Abstract
Triggered by the establishment of the J-league in 1993, the football club activities in Japan have been shifted from corporate clubs and school clubs to community clubs. While this phenomenon has been studied from the point of view of sports business, including the aspects of vision, marketing, human resources development and the like, to the best knowledge of the authors, there exists no research in the literature focusing on the evolutionary process of football clubs from their infancy to the establishment of professional clubs. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by proposing a conceptual management model to guide such evolutionary paths, with focus on how to develop cooperative relationships with local governments through different stages. The conceptual management model is created by the Modified Grounded Theory approach. Two clubs that exist in the special city and were promoted to the J-League from amateur clubs in the region are surveyed as a case study.
