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There remains a critical issue in sport management scholarship in that the field lacks a well-defined framework for delineating practical implications in research. This research aims to answer the following research questions: (1) What types of practical implications can be identified in sport management research? (2) How can sport management research frame the practical implications of the study in a way that is both theoretically sound and useful for practitioners?

Through a scoping review and within the lens of Jaworski (2011)'s framework for managerial relevance, the study examined 427 articles from European Sport Management Quarterly, Journal of Sport Management and Sport Management Review published between 2000 and 2020.

This study presents a five-pronged framework that identifies target managers, organizational tasks, time horizons, philosophical impact and desired outcomes. Furthermore, the current research offers suggestions for how to present managerial implications in sport management research.

The findings shed light on the managerial relevance of the recent sport management body of work, developing an important framework for practical implications for the field to reflect and incorporate into future studies. With a theoretical understanding of how to frame the practical implications of sport management research, the gap between academia and industry can continue to narrow, and the relevance to the industry may be more pertinent than ever before.

This conceptual/study protocol paper provides important context around the role of sport in Australia where sport provides aspects of community agency through participation, organisation and volunteerism. It provides a descriptive analysis of how sport assists young people in developing physical and mental ”fitness” through its community orientation. However, it also provides discussion around the potential of a “generation lost” to sport as a consequence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The conceptual nature of this paper means that the data collection underpinning this research has not yet been conducted. However, given that we have applied for human research ethics along with having accrued sporting clubs and organisations eager to be involved in the research, we are planning to roll out this research by mid 2020. The design will be based on mixed methods approach whereby large-scale surveys together with focus groups and interviews will be central to the research data collection process. This research is unique given the nature of the time in which it exists. The last global pandemic was around 100 years ago when sport did not play such a significant role in society. Understanding the implications of the pandemic on young people and to the sporting clubs and organisations will be key in re-establishing sport as a central component of community agency towards the physical and mental health of young people. The urgency of understanding this is key to assisting the loss of potential young people to sport and the benefits that go with it to the individual, the community, and society as a whole.

Drawing upon social judgment theory, the research examines whether changes in psychological involvement with a sport human brand owing to their sporting success can generate spillover effects on people's national pride, a proxy for the collective level of well-being and whether the individual's behavioral engagement in sport spectating will moderate this relationship.

Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment grounded in the 2021 Indian Premier League championship, the authors solicit responses from 296 representative individuals residing in India twice using a two-wave panel design. The authors conducted confirmatory factor analysis, repeated measures T-test, latent change score analysis, and structural regression analysis to examine the relationship between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride.

The results demonstrate a positive association between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride. Further, the findings indicate that an increase in psychological involvement with sport human brand was associated with an increase in national pride due to the successful athletic endeavor involving the sport human brand. However, the relationship between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride was invariant irrespective of patrons' spectatorship behavior.

This research demonstrates that sport human brands possess transformative soft power that extends their prerogative cultural identity personified by their athletic ability and success, allowing them to shape public sentiments of national pride via their profound influence through and beyond the complex network of brand ecosystems.

This paper aims to identify factors that affect the sports tourism destination's competitiveness on a small island. Hence, this study looks at and evaluates these factors. The study then comes up with a model that clarifies the interrelationships between these factors.

The authors broke down the data analysis process into three steps. The first step was to conduct a literature review and use industry and academia experts' help to determine the essential aspects (fuzzy Delphi method). Then, a hierarchical model was developed, and the factors were categorised using the interpretive structural modelling (ISM) approach. Factors' driving and dependency power were also determined using MICMAC analysis.

This work has identified 13 key factors related to the sports tourism destination's competitiveness on a small island. For a small island like Kish Island, the two independent variables (government support and destination political stability) that define the institutional framework for the destination are most important. Building corresponding competitive and support strategies to address these two independent variables is thus beneficial.

The research's results provide decision-makers, practitioners, and researchers with new insights into the hierarchical model of determinants. The study will fill the existing gap between theory and practice.

Sports tourism destination managers on small islands may benefit from the proposed model since the model will enable them to organise the managers' priorities better to enhance the managers' destinations' competitiveness and provide tourists with a more accurate depiction of the destination.

According to the authors' knowledge, the research design presented in this article has provided the first attempt to hierarchical analyse these factors and develop a model for sports tourism destination competitiveness on small islands and destinations with less-developed economies. This study fills the gap in the destination competitiveness and sports tourism literature by not only identifying the key influencing factors but also examining the interactions between these factors and providing empirical evidence supporting their relationships.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the beliefs and attitudes toward the use of information and communication technology (ICT). The study examines the challenges of implementing ICT-based training and provides insights for promoting the acceptance of online training in volunteer sports communities.

The study uses an action design research methodology that combines the implementation of ICT-based training, interviews, and a survey of 523 participants to examine the influence of online training on beliefs and attitudes.

The study shows that before the COVID-19 pandemic, soccer referees had negative beliefs about the use of ICT for learning. However, the experience of being forced to use ICT for training during the pandemic led to a positive shift in their beliefs about ICT.

The study offers four lessons learned for promoting the use of ICT-based training in voluntary sports. Future research should investigate the influence of blended learning approaches on affective, cognitive, and skill-based learning outcomes.

The study has practical implications for those responsible for implementing ICT-based training in voluntary sport. The findings suggest that design features such as usefulness, ease of use and enjoyment should be emphasized to increase the acceptance of online training.

The study contributes to the literature by providing insights into the challenges of implementing ICT-based training in voluntary sport contexts. The findings suggest that the experience of being forced to use ICT can promote the acceptance of online training in volunteer sports communities.

The purpose is to review literature on sports season ticket subscriptions to distil current knowledge and guide future research and practice.

A systematic literature review is conducted of research on sports season tickets, a long-established and innovative subscription category.

In-depth examination of 28 papers showed a focus on drivers of satisfaction, churn and renewal causes, and product utilisation rates. Subscription markets typically involve many “solely loyal” consumers, most purchasing one or two subscriptions in a category. From reduced barriers to entry and exit to “curated” subscriptions, subscription marketing is changing very quickly. Sports marketers build relationships with subscribers using behavioural data, tier benefits to distinguish between casual and subscribing customers, and create recall and scarcity around key aspects of subscription to combat churn and increase utilisation.

Scarce research on subscription marketing practices remains the primary limitation. Existing research suggests that strong connections between subscriber and organisation, heavy product utilisation and/or strong barriers to switching drive customer satisfaction and retention.

Rapid expansion of subscription products should reduce “excess loyalty”, meaning that subscription models' main benefit will be limited to reoccurring revenue. Exceptions occur when consumers are heavily connected to the product or have little provider choice, so allocate their category buying exclusively. New subscription products face myriad challenges. Guidance on effective subscription marketing from sports marketing research and practice is outlined.

By combining research on market structure, marketing empirical generalisations and subscription marketing, this paper guides future research and practice.

Football is the world's most popular sport and the role of football on campus is of interest to university public relations (PR) and management professionals tasked with operations, promotions and reputation management. The purpose of the study is to explore similarities and differences in the structure and promotion of football on campus in the USA and the UK.

The authors completed this case study research by focusing on two related cases using cross-case pattern identification. Consistent with case study research, data collection methods were combined. Depth interviews with PR and management professionals at USA and UK universities were supported by archived documents, published media and social media accounts.

Football maintains a high level of popularity among students on campus, but each country's approach reveals different models and competitive market forces. In the USA, varsity football faces competition from popular revenue-producing sports (e.g. American football and men's basketball), but growth in the overall game, which is assisted by international influences, indicates future advancement opportunities. In the UK, football is the dominant campus sport with unique ties to professional football and high growth potential for the women's game. The lack of a fan-based model indicates the possibility for structural change, but stiff competition exists with the historically popular and well-developed professional game.

A well-known limitation of case study research is the absence of generalizability, and each case has aspects that are unique to the research (Lucas et al., 2018). That applies in this instance as well. Variance is expected to exist between, and among universities and, based on this data, this is not possible to generalize to other universities. However, future survey research could use these results to help with the development of research questions using quantitative methods.

Sports PR research using the case model with professional teams has been conducted, but the authors found no published PR research comparing the structure and promotion of football at USA and UK universities. The outcomes can help with future research inquiries and theory development and are instructive for professionals working in the field.

This study aims to investigate the impact of technologies on the knowledge transfer process. In particular, the authors aim to analyze the topic of knowledge brokers and the relationship between broker and digital tools in the knowledge transfer process in the sport context. The study developed, therefore, aims to investigate the creating of this environment for knowledge transfer and knowledge sharing between man and machine, looking to improve the planning of technical sports projects of the clubs.

This paper presents a qualitative approach aimed at analyzing how platforms and the players’ agents can be useful tools in the knowledge transfer process. The research was conducted through a survey with a structured questionnaire via e-mail to 64 managers at the head of clubs playing in the Italian Series B basketball in the 2021–2022 championship. The total number of questions administered is 21.

The results demonstrate how sports directors, for the construction of a technical sports project, in addition to learning off the pitch by interactions with media, fans, pressure management, leadership skills, positive attitude, tolerance, understanding of other opinions, background and cultures, see the athletes’ agents as the main stakeholder of the managers. The research resulted, by the clubs’ managers, in both formal learning and informal-type learning. Informal learning, by far the most frequently used and most important in the general learning process of executives, is identified in the use that executives make of information available on digital platforms and of the fiduciary relationships that management has with players’ agents.

The results demonstrate the valuable opportunities for executives, coaches, managers and clubs to strategically manage learning and knowledge sharing. Improving and managing knowledge-sharing strategies would help increase knowledge, not only of the sports directors but also of the entire club, thus improving the absolute quality of the game within the Italian basketball divisions. The authors have developed an innovative framework regarding the construction of a “typed sports technical project”, and the authors have identified a series of crucial phases capable of determining the creation of a new roster of athletes.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become increasingly significant in the sport industry, and athletes, leagues, teams and sport organizations are actively engaging in socially responsible activities. The popularity of CSR has attracted the attention of scholars in the field of sport management. However, little research has investigated the overview and evolution of the extant literature on CSR research in sport management. Therefore, this study aims to explore the knowledge structure of CSR in sport management and provide implications for future research.

This work investigated and examined bibliographic data of scientific documents (N = 234) indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database from 2008 to 2021. The Bibliometrix R package and VOSviewer software were used to analyze and visualize the knowledge map of CSR research in sport management.

The bibliometric analysis found that CSR has become a critical topic in the field of sport management. Most studies focus on the implementation of CSR activities by sport organizations and their impact on consumers' reactions and behaviors.

The findings of the current paper provide an efficient overview of the evolution of CSR in sport management and offer avenues for future scientific endeavors.

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.