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Background: Due to the commercialization of football, clubs have put more focus on management in general, and stakeholder management in particular. Despite this, research on stakeholder management in football is in its infancy. Therefore, little is known about how football clubs manage their stakeholders that also possess unique characteristics. Furthermore, these characteristics are more prevalent in Swedish football because of the ownership structure that allows the stakeholder to possess multiple roles at once. Thus, Swedish football was selected as the area to study, as the unique features of Swedish football provide interesting implications. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of stakeholder management in Swedish football. This study aims to understand the managerial implications that arise when managing stakeholders in Swedish football, how tensions are managed, and how to keep stakeholders satisfied. Method: In order to fulfill the purpose of this thesis, a qualitative multiple case study approach was adopted since the nature of the study is exploratory. Through twelve semi-structured interviews, empirical data was gathered. This study adopted an inductive approach, and the data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Conclusion: This study has found that tensions are managed through the use of good communication tools, as well as the building of relationships. These relationships later affect the level of influence stakeholders have on the club. Furthermore, clubs keep their stakeholders satisfied by listening, being clear and transparent, having good values for the stakeholders to be proud of, as well as giving stakeholders a good return on their investment. These findings emerged into a suggested framework that displays the relationship between the different aspects of stakeholder management in football.

Stakeholder satisfaction has in the modern day, become an imperative criterion to achieve project success. Satisfaction of stakeholders’ requirements however is challenging because these requirements evolve as the project progresses. Previous research indicates that as stakeholders continuously interact with a project, they gain more information and new requirements or request for modifications are likely to emerge as a result of this increased intelligence. Nonetheless, conventional project management elicits requirements from stakeholders at the onset of the project, and uses these pre-defined requests to design the project. This practice hinders the ability of stakeholders to influence the project as it advances, and ill equips managers to handle and implement stakeholder requirements that materialize at subsequent phases. It is therefore important to investigate how emergent requirements of stakeholders come about and how they are managed in practice. The objective of this thesis is to answer the research question, “From the perspective of managers, in the Scandinavian management context, how do emergent requirements of key stakeholders materialize, and how are they managed?” by probing into the ways via which emergent requirement of stakeholders come about, and investigating how managers deal with these emergent requirement upon their occurrence. This qualitative study was conducted in the Scandinavian region using semi-structured interviews. Five respondents in managerial positions of the Umeå wastewater treatment plant project participated in the research and data collected concerned materialization and management of emergent requirements that surfaced during different phases of the project. The resulting data was then analyzed with reference to previously established theoretical frameworks. Results from this study confirm that, new or modified requirements and consequently, requests for changes do emerge at even the execution phase of projects, despite careful planning. These emergent requirements are traced to three different sources and are managed in different ways depending on the type of requirement, whether strategic and critical or minor.