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Floorball is a Swedish sports innovation which emerged and started to be played about 40 years ago. The purpose of this paper is to explore value capturing in this relatively new sport and the various contributions made by different actors towards market development of the sport.

The research utilizes a theoretical framework of value capturing in professional team sports for research. The analysis is based upon 13 semi-structured interviews with representatives from three groups, “players/coaches,” “board members and “manufacturers/retailers.”

All economic actors within the research framework contribute to various extents to the market development of the sport, yet they all need to cooperate, exemplifying that innovation for market development and value for the sport can only be co-created.

The sample is taken from the Swedish market and may, thus, be considered biased.

All economic actors within the research framework contribute to market development of the sport to various degrees, yet they all need to cooperate, exemplifying that innovation for market development and value for the sport can only be co-created.

This paper provides unique insights into the development of floorball as a “new” sport.

The sports industry is a forerunner in the international quest for talent as the search by sport clubs and the corresponding self-initiated expatriation of athletes starts at a very early age. The purpose of this paper is to address this phenomenon by exploring the experiences of talented young Icelandic footballers (soccer players) in their transition from Iceland into senior-level professional football in European leagues across six dimensions – three individual and three cultural.

Biographical narrative interviews have been conducted with eight Icelandic players moving overseas at a young age with the purpose of advancing their career. To investigate the coping strategies applied, a purposeful sampling approach was chosen, given that half of the participants successfully dealt with transitions in their career, while the other half did not experience the same success.

As an overall result, the expatriate journey for young footballers is complex, influenced by many events, expectations, conditions and pressures that affect their support web and ability to adjust. Reflecting on the experiences of successful transitions, problem-focused coping strategies have been more effective than emotion-focused coping.

This study highlights some necessary conditions and coping strategies for young self-initiated sports expatriates to cope with the expatriate transition successfully.

The authors contribute to research on expatriation, as this specific group of “young professionals” has not yet been addressed by the research within international human resource management. Our research framework responds to calls in the literature to consider additional stages of player development and an array of individual and cultural factors that may have a significant role in shaping players’ careers abroad.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain the advertising behavior seen as an activation strategy performed by Olympic sponsors in an emerging market context. It provides insights into the strategic goals related to sponsorship.

The longitudinal approach taken opens the possibility to explore the dynamics of the strategies of Chinese as well as foreign firms in China. Theories on how sponsorship works cannot assist in explaining outcomes of sponsor-linked marketing, and since the actors involved rarely divulge their genuine intentions or their reciprocal contractual arrangements with the sponsored property, a new methodology has to be developed. A means-objective framework of sponsoring consists of six factors, which were applied to analyze 739 advertisements, articles and press releases collected from Chinese newspapers and Chinese official web pages covering a period of eight years (2001-2008) prior to the Olympic Games in Beijing. Based on a qualitative content analysis and nine means-objectives combinations in sponsorship patterns the authors discovered four dominant advertising strategies.

Lead-time is a key concept when analyzing sponsor advertising strategies. The authors conclude from the longitudinal data that the time gap between signing the contract and the dates of the event influences the strategy of the sponsoring corporations. The authors also observe that the advertising content changes over time and the sponsors craft different “advertising strategies” in different periods. Within this context the authors categorized two different advertising strategies. The sponsors are assumed to conduct a “Short Advertising Strategy” different from the “Long Advertising Strategy.” Both are examples of activation strategies.

Advertising strategies and activation seems to be dependent on the lead-time to the Olympic Games and the level of internationalization of the sponsoring firm.

The aim of this research was to identify and describe driving forces of importance in sponsorship during the seven years preceding a mega-sporting event like the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing. This was done through the development of a conceptual 'meansobjectives model' linking sponsorship to brand equity factors and to objectives. The proposed model enables matching with real data consisting of 200 randomly chosen advertisements, articles and press releases from Chinese newspapers and the internet, revealing six types of means-objectives in sponsorship.