the identification and prioritization of the exiting challenges of privatization of iranian football clubs using pest1 model

a review of studies about sports privatization indicates that almost allcountries in the world have paid considerable attention to the role and thesignificance of sports privatization. however, it should be noted that thereare not only one or two factors influencing sports privatization. the mainissue is that sports privatization especially for football clubs cannot beeffective without the existence of a set of factors. accordingly, the presentstudy concentrated on the most important challenges facing football clubsprivatization in iran. this descriptive-application study has employed asurvey method. the statistical population included football managers,university professors in the field of physical education, and sports experts.excel software and numerical means were used to identify challenges.besides, expert choice and ranking techniques such as ahp, topsis, andsaw were used to perform the primary ranking of factors. prioritizingmethods such as prioritizing means, borda and copeland wereemployed to merge and rank factors and indexes considered as challenges.the findings suggested that the most important challenges were legalpolitical,sociocultural, economic, and technological challenges respectively.unplanned privatization with no specific stages was considered as the mainlegal-political challenge, sports underestimation in socioculturaldevelopment programs as the main sociocultural challenge, lack of broadcastright as the main source of income as the core economic challenge, andfinally inadequacy of loans granted to the private sector by the government wasregarded as the major technological challenge.