Restructuring the Belgian Professional Football League: A Location-Allocation Solution

In the 1990s, and even more since the Bosman Case, professional football in Europe has been transformed from a utility maximisation to a more endogenous growth-based profit maximisation consumer-oriented service. In the post-Bosman period Belgian football has declined in the European rankings and has in a more economic-oriented climate problems in surviving. The recent transformation implies that in the long run the economic features and more specific the location of the club is becoming a very important factor. The existing heterogeneous characteristics of the different clubs made it necessary to introduce an empirically-based modified maximum covering location model. The empirical results prove that a restructuring of Belgian professional football to 14 clubs and in some cases a relocation or merger might be a solution for the contemporary problems. Copyright (c) 2004 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.