality/value – The paper shed new light on the win/profit maximization. The theoretical model provides an assessment of the weight between win and profit in Ligue 1 and then points a new explanation for persistent losses in the sport industry.