On The Difficulty of Measuring Organizational Resilience: A Preliminary Study in the Football Industry

Organizational resilience has increasingly been conceptualized as the capacity to sustain functionality and performance under conditions of volatility while simultaneously enabling adaptive renewal. Despite its theoretical centrality in organization studies, resilience remains empirically difficult to operationalize beyond perceptual or qualitative measures. This study advances the literature by proposing a financially grounded operationalization of organizational resilience within professional football. Building on the distinction between structural stability and adaptive reconfiguration, we conceptualize resilience as the interplay between stable revenue architectures and dynamic asset management through player trading. Using a longitudinal panel of nine Italian Serie A clubs observed over fifteen seasons (2010–11 to 2024– 25), we estimate fixed effects models with cluster-robust standard errors to examine how capital gains from player trading, structural revenues, wage investment, and exogenous shock exposure influence sporting performance. The results show a robust and persistent positive association between capital gains and league points, even after controlling for structural revenues and the COVID-19 shock. Core revenues contribute positively to performance, whereas wage increases within clubs do not systematically translate into improved results. These findings suggest that organizational resilience in professional football is not primarily driven by financial magnitude but by the capability to continuously reconfigure assets and orchestrate financial strategies over time. Competitive performance emerges as the observable manifestation of adaptive continuity. The study contributes to organization theory by offering a measurable, systemic articulation of resilience and provides managerial insights into how financial strategies can sustain performance under persistent uncertainty.