Search results

The authors integrate the established literature on corporate entrepreneurship with the expanding inquiry into sport entrepreneurship by examining professional teams and leagues across North America. By situating the discussion in the context of organizational theory on competition, the authors argue for how teams (contestants) and leagues (organizers) uniquely apply the different forms of corporate entrepreneurship, providing contemporary examples of each. Additionally, the authors identify notable challenges of entrepreneurship within a sport context, emphasizing components that allowed organizations to overcome these concerns. By shining a light on the occurrences and challenges of corporate entrepreneurship within the sport industry, the authors hope to continue the push for greater interest in and examination of sport-related innovation and entrepreneurship.

This work researches and shares numerous examples across the North American sport landscape to illustrate corporate innovation and venturing by sport entities.

This research identifies innovation, sourced from different competitive actors, involving new products, new services, new processes and new administrative structures and approaches, and even includes the development of new businesses.

In looking at the entrepreneurial efforts of established sport teams and leagues, the authors highlight the impressive efforts of these entities to innovate, grow and evolve their products, service offerings and markets despite unique industrial constraints.

Demonstrate proof-of-concept for conducting NFL Draft trades on a blockchain network using smart contracts.

Using Ethereum smart contracts, the authors model several types of draft trades between teams. An example scenario is used to demonstrate contract interaction and draft results.

The authors show the feasibility of conducting draft-day trades using smart contracts. The entire negotiation process, including side deals, can be conducted digitally.

Further work is required to incorporate the full-scale depth required to integrate the draft trading process into a decentralized user platform and experience.

Cutting time for the trade negotiation process buys decision time for team decision-makers. Gains are also made with accuracy and cost.

Full-scale adoption may find resistance due to the level of fan involvement; the draft has evolved into an interactive experience for both fans and teams.

This research demonstrates the new application of smart contracts in the inter-section of sports management and blockchain technology.

Previous studies focused predominantly on wage dispersion within men’ sports teams. This study aims to reveal how the relationship between wage dispersion and team performance applies for women’s sport.

The sample comprises 168 observations of four consecutive National Basketball Association (NBA) and Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) regular seasons (2018–2021). Eight econometric models are performed for comparing the leagues.

The findings indicate that the wage dispersion within the squads affects the women’s and men’s basketball teams differently. Cohesiveness theory is applicable for WNBA teams, while NBA teams follow the tournament theory.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper which inspects the relationship between wage dispersion and team performance using data from women’s sports. Further research may examine whether the differences found in sports also apply in different labor markets.

The authors intend to contribute to the lack of information about corporate social responsibility (CSR) in sports verified in the literature. The main purpose is to understand what the supporters' perceptions of CSR practices in sports clubs are and how these initiatives influence some of their attitudes towards the clubs they support.

Using a total sample of 142 supporters, the study hypotheses were tested with PLS-SEM structural equation modeling.

The authors conclude that CSR initiatives have a positive influence in the supporters' perception of the club and contribute to the positive word-of-mouth communication about the club. The results also show that these initiatives do not have a significant influence on the supporters' intention to become or remain paid members of sports clubs.

It should be noted that research on CSR in the national sports context is scarce, which increases the importance of its contribution to the literature in this area.

Professional sports teams employ highly paid managers and coaches to train players and make tactical and strategic team decisions. A large literature analyzes the impact of manager decisions on team outcomes. Empirical analysis of manager decisions requires a quantifiable proxy variable for manager decisions. Previous research focused on manager dismissals, tenure on teams, the number of substitutions made in games or the number of healthy players on rosters held out of games for rest, generally finding small positive impacts of manager decisions on team success.

The authors quantify manager decisions by developing a novel measure of game-specific coaching decisions: the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) of playing-time across players on a team roster over the course of a season.

Evidence from two-way fixed effects regression models explaining observed variation in National Basketball Association team winning percentage over the 1999–2000 to 2018–2019 seasons show a significant association between managers’ allocation of playing time and team success. A one standard deviation change in playing-time HHI that reflects a flattened distribution of player talent is associated with between one and two additional wins per season, holding the talent of players on the team roster constant. Heterogeneity exists in the impact across teams with different player talent.

This is one of the first papers to examine playing-time concentration in the NBA. The results are important for understanding how managerial decisions about resource allocation lead to sustained competitive advantage. Linking coaching decisions to wins can help teams to better promote this core product.

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.

This paper explores organization-level racialized work strategies for maintaining racialized organizations (Ray, 2019). It focuses on intentional actions to maintain dominant racial norms, demonstrating how work strategies are informed by dominant racial structures that maintain racial inequities.

We compiled a chronological case study (Yin, 2012) based on 168 news media articles and various organizational documents to examine responses to athlete protests at the University of Texas at Austin following the death of George Floyd. Gioia et al.’s (2013) method uncovered how dominant racial norms inform organizational behaviors.

The paper challenges institutional theory neutrality and identifies several racialized work strategies that organizations employ to maintain racialized norms and practices. The findings provide a framework for organizations to interrogate their strategies and their role in reproducing dominant racial norms and inequities.

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was reinvigorated within sporting and corporate domains. However, many organizations engaged in performativity, sparking criticism about meaningful change in organizational contexts. Our case study examines how one organization responded to athlete activists’ BLM-fueled demands, revealing specific racialized work strategies that maintain structures of racism. As organizations worldwide disrupt and discuss oppressive structures such as racism, we demonstrate how organizational leadership, while aware of policies and practices of racism, may choose not to act and actively maintain such structures.

This study aims to identify an automated machine learning algorithm with high accuracy that sport practitioners can use to identify the specific factors for predicting Major League Baseball (MLB) attendance. Furthermore, by predicting spectators for each league (American League and National League) and division in MLB, the authors will identify the specific factors that increase accuracy, discuss them and provide implications for marketing strategies for academics and practitioners in sport.

This study used six years of daily MLB game data (2014–2019). All data were collected as predictors, such as game performance, weather and unemployment rate. Also, the attendance rate was obtained as an observation variable. The Random Forest, Lasso regression models and XGBoost were used to build the prediction model, and the analysis was conducted using Python 3.7.

The RMSE value was 0.14, and the R2 was 0.62 as a consequence of fine-tuning the tuning parameters of the XGBoost model, which had the best performance in forecasting the attendance rate. The most influential variables in the model are “Rank” of 0.247 and “Day of the week”, “Home team” and “Day/Night game” were shown as influential variables in order. The result was shown that the “Unemployment rate”, as a macroeconomic factor, has a value of 0.06 and weather factors were a total value of 0.147.

This research highlights unemployment rate as a determinant affecting MLB game attendance rates. Beyond contextual elements such as climate, the findings of this study underscore the significance of economic factors, particularly unemployment rates, necessitating further investigation into these factors to gain a more comprehensive understanding of game attendance.

Previous corporate social responsibility (CSR) research has mainly revolved around the “usual target” (that is, fans and consumers) that invest money, time and energy in supporting their teams in isolation while largely ignoring individual members of the public. Building on social exchange theory and social media analytics, the authors examine the social outcomes of CSR aggregated from individual members of society's perceived benefits (intangible and psychological).

Raw data were drawn from the CSR-focused Twitter accounts of six professional leagues (i.e. @nbacares, @nflplay60, @InspireChange, @thewnbpa, @Pr_nhl, @Mlsworks and @Mlbsocial). The authors collected historical data from each CSR-focused Twitter account (N = 136,076) from March 2010 to September 2022.

After conducting sentiment analysis of public perceptions, the majority of tweets (53%) were neutral, 39% were positive and 8% were negative. All CSR-related accounts received more positive tweets about their initiatives than negative ones did. The most prevalent positive topics are supporting the community, education, youth wellness and health and inspiring the young generation. The most prevalent negative topics were related to fake, hypocrite, hate and social justice.

The study contributes to the CSR-sport literature by incorporating members of the general public into the stakeholder ecosystem and empirically examining their perceptions of sport organizations' CSR activities. Also, by drawing on the social exchange theory and the unique nature of social media, the authors highlight when and how the public expresses positive, neutral and negative perceptions over time. Finally, it joins a small but growing body of research that adopts the application of big data to sport management, and it measures the sentiment, frequency, distribution and topics of tweets, thereby determining positive and negative public perceptions.

This research aimed to measure the influence of resource dependency (trading and/or shareholder's dependencies) squad age structure by building archetypes to identify strategic dominant schemes.

Based on the Ligue 1 football clubs from the 2009/2010 season to the 2018/2019 data, the authors use the k-means classification to build archetypes of resource dependency and squad structure variables. The influence of resource dependency on squad structure is then analysed through a table of contingency.

Firstly, the authors identify archetypes of resource dependency with some clubs that are dependent on the transfer market and others that do not count on sales to balance their account. Secondly, they provide different archetypes of squad structure choices. The contingency between those archetypes allows to identify three main strategic schemes (avoidance, shaping and adaptation).

The research tests an original relationship between resource dependency of clubs and their human resource strategy to respond to it. This paper can help to provide detailed profiles for big clubs looking for affiliate clubs to know which clubs have efficient academy or player development capacities.