Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the role of legitimacy in
internationalization to Africa of a Finnish professional service microfirm,
which uses cause-related marketing (CRM) as the business model.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper consists of a single case study of a microfirm (two
employees) originating from Finland, which has successfully internationalized
to many African countries. Due to the uniqueness of the context, the authors
use semi-structured interviews to collect founders’ insights to the issue being
addressed. Moreover, along with interviews, secondary sources related to
football talent scouting in Africa are also utilized in the paper.

Findings – The authors found that the case company was established with the
aim of helping and uplifting poor African footballers, so the business model is
CRM. It has scouted many of them for professional football clubs in Europe. The
authors further found that sociopolitical legitimacy plays a major role in
dealing with African footballers and local stakeholders, while cognitive
legitimacy helped the case firm gain the trust of European football clubs.

Originality/value – Internationalization of microfirms operating in the service
sector is a rather underresearched area compared to the internationalization of
SMEs and large MNEs. The paper is one of the first to study
internationalization of a professional service microfirm involved in scouting
football talent in Africa and matchmaking them with European football clubs. It
contributes to extant CRM and internationalization literature by being one of
the first to analyze a firm whose business model revolves around CRM and
discussing specific roles of different kinds of legitimacies needed for internationalization
to Africa in this specific service sector.