Decision-usefulness objective: An application for football clubs

The hegemonic position acquired by the neoliberal view in social sciences since the 1950s has also affected accounting. In accordance with this view, the perception that accounting is an objective and inherently value-neutral discipline, similar to natural sciences, has been adopted and the value of accounting information has been determined by its predictive ability. In contrast with this view, accounting rules are not rules that occur spontaneously in a vacuum, but are created in a certain context to achieve a goal. The objective of "decision-usefulness" which is identified in the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is the product of the aforementioned context and this objective shapes the framework of contemporary accounting thought. As a consequence of inadequate attention to the objective of accounting in Turkish literature, it is hard to understand changes brought by decision-uselfulness objective, which is called "revolutionary" by some. Without sufficient knowledge of its theoretical origins, it is not possible to understand the effect of this objective on accounting and to compare it with alternative objectives. In order to understand the theoretical origins of the decision-usefulness and its effect on accounting, initially the users and the characteristics of the accounting information and the conceptual framework in which the objective is conveyed were examined in this study. After finding out the effect of the neoliberal view on the emergence of the decision-usefulness, it was tried to list the assumptions of this view, which were also adopted in accounting. Then stewardship, the disfavored objective of accounting, is studied and the effects of this paradigm shift on accounting have been investigated. Since the aim of this dissertation is to study the decision-usefulness with a critical approach, the characteristics of the sports sector that can create anomaly in terms of IFRS, which are published standards for profit-oriented entities, were examined and it was decided to use listed football clubs in the dissertation. Accordingly, in order to examine whether the financial statements of clubs provide useful information in terms of loan decisions, a bankruptcy/distress model have been developed by comparing the data of companies that were taken out of exchange due to bankruptcy or financial problems while being traded in Borsa Istanbul via the logistic regression analysis, and by applying the model to clubs, it was concluded that the statements of football clubs do not provide useful information for loan decisions.