Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine prominent issues and knowledge contributions from research exploring the nexus between accounting and the business of sport, overview the other papers presented in this AAAJ Special Issue and draw from this work to scope out future impactful research opportunities in this area.

A review and examination of the prior literature and the other papers published in this AAAJ Special Issue.

The paper identifies and summarises three key research themes in the extant literature: financial regulation and assurance; commercialisation and professionalism; and accountability and control. Then it draws from work within these research themes to set out four broad areas for future impactful research.

The value of this paper rests with collating and synthesising several important research issues on the nexus between accounting (broadly defined) and the business of sport, and in prompting future extensions of this work through setting out areas for further innovative accounting research on sport.

The research examined in this paper and the future research avenues proposed are highly relevant to administrators and regulators in sport. They also offer important insights into matters of accounting, accountability, valuation and control more generally.

This paper adds to vibrant existing streams of research in the area by bringing together authors from different areas of accounting research for this AAAJ Special Issue. In scoping out an agenda for impactful research at the intersection of accounting and sport, this paper also draws attention to underexplored issues pertaining to the rise of integrity and accountability concerns in sport, strategic choices in financial regulation, valuation issues and practices and the rise of technology in sport.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding of “the” accounting entity, demonstrating how it is a contestable socio-political construction informed by a nexus of market, state and community actors.

A case study method is utilised to follow debate relating to Swedish football clubs’ responsibility for the payment/non-payment of policing costs between 1999 and 2014. The case study uses documentary and interview data, focusing on one of the high-risk Stockholm clubs.

The paper makes four main contributions: first, demonstrating how the accounting entity is a changeable and contestable construction; second, outlining how distinctions informing contests about the accounting arena are materialised through accounting calculations and other devices; third, showing the importance of community in a coordinated sense in mediating accounting practices; and fourth, contributing to the literature on accounting and sport, highlighting the importance of state actors in this arena.

This research draws on original empirical data providing unique insights into debates regarding the responsibility for the payment of police costs in the context of sports-related violence. The authors show the importance of characterising accounting for sporting organisations as a shifting and contestable nexus of market, state and community actors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine an ongoing process of logic assimilation within an amateur sports organisation (ASO) called the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). It seeks to develop our understanding of how forms of accounting mitigated (or exacerbated) the tensions that arose among GAA members due to the consequences of the assimilation of select elements of a professional logic and a commercial logic within its traditionally dominant social welfare logic.

Interviews were undertaken with representatives and members of the GAA to understand the effects of growing commercialisation and professionalisation on the organisation’s traditional amateur status and social mission. In particular, the authors sought to understand how accounting, in the form of financial reporting, influenced the extent of the tensions that arose. Interviews were supported by an extensive collection of podcasts and news articles that discussed this topic.

The paper’s findings offer unique empirical insights into the role played by forms of accounting in the maintenance of amateurism within an ASO. It reveals the conflicting role of financial reporting within the GAA whereby it was used by the GAA’s management to ease member concerns surrounding logic assimilation while simultaneously being ignored by clubs and counties to facilitate payments to managers thereby eroding the amateur status of Gaelic Games.

The paper is unique in its exploration of logic assimilation within a form of hybrid organisation that has previously been unexamined in the accounting literature. It extends extant understandings of how accounting influences the co-existence of potentially conflicting logics. The paper also discusses the implications of what accounting makes visible and keeps invisible on the longevity of the traditionally dominant social welfare logic within an ASO.

The purpose of this study is to characterise types of practices – or “routings” as they are denoted in this paper – that have been developed to incorporate non-financial inscriptions, representing value-in-kind (VIK) sponsorship resources, into accounting systems.

This study adopts field-based research, utilising Latour's (1999) concept of “circulating reference”, to illustrate how VIK (non-cash) resources were managed in an Australian sporting organization.

This paper contributes to our understanding of: first, how accounting infrastructure is constituted and stabilised by a network of multiple and overlapping accounting practices; second, how VIK resources are allocated and managed via local practices; and third, the importance of “budget relief” as a method of valuation in accounting practice.

Our paper has implications for understanding how financial and non-financial accounting inscriptions are related in practice, requiring both integration and separation within networks of multiple and overlapping routings of accounting practices.

Our work highlights previously unexplored accounting practices, which assist in the process of utilizing VIK resources in the context of a sporting organization.

The purpose of this paper is to extend research on boundary making and breaking through alternative football clubs. These entities have borne out of the disappointment caused by the neoliberal turn of the football industry, which excluded traditional fans from being active actors and therefore call for study and generalization of specific forms of alternative accountability.

The study looks at emerging trends in the accounting and sport literature by drawing on two concepts that emerged in critical scholarship: critical performativity and critical dialogical accountability, with the aim of better understanding how these elements are developed and shaped within an alternative form of football organization. The focus on Football Club United of Manchester drives the ethnographic approach with data collected via participant observation, field-notes, documental analysis and semi-structured interviews.

The research shows that the pillars of the club's ethos, pushing its critical performative interventions toward setting new boundaries, are democratic governance and accountability, favoring participation and inclusion, and strictly linked to this, a responsibility to local communities. However, the study also highlights the difficulties of maintaining these boundaries when core values are threatened by degeneration.

The study makes a novel contribution to the field of accounting and sport, showing how an alternative football club adopts inclusive accountability systems that go beyond mainstream neoliberal practices. Such an inclusive approach can stimulate critical performativity, moving away from means-end rationality.

This paper provides a conceptual discussion of the bidirectional relationship between knowledge management (KM) and intellectual capital (IC) in a specific subset of knowledge-based organisations, i.e. professional sport organisations. Through the review and conceptual discussion of two relevant research themes, i.e. KM strategies for IC value creation and IC codification, this paper aims to highlight research gaps useful to future research.

The authors apply a systematic literature review method to analyse 66 management and accounting studies on KM and IC in sport organisations. Internal and external validity tests support the methodology adopted.

The authors provide a conceptual model to explain how KM strategies about IC investments can be optimal, i.e. they create value for all the stakeholders but also suboptimal, i.e. they create value only for a group of stakeholders. Next, they provide evidence of the opportunistic use of the codification associated with IC investments that impair financial reporting information transparency and mislead managers and investors.

The results are informative for managers, regulators and policymakers to mitigate the inefficiencies regarding KM and IC codification and decisions.

This study contributes to the understanding of the bidirectional relationship between KM and IC in knowledge-based organisations by focussing on professional sport organisations in which KM and IC have played an important role for a long time. It also includes future avenues for advances in managing, measuring and reporting IC.

This research explores the historical nexus between accounting and gender to illuminate male hegemonies within accounting. It examines the nature of that hegemony at the boundary between the female domain of household and philanthropic activities and the male domain of business and finance.

A qualitative research approach is used for this historical research. The primary source was digitised newspapers from the National Library of Australia. Newspapers have been used in previous historical accounting research and are relevant in this instance because they provide the only surviving data about the All Nations’ Fair. Given that newspapers were published daily, the depth of coverage is not replicated by other archival sources, and at that time provided a strong community voice.

Women undertook the management of and accounting for the All Nations’ Fair, a philanthropic activity designed to rescue the Geelong Cricket and Football Club from its parlous financial position. Despite women undertaking the work, the management of and accounting for, the Fair was attributed to men. This reflects a gendered construction of accounting that overpowers the reality of who undertook the work.

This research demonstrates only a single example of women’s philanthropic accounting, so is not generalisable. It suggests however that male hegemonies have exerted and continue to exert power over women.

The value of this paper is that historical examples serve as a corrective to histories that have ignored women’s contribution to accounting, particularly in philanthropic activities. The relationship between women’s accounting and gender also has contemporary significance. Gendered disadvantage and subjugation to a dominant masculine hegemony remain recurring themes in accounting research because they continue to impact adversely on the experiences of many women in accounting.

This paper aims to propose an analysis of financial regulation practices, identified thanks to an extensive benchmark carried out in eight European professional sports leagues.

Between 1970 and 2018, 81 French football clubs went bankrupt. The paper proposes an analysis of financial regulation practices in eight European professional sports leagues to enhance the prevention of bankruptcy of French football clubs. Three research questions are addressed: What are the financial and accounting disclosure practices in the main professional leagues? What assessment tools are employed to evaluate the financial risk and budgetary feasibility? What financial support measures exist for clubs and how are insolvency proceedings initiated by clubs? To identify financial regulation practices in professional sport, a selection of leagues was made based on their economic importance, specific regulatory tools used, and their approach to financial difficulties and the handling of insolvency proceedings.

Through an examination of financial regulation practices in other leagues, three main findings are highlighted: The significance of required financial documents and deadlines varies depending on the competition organizer; some leagues utilize ratio-based assessments rather than relying solely on opinions from financial oversight bodies; certain leagues have established assistance processes for troubled clubs as opposed to punitive measures resulting in administrative regulations.

This study proposes new financial regulation modalities to prevent the bankruptcy of French football clubs. Firstly, a reform management control is suggested. Secondly, the engagement of stakeholders in bankruptcy prevention is recommended. Lastly, the implementation of a dedicated policy to support clubs facing difficulties is proposed.

The French football federation and the professional league are important actors in the European football. Many bankruptcies are noted in these championships and since the COVID crisis, the financial situation of the clubs has deteriorated, pointing to a strong risk of bankruptcy in the coming years.

The paper provides a theoretical framework for interdisciplinary accounting scholars interested in performances of accountability in front of live audiences.

This is a processual case study of “Falkirk in crisis” that covers the period from September 2021 to September 2022. The focus of this paper is two-fan-Q&A sessions held in October 2021 and June 2022. Both are naturally occurring discussions between two groups such as are found in previous research on routine events and accountability. This is a theoretically consequential case study.

A key insight of the paper is to identify the practical and symbolic dimensions of accountability. The paper demonstrates the need to align these two dimensions when responding to questions: a practical question demands a practical answer and a symbolic question requires a symbolic answer. Second, the paper argues that most fields contain conflicting logics and highlights that a complete performance of accountability needs to cover the different conflicting logics within the field. In this case, this means paying full attention to both the communitarian and results logics. A third finding is that a performance of accountability cannot succeed if the audience rejects attempts to impose an unpalatable definition of the situation. If these three conditions are not met, the performance is bound to fail.

An important theoretical coontribution of the study is the application of Jeffery Alexander’s work on political performance to public performances of accountability.

The phenomenon explored in the paper (what the authors term “grassroots accountability”) has broad applicability to any situation in organizational or civic life where the power apex of an organization is required to engage with a group of informed and committed stakeholders – the “community”. For those who find themselves in the position of the fans in this study, the observations set out in the empirical narrative can serve as a useful practical guide. Attempts to answer a practical complaint with a symbolic answer (or vice versa) should be challenged as evasive.

This paper studies an engagement of elite actors with ordinary (or grassroots) actors. The study shows important rules of engagement, including the importance of respecting the power of practical questions and the need to engage with these questions appropriately.

This paper offers a new vista for interdisciplinary accounting by synthesizing the accountability literature with the political performance literature. Specifically, the paper employs Jeffery Alexander’s work on practical and symbolic performance to study the microprocesses underpinning successful and unsuccessful performances of accountability.

As an industry, sport business (SB) has seen significant growth since the early 2000s. Concurrently, the number of postsecondary sport management programs has also expanded dramatically. However, there remain concerns about whether these programs are meeting the demands of both employers and graduates. To address these concerns, this study examines the credential and competency demands of the SB labor market in the United States.

Researchers conducted an analysis using a broad sample of employment postings (N = 613) for SB positions from two different years, 2008 and 2018.

Results support that a complex set of SB qualifications exist, and the credentials and competencies included in SB employment postings have evolved over the past decade.

A noteworthy finding is that meta-skills are found to be particularly important for employability, including items such as communication, emotional intelligence and analytical thinking and adaptability.