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Traditional sports have seen declining participation at many levels, with football being no different. This is occurring at a time when emergent technologies present new challenges, particularly to the crucial yet ignored cohort of millennials. Without meeting the needs of millennials, football cannot be successful in the future. This research seeks to understand how millennial football fandom (sport, not team) in Australia impacts football participation, whilst empirically examining the impact of football video games (FVGs).

Survey data are collected from online groups, forums and social media pages of Australian football (soccer) fans. Quantitative analysis of millennial fandom and its influence on football participation (for the first time demarcated into play and engagement) is undertaken, including the moderating influence of time spent playing FVGs, amidst covariate influences of age and number of children.

Results highlight the multi-dimensionality of millennial football fandom in Australia, reveal the typical hours spent playing football across a range of participation types (including play and engagement), support fan involvement’s influence on engagement with football, establish that a desire to interact with other football fans manifests in playing more football, specify how playing FVGs moderates these relationships, supports the covariate influences of age and evidences that playing FVGs does not hamper football play.

This is the first study to examine millennial fans of football (the sport, not tied to a club) and the influence of fandom on football participation. By separating football participation into two forms, play and engagement, we highlight discrete influences, whilst evaluating for the first time the moderating influence of the time millennials spend playing FVGs. For sport managers and administrators, these are important findings to facilitate better segmentation, recruitment, retention and participation, each with broader societal health benefits. This is undertaken in Australia where football is not a dominant code, relegating fandom to a niche, thus revealing important findings for sports and business management.

National surveys reveal that sports fans exhibit greater support for athletes, sports teams and leagues endorsing social justice initiatives compared to the general population, highlighting the potential of sports for positive social impact. This study investigates whether such responses are influenced by systematic biases.

Replicating a Nielsen national survey, two experiments explore whether biases affect support for athletes' participation in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The study also examines partisan motivated reasoning as a factor driving sports fans' support for BLM.

While avid fans display stronger endorsement of BLM compared to causal/non-sports fans, evidence suggests that systematic biases distort these responses. When sport identity becomes salient, reported support for the BLM movement becomes inflated.

Researchers often employ self-report surveys to gauge audience perceptions of athlete activism or cause-related initiatives, particularly when assessing their impact. This study's findings indicate that this context is susceptible to SDB.

The study underscores the role of systematic biases in self-report surveys, particularly in socially desirable contexts. People tend to over-report “positive behavior,” leading survey participants to respond more favorably to questions that are socially desirable. Therefore, interpreting survey results with caution becomes essential when the research context is deemed socially (un)desirable. It is crucial for researchers to apply appropriate measures to identify and mitigate systematic response biases. The authors recommend that researchers adopt both procedural and statistical remedies to detect and reduce social desirability biases.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of sports sponsorship on brand equity using two managerially related outcomes: price premium and market share.

This study uses a best–worst discrete choice experiment (BWDCE) and compares the outcome with that of the purchase intention scale, an established probabilistic measure of purchase intention. The total sample consists of 409 fans of three soccer teams sponsored by three different competing brands: Nike, Adidas and Puma.

With sports sponsorship, fans were willing to pay more for the sponsor’s product, with the sponsoring brand obtaining the highest market share. Prominent brands generally performed better than less prominent brands. The best–worst scaling method was also 35% more accurate in predicting brand choice than a purchase intention scale.

Future research could use the same method to study other types of sponsors, such as title sponsors or other product categories.

Sponsorship managers can use this methodology to assess the return on investment in sponsorship engagement.

Prior sponsorship studies on brand equity tend to ignore market share or fans’ willingness to pay a price premium for a sponsor’s goods and services. However, these two measures are crucial in assessing the effectiveness of sponsorship. This study demonstrates how to conduct such an assessment using the BWDCE method. It provides a clearer picture of sponsorship in terms of its economic value, which is more managerially useful.

The purpose of this study was to compare four different consumer pathway models based on identity theory, attitude/loyalty theory, lifestyle theory and hierarchy of effects theory, each with associated instruments measuring connection to the team.

The authors did a two-study analysis, first collecting data from people aware of an NFL team (N = 218) and then an MLS team (N = 209) to determine which connection item performed better.

The authors found that the Consumer Pathway for Sport Fandom based on the hierarchy of effects theory and its associated interest measurement item performed better than the other three frameworks and items. The Interest item shared the most variance with games attended, games intending to attend, games watched via media and games intending to watch via media.

The Consumer Pathway for Sport Fandom represents the entire consumer spectrum from non-aware consumers all the way up to die-hard sports fans. This pathway will allow sport marketers to track their consumers from initial awareness of the product or service all the way through the brand relationship to ultimate loyalty.

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.

The purpose of this commentary is to discuss a framework (the Revised Model of Sport Consumer Behavior – R-MSCB; Trail, 2019) to accomplish the following objectives. (1) Provide a framework for sport marketers and sport organizations to use in their own market research. (2) Designate the processes needed to generate results and knowledge that sport organizations, sport marketers and associated corporate partners can use to improve marketing campaigns. (3) Provide suggestions for analytic techniques and measurement constructs/instruments that will facilitate market research within the sport industry.

The author created a 140-item questionnaire for the pre-survey and a 50-item questionnaire for the post-survey. The pre-survey was given at the beginning of the season, and the post-survey was given at the end of the season. The research group has generated a sequence of 13 studies and has collected pre-survey responses from over 7,800 people across 4 continents, 8 sports and 13 teams (data collections), with more teams still planned and over 2,000 post-season survey responses with data collection continuing.

This project, with its 13 studies, will provide sport organizations with the theories/frameworks, knowledge and processes to do their own market research in a more effective and efficient manner and will show sport organizations how to understand the complexities of sport consumer behavior, the motivations behind it and how it varies extensively across individuals. The author will show sports organizations how to collect data from their consumers using valid and reliable measures and constructs that will allow them to segment their consumers, how to effectively market to those segments and how to establish long-lasting relationships that make a satisfied and loyal customer.

This paper provides the framework and guidelines so that sport marketers and researchers can identify specific variables, constructs and relationships that will further their own objectives when attempting to explain sport consumer behavior. Using their own market research, they can implement the results/output in association with the Communications Strategy Model to create more effective and efficient marketing and communications campaigns and consequently drive key performance indicators (KPIs) and improve revenue streams.

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 study delves into the psychological processes underlying sport fans' post-purchase innovativeness behaviour. This exploratory research aims to establish a theoretical framework that elucidates the formation of sport fans' word-of-mouth (WOM) behaviours, particularly emphasising the structural relationship between motivated consumer innovativeness and satisfaction in using AR live-streaming services.

Utilising an online survey and convenience sampling, the study garnered a total of 243 usable responses from three online baseball fan communities in South Korea. Confirmatory factor analysis was employed to assess the psychometric properties of the constructs. Subsequently, a structural equation model was used to probe the influence of motivated consumer innovativeness on WOM, with a particular focus on the mediating role of satisfaction.

Three dimensions of motivated sport fans innovativeness – functional, hedonic and cognitive – showed a positive association with WOM, partly mediated by satisfaction. In contrast, socially motivated sport fans innovativeness did not directly lead to WOM but influenced it solely through satisfaction. The full mediating role of satisfaction in the relationship between socially motivated fans innovativeness and WOM was found.

This research stands out as one of the scant studies exploring motivated sport fans innovativeness in the context of AR live sport streaming. The findings not only corroborate but also augment the extant literature by empirically confirming that three dimensions of motivated fans innovativeness, coupled with satisfaction, are pivotal antecedents to WOM intention.

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 explores match related factors and their impact on the batting strike rate in Twenty20 cricket – an aspect which can generate excitement and fan engagement in cricket matches.

Data was collected from www.cricinfo.com using a web scraping tool based on R programming from February 17, 2005, to October 25, 2022, numbering 4,221 men’s Twenty20 international innings featuring 41 national teams that had taken place in 85 venues across 11 countries of play. Hypothesis testing was conducted using one-way ANOVA.

The findings indicate that batters score faster in the first inning of a match, and mean strike rates also vary significantly based on the country of play. Further, the study analyses the top performing national sides, venues and country of play in terms of mean batting strike rate, thus providing insights to cricket boards, international regulating bodies of cricket, sponsors, media companies and coaching staff for better decision-making based on batting strike rate.

The originality of the study lies in its focus on using non-marketing strategies to increase fan engagement. Further, this study is the first one to examine different venues from the perspective of batting strike rate in men’s Twenty20 international matches.