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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a number of promises typically made by owners of professional sports franchises in the USA that are also typically ignored or underevaluated by public bureaus and their elected principals using the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York as a case study. Ex post subsidy outcomes are evaluated against ex ante subsidy promises in order to draw lessons that can inform and improve subsidy debates elsewhere.

The case study adopts a pre-post strategy drawing on data from multiple sources over a period of up to ten years in order to triangulate the narrative and build credibility. The franchise owner’s ex ante promises and financial projections were obtained from various media including newspaper, video and interviews between December 2003, when the arena was publicly announced, and September 2012, when the arena opened. Data on ex post outputs were obtained from financial documents and government records covering periods from September 2011 through June 2016.

The franchise owner is found to have exaggerated the arena’s financial condition, under-delivered on its employment promises, and exaggerated the scope and timeliness of ancillary real estate development. Only promises of event frequency and attendance levels, measures of the public’s demand for the facility, have been met during the first three years.

Because the evaluation is a case study, causal conclusions cannot be drawn and some aspects of the Barclays Center context may not be applicable in other jurisdictions or subsidy debates. In addition, the case study does not evaluate an exhaustive list of the promises franchise owners make.

Franchise owners have a financial incentive to overpromise public benefits, since subsidy levels are tied to what the public is perceived to receive in return. This case study demonstrates that the public sector should not take owners’ promises and projections of public benefits at face value. Moreover, the case study reveals that the public sector should put more effort into ensuring ex post policy and data transparency in order to facilitate benefit-cost analyses of such subsidies.

The data required to evaluate promises, other than economic development ones, made by franchise owners are not systematically collected across state and local governments in the USA, making large-n studies impossible. Case studies are underutilized approaches in this area of public affairs, and this paper illustrates their usefulness. By focusing on a single facility, an evaluation of the franchise owner’s less acknowledged and arguably more important promises about the facility and its local impact is possible.

This study presents a multi-method based approach to matching fan expectations and needs with a franchise's strategic vision. This approach is demonstrated by looking at a Canadian team in the National Hockey League. The needs of the customers are assessed through a questionnaire survey and an indepth interview with the franchise's marketing vicepresident. Results are discussed, discrepancies between the two positions are analysed and recommendations are made.

The aim of this study is to demonstrate suitability of the continuous improvement framework and use of benchmarking method in the context of sports.

This study uses non‐financial performance measures that are indicative of performance and are closely related to the desired outcomes. Use of such measures seems necessary in the sports and appropriate in relation to professional sports organizations' recruiting, attendance, and profit maximizing objectives. Analyses of this study are based on data of National Basketball Association (NBA) games over three basketball seasons.

The results indicated significant correlation between attendance and winning percentages. Furthermore, the results suggest that a team can improve its winning percentages by changes in the roster that help it emulate superior teams. Comparing teams that advanced in a given season and reach the playoffs with those that did not, revealed the more important skill factors for success in the NBA. The results also indicated that some players' skills might be more critical for a given team in reaching the playoffs.

The results presented in this paper are influenced by the NBA's basketball rules. Because basketball rules are not the same for all leagues and such rules change over time, the findings are time‐specific and should be considered in that light. Additionally, the research design used in this study must be modified for other professional sports.

This paper provides an example for application of continuous improvement framework to professional sports.

League expansion involves a significant investment of time, money and resources. Therefore, ensuring the success of new franchises is imperative to the commercial health of a competition; however, there is an absence of studies examining the establishment process of franchises. In 2020, Super Rugby announced that it would expand in 2022 with the inclusion of two new franchises, Fijian Drua and Moana Pasifika. The article explores what implementation challenges Drua and Pasifika faced during franchise establishment.

Following a qualitative case study methodology, data were collected via newspaper, website and document repository ‘Nexis’, and triangulated against interviews with five expert individuals involved in franchise establishment. Applying mixed-coding, thematic analysis using Redmond's franchise expansion factors framework, six deductive and two inductive themes were generated.

In accordance with Redmond's franchise expansion factors framework, financial sustainability, competitive balance and labour market challenges were identified as internal challenges, whilst media relationships, market competition and community engagement were highlighted as external challenges. Additionally, two new factors, infrastructure and business operations and youth development, were inductively identified as issues during franchise establishment extending Redmond's model.

The study offers strategic guidance to practitioners on franchise establishment and provides insight into cross-border expansion processes. Theoretically, the research supports and extends the applicability of Redmond's expansion factors framework for future research.

Since the appearance of Simon Rottenberg's seminal paper on the baseball players' labour market in the Journal of Political Economy (1956), the literature on the economics of professional team sports has increased rapidly, fuelled by major changes in the restrictive rules which had pervaded these sports, themselves a consequence of battles in the courts and the collective bargaining arena. These changes have not been limited to North America, to which most of the literature relates, but also apply to Western Europe and Australia in particular. This monograph surveys this literature covering those various parts of the world in order to draw out both theoretical and empirical aspects. However, to argue that the existence of what is now an extensive literature “justifies” such a survey on professional team sports clearly begs a number of questions. Justification can be found in at least two major aspects.

Franchise relocation and sport introduction are becoming commonplace in professional sports. However, many franchises have found that developing fan acceptance is often challenging. The fan adoption process is presented as a systematic framework that guides strategy development from creating fan awareness through adoption. An examination of the Carolina Hurricanes inaugural season (1997‐1998) provides a variety of examples of how marketing strategy evolves throughout the fan adoption process.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the effects of initially controllable market factors on franchise success within NBA's Development League (D-League).

The open systems theory provided the foundation for analyzing characteristics contributing to small business success, as measured by attendance capacity for NBA D-League teams. Multiple regression analysis was utilized.

The results of this study indicate specific market characteristics increase franchise success in NBA's D-League. Population, income, facility size and ownership model all influenced attendance capacity.

This study is limited to the teams that have operated in NBA's D-League. Contextual factors related to new business survival are not unique to minor league basketball and can be applied by scholars or professionals to any new business to help understand new business survival.

This research is also useful to cities looking to invest in a professional sports franchise and for all small business owners to understand market characteristics that can contribute to success.

The results from this study significantly contribute to small business literature by being the first empirical study on NBA's D-League.

Eduselling is a unique form of selling as it combines needs assessments, relationship building, customer education and aftermarketing in a process that originates at the prospect targeting stage and progresses to an on-going partnership agreement. Results of proprietary research indicate that certain professional sport organizations fall short of educating corporate clients with respect to all of the benefits and attributes of the products they offer: these results led to the development of a nine-step conceptual framework designed to assist corporate salespeople in professional sport. Future research should focus on specific selling activities and attempt to identify those activities that lead to higher retention rates of corporate sponsors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how North American professional team owners are engaging in broader urban development projects that have their teams as anchor tenants in new sports facilities, by examining the case of Rogers Arena in Edmonton, Canada.

Approached from a constructionist perspective, the study employed an instrumental case study strategy as it facilitates understanding and description of a particular phenomenon and allows researchers to use the case as a comparative point across other settings (with similar conditions) in which the phenomenon might be present.

Using urban regime theory as a framework, the authors found that in Edmonton, the team owner was able to align his interests with other political and business interests by engaging in a development strategy that increased the vibrancy of Edmonton’s downtown core. As a result, the owner was able to garner support for both the arena and the surrounding development.

The authors argue that this new model of team owner as developer has several implications: on-field performance may only be important insofar as it drives demand for the development; the owner’s focus is on driving revenues and profits from interests outside of the sports facility itself; and the team (and the threat of relocation) is leveraged to gain master developer status for the ownership group.

This paper adds to the understanding of owner interests and how franchise profitability and solvency can be tied to other related business interests controlled by team owners.