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The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners and students a practical yet comprehensive set of templates for applying Michael Porter's five forces framework for industry analysis.

Based on experiences with practicing managers, small business owners, industry analysts, academics, and students, a set of industry analysis templates that systematically guides an analyst through a comprehensive assessment of the five forces is presented with the following: copies of the templates themselves, descriptions of their structure and use, an example of a completed template (spectator sports industry), and a discussion of possible modifications and extensions.

The industry analysis templates described in this paper retain the comprehensiveness of Porter's framework but in a format much more student/manager-oriented using graphics, visual cues, a uniform structure, and straightforward descriptions of concepts. Template users show evidence of deeper strategic insights and have a sophisticated tool for future analysis.

Managers, analysts, students, and others wanting robust industry analysis are provided with a comprehensive, structured, and practical set of templates to use in assessing an industry using the five forces framework.

Leading strategic management texts and other sources provide no comprehensive, systematic, and robust format for conducting a five forces analysis of an industry. The set of industry analysis templates described in this paper provides a visually compelling, user-friendly format that can assist those analyzing industries gain important strategic insights not only into industry drivers, but also important competitive advantages for individual firms.

This article examines the applications of RFID technology in the world of sport. It provides the reader with an overview of RFID and its uses in business. The article looks at how RFID can be employed in the games themselves, in sports venues and in sports memorabilia as a means of enhancing the value, enjoyment and security of sports. The author concludes by discussing the importance of this technology for sports marketing and research.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether the fitness industry in Belgium is financially viable in its position as a growing commercial player within the framework of the European sport model where non-profit and public sport providers still have a strong impact.

The authors evaluate the financial performance of the Belgian fitness industry using a time-trend analysis applying a cross-sectional research design for the years 2002 through 2007.

The analysis shows that the Belgian fitness industry is not able to generate positive income figures despite large increases in sales revenues. In particular fitness chains generally accumulate losses. However, the Belgian fitness industry pursues an active investment policy resulting in high noncash expenses in depreciations negatively influencing accounting profit numbers. The operating cash flow generated by the Belgian fitness industry is, nevertheless, largely positive. Although no immediate liquidity problem exists, the fitness industry needs to improve its profitability in the long run in order to stay in business.

This study can be a starting point for further and more in depth financial performance evaluations of commercial actors in the field of sport. Differences and similarities between European countries should be investigated in order to generalize the findings.

The conclusions could support regulators in policy decisions and business managers in strategic decisions relying on financial information in order to pilot their organization.

Analyzing the financial performance of a sport industry at a national scale is challenging. However, this kind of analysis is not frequently performed for commercial sport providers such as the fitness industry. This is precisely where this paper wants to contribute.

The purpose of this paper is to accomplish several goals. First, it studies the relevance of the sports sector as part of the entertainment industry. Second, it identifies promising markets within the sports industry, paying special attention to the relative importance of soccer in the context of team-sport leagues. Finally, the paper helps entrepreneurs to recognized market opportunities in the sports industry by identifying the soccer clubs that were found to be low-risk global brands.

To evaluate the relevance of the entertainment and sports industries, both in the USA and EU-28, the authors rely on their respective contribution to the domestic product and to employment. Two procedures are proposed for establishing the status of global sport leagues: one is based on the annual revenues and the other on the degree of interest that the public shows for each professional sport league. (The latter is performed by comparing the intensity with which internet users search for contents related to each of the Top-10 sports leagues worldwide.) Finally, by estimating the fixed effects of a model in which sport performance is filtered out, we calculate the expected low-risk revenues that clubs generate due to their heterogeneous brand value.

This paper reaches some few relevant results. First, we find that the greater employment opportunities in the European sport industry are concentrated in the UK, Spain, France and Germany, which may orientate entrepreneurs to start projects in promising sport markets. Then, data on annual revenues is used to rank the main team-sport leagues worldwide: NFL, MLB, NBA, Premier League and NHL. Another rank is based on the degree of interest of fans (as captured by Google Trends) yields a different result, where the NFL, NBA and the UEFA Champions League are, respectively, at command. Besides, the paper also ranks clubs as valuable assets by identifying which of them are low-risk soccer brands. The empirical study provides insights to select business opportunities by targeting the less-risky clubs or leagues, by calculating the expected annual revenues of clubs regardless of their recent sports performances.

This paper is innovative in two ways. First, it develops an analysis based on Google Trends to establish the comparative status of team-sport leagues worldwide. Second, by adopting an original empirical approach, it identifies markets and brands to carry out low-risk entrepreneurial projects. The expected potential revenues derived from this procedure are not contingent to the risk due to poor sport achievements in a particular season. To our knowledge, researchers have not computed in the past such calculations as that we name here low-risk revenues.

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.