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The primary purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the key perspectives that emerge in this Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) Special Issue as a basis for determining the existence or otherwise of a Soccer Society, as well as reflecting on the challenges that evidence of corruption in soccer (the beautiful game) has had on the game to date. Reflections on these matters are then utilised to offer a prospective analysis of issues for further research.

The paper is a reflective analysis that draws on existing societal work to provide key dimensions of accounting and accountability for significant organisations in the world of sport in general and soccer in particular.

Much prior research on soccer has largely focussed on the internal workings of soccer organisations, with little discussion of the importance of context. This paper explores the influence of the game more broadly. Moreover, a number of the papers included illustrate an overwhelming sense of joy and pleasure from experiences of the beautiful game, as well as providing evidence of the general societal good that can flow from it. However, the study also highlights concerns emanating from weak, and seemingly pliable, governance, regulatory and accountability regimes that provide a fertile field for corruption and sportswashing.

This paper highlights a research agenda as an encouragement to interdisciplinary accounting researchers to investigate accountability and governance issues as a basis for evidence-based discussions of the impact of soccer and its regulation.

This paper specifically, and the Special Issue more broadly, offers a set of original empirical and theoretical contributions with respect to an activity that has faced limited scrutiny and consideration by academic accountants. Together, they offer a substantive body of work to enable future research in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to review the cancellation of Australia's National Soccer League (NSL) competition and its replacement in 2004 with the corporatist A‐League which is based on the North American model of “one team one city”, no promotion and relegation, and private‐equity clubs. The authors believe that one of the aims of the A‐League and its “ground‐zero” ideology was to institute exclusion of the ethnic clubs that had formed the backbone of the NSL for 30 years.

Extensive literature search, participant‐observation, one personal interview and two group interviews were employed. People interviewed were the President of the Croatian community's Melbourne Knights Football Club, the Club Secretary of Melbourne Knights, and three leaders of Melbourne Knights’ MCF hooligan firm.

The authors observe the Football Federation Australia hiding behind the perceived scientific nature and technical veracity of budgeted accounting numbers to set the financial bar too high for the ethnic clubs to find a place in the brave new world that has been called “Modern Football”. However, capitalism creates its own discontents. Online forums and homemade fence banners are the new vehicles for dissent for the supporters of “Old Soccer”.

There is still only a small academic literature on Australian football and most of this has been written by humanities lecturers. The paper offers a business school perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the long tail of topical search queries, including the influence of current events, posed to a large, urban public library discovery system.

Search queries from the months of June, July, August and September 2014 (1,488,339 total queries) were collected from the Edmonton Public Library’s BiblioCommons database using Google Analytics and exported to Excel. The data were then analyzed using descriptive statistics, frequency counts and textual analysis to explicate the long tail of search, (including the most popular searches) and to explore the relationship between topical search queries and current events.

The findings support the long tail theory, as the aggregate tail of topical search queries comprised the vast majority of the total searches and current events exert some influence on the nature and frequency of topical searches.

Data collection was limited to four months of the year; thus, comparisons across the year cannot be made. There are practical implications for public libraries in terms of marketing and collections, as well as for improving catalogue functionality, to support user search behaviour.

Not much research attention has been focused on the nature of topical search queries in public libraries compared to academic libraries and the Web. The findings contribute to developing insight into the divergent interests of intergenerational public library users and the topics of materials they are searching for.

This study aims to provide a social accounting of early women's football as a form of consciousness raising, and to provide a platform to raise questions about the path of the future of the women's game.

Newspaper archival materials supplemented by books and journal articles.

British woman's football was repressed for 50 years by the football association.

This is a discussion paper, rather than a full academic manuscript.

This paper is designed to enable questions to be raised about equality, and what that means in 2022.

There is an opportunity to reconsider a “feminine” version of the field of football.

There is an opportunity to use feminist theories to consider the past and future of women's football.

This study examined the determinants of attendance at the Chilean national soccer tournaments between 1990 and 2002. A multilevel model approach was taken to estimate the effects of several factors, including unobserved sources, hypothesised to influence attendance in Chile. Results regarding team success, team division, population, stadium size and habitual persistence were found to influence professional soccer attendance; other factors such as admission price, age of team, international success, availability of soccer teams in the same vicinity and stadium ownership did not.

Experiences of high quality games between top-class sports teams could influence sports fans’ decision to attend the domestic sports games. For example, soccer fans who watched the World Cup games between the best national teams are likely to be disappointed with the performance of their domestic league teams after the World Cup event, while more people might be attracted to watch a soccer game because of their increased interest in soccer games. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the international sports event (i.e. the World Cup) influences the demand of the domestic sports league games in the non-hosting country.

To test these antithetical hypotheses, the authors collect the Chinese Super League game-level data from 2004 to 2011. For analysis, the authors propose two empirical models rigorously developed based on previous sports marketing theories.

The findings are surprising compared to previous studies for the hosting countries or countries that performed spectacularly during the World Cup tournaments. The authors find that the international event negatively influences the attendance of domestic games. Specifically, it gives salience to the competitive quality of a match and helps enhance the impact of star players. Furthermore, the authors find evidence of dynamic effects of the international event.

The study contributes to the previous sports literatures by expanding our understanding of the effect of international sports events. Particularly, the results shed light on international events’ impact on the domestic sports league demand in more general conditions based on its influence on people’s behavior, rather than focusing on the effect caused by facility development or dramatic performance during the international event.

It is not uncommon for sports fans to follow multiple sports teams across different sports and even several teams across different leagues of the same sport. Whereas this might be considered a competitive situation, the purpose of this paper is to examine how interest in overseas football (soccer) leagues played a symbiotic role in the successful development of an Australian national soccer league.

Results of survey data are presented from two clubs in Australia's newly formed A‐League. Three surveys were conducted over a two year period with over 3,700 season ticket holders. Specific attention is paid to fans' previous interest and exposure to football, which is then related to attitudes and behaviour associated with the new clubs.

Interest in overseas clubs and leagues is found to be a major antecedent of interest in the Australian league. Those who follow teams in overseas leagues are more likely to be heavy consumers of the new local league than those who follow local leagues or had no prior experience. They also exhibit stronger attitudinal and behavioural loyalty, such as higher attendance and renewal rates of season tickets.

Recognising fan interest in multiple teams/leagues as positive involves a shift in management thinking away from a competitive to a collaborative stance. In this case, rapid adoption of new teams is encouraged by capitalising on strong interest in overseas leagues. This requires careful structuring and branding of the competition that mimicks familiar foreign leagues, while minimising unfavourable comparisons in areas like quality of play.

This study capitalises on the rare opportunity to examine foundation teams in a new national league. The findings highlight the importance and value of taking a “global” perspective to the marketing of sports, and of carefully leveraging the interest in other elite competitions to build interest in new leagues.

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.

Storytelling has long been a popular strategy in marketing. Despite its ubiquity, the influence of storytelling in the sport marketing literature has not been investigated, especially on consumers' perspective. Thus, the purpose of this study is to (a) examine the effect of storytelling on sport consumers, and (b) explore the moderation effect of product involvement on the relationship between storytelling and purchase intention of a signature sneaker.

Two experiments using 3 (storytelling: bullet-point type vs. athlete-based story vs. product-based story) × 2 (product involvement: low vs. high) between-subjects experimental design were conducted.

The main finding illustrates that both the athlete-based story and the product-based story had a stronger influence on a consumer's purchase intention than the information that was given in a bullet-point condition. This study provides a theoretical implication of storytelling strategy for sport marketing literature. From a managerial perspective, the authors heavily recommend the use of storytelling in sport product advertisements.

Previous literature has highlighted the effect of storytelling in sports organization such as professional sports team or utilization in social media. However, limited studies could be found in the sports product industry and consumer behavior sector. Thus, the current study has a significant value of understanding the storytelling strategy in the perspective of sports consumers as well as brand marketers.