Accountability within the Football Industry

Abstract

Accountability has come into fashion in recent years, not just in terms of business behaviour but in wider areas such as politics. While the word itself may only have recently come into popular usage, the notion of accountability has a somewhat longer history. Accountability can be defined as the duty to provide an account (by no means necessarily a financial account) or reckoning of those actions for which one is held responsible (Gray, Owen and Adams, 1996). The requirement to report to shareholders (financial accounting) is one of the very few instances of explicit accountability being established within the law itself, and is thus a rare example of congruence between an organization’s defined responsibility and its discharged responsibility.