El fútbol como herramienta pedagógica en la enseñanza de dirección de empresas.

Following the implementation of the European Higher Education Area, university teachers have had to develop and apply new teaching methods in their educational practice that enable students to learn from a more didactic approach. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the effects of the implementation of teaching innovation projects on academic performance in a sample of 1,546 students from three universities and four different degree programmes. To this end, we studied the performance of an experimental group that carried out a practical activity in which they had to relate the victory of the Spanish national soccer team in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa with how the main functions of a company's management are executed. The experimental group was compared to a control group that studied the same topic in a traditional master class. The results show that the academic performance of the experimental group was superior to that of the control group. Therefore, it is concluded that the development and implementation of teacher innovation projects carried out in the classroom improve the academic performance of university students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]