The exiting challenges of privatization of Iranian football clubs with using PEST model

A review of studies done in the field of sports privatization indicates that almost all countries in the world have given considerable attention to the role and the significance of sports privatization. However، it should be noted that there are not only one or two influential factors in this field. The main issue is that sports privatization especially football clubs privatization is not effective without the existence a set of factors. Accordingly، employing the Pest Model; the present study has concentrated on the most important challenges facing football clubs privatization. This descriptive-correlational study has employed a survey method. The population under study included football clubs managers، university professors in the field of physical educations، and sports experts. Excel Software and numerical means were used to indentify challenges affecting football clubs privatization. Besides، Expert Choice and ranking techniques such as AHO، TOPSIS، and SAW were used to perform the primary ranking of factors under investigation. Prioritizing methods such as prioritizing means، BORDA، COPELAND were employed to merge and rank factors and indexes considered as a challenge. The findings of the study suggested that the most important challenges are legal-political، socio-cultural، economic، and technological challenges، respectively. Unplanned privatization with no specific stages was considered as the main legal-political challenge، sports underestimation in socio-cultural development programs as the main socio-cultural challenge، the nonexistence of broadcast right as the main source of income as the core economic challenge، and finally inadequacy of loans granted to the private sector by the government was regarded as the major technological challenge.