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The purpose of this paper is to identify the determinants of success of elite athletes by applying the concept of career success to a sporting context. The concept of career success includes extrinsic (i.e. tangible) career accomplishments like medals as well as intrinsic factors referring to subjective judgements about career attainments. Thereby, a holistic perspective is taken which has not been studied extensively before.

Based on previous literature, a theoretical model was derived outlining how human capital, motivation, organisational characteristics and socio-demographics affect both intrinsic and extrinsic career success. To measure the impact of these factors, primary (n=1,249) and secondary data of elite athletes were collected. Regression analyses indicated that all factors included in the theoretical model were associated with extrinsic and intrinsic success.

Institutional support was an important driver for intrinsic career success while financial support affected extrinsic career success. There was no significant influence of extrinsic career success on intrinsic career success.

These findings imply that policy makers should offer enhanced dual career options, such as mentoring programmes, aspects like sport-psychological support and nutrition counselling, and long-term, stable financial support for athletes to maximise career success.

This paper applies the construct of career success to sports. A focus on the athletes’ intrinsic career success is placed as this area has been neglected in past research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the legacy of Australia II 's victory in the America's Cup in 1983. Achieving sporting success at international events produces a variety of impacts and identities for the sporting nation, the team, and individuals involved in the victory. These impacts differ from sport to sport and are affected by the mechanisms involved in the event (such as the bidding process). What makes these legacies unusual is that they were driven by sporting success, with the right to host and defend the America's Cup being solely dependent on winning the Cup in 1983, rather than a pre‐planned concept from a bidding team or event manager.

A case study approach is used in this paper, based upon the evaluation of literature in the public domain. This information is enhanced by primary research obtained from the observations of one of the authors as a crew member of Australia II.

26 years on since Australia II 's success, and the legacy is still flourishing, the ripple effect has not dissipated. The cause and effect of winning the America's Cup has created three legacies, hosting the defence of the America's Cup, the creation of organisations developing participation in the sport of sailing with a growing events portfolio and the establishment of a national sporting identity.

Insights are outlined into the legacies of Australia II through the use of sporting heroes, identity, social capital, community networks and an emerging events management portfolio.

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 study derives a new framework that comprehensively assesses management quality along four dimensions, namely Sporting Success; Financial Performance; Fan Welfare Maximization; and Leadership and Governance. Filled with measurable key performance indicators (KPIs), these dimensions serve the purpose of objectively quantifying the relevant success factors. Ultimately, the performance in all dimensions indicates a football club's management quality.

The study relies first on a review of the literature in the field of both general management and sports. Second, the authors adapt the balanced scorecard framework to the field of professional football and use a set of KPIs to assess the management quality of the Bundesliga teams over the seasons 2016/17 and 2017/18. Third, the authors validate the relative weights of the four dimensions composing the so-called “Football Management Quality score” (i.e. FoMa Q-Score) using expert interviews.

Two movements characterize the score development in 2017/18 compared to 2016/17: first, scores appear more contracted than previously. Second, both average and median scores improved, suggesting a general improvement in the management quality within the Bundesliga.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first exploratory study deriving and measuring relevant key criteria for managing football clubs and illustrating the findings in a ranking. The aim of this study is to establish a model that impacts both academia and practice. By utilizing existing management literature and adjusting it to football particularities, the newfound knowledge begins to close the gap in sport management literature.

The purpose of this study is to develop insight into the socio‐economic determinants of African sports performance. Previous studies have argued that a country's success in sports is directly related to the economic resources that are available for those sports. However, factors that are used to determine the levels of success for developed countries are not necessarily the same, or bear the same weight, as for developing countries.

The premise of this study is to identify specific factors that increase success in sports in developing countries by means of several econometric specifications using cross sectional data for African countries.

This study finds evidence that suggests that Africa's performance in sports is dependent on a range of socio‐economic factors, which in some respects confirms worldwide studies. Money does indeed matter: GDP was the overwhelmingly consistent dependent variable in all four models tested. Interestingly, important shades of distinction between the various dependent variables are found.

There is a lack of research in the field of sports and organizational economics especially in emerging countries. Previous studies have treated countries as a homogeneous grouping and allowed the broad aggregates to reveal the determinants. This study focuses on a sub‐group of countries that are relatively poor, have had a complex past with colonial masters, and that generally have weak administrative structures.

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.

This paper aims to evaluate the applicability of the concept of benchmarking as a research tool for furthering understanding of the management of élite sport systems.

The research used semi‐structured interviews and documentary analysis to investigate the élite sport services offered by two successful Scandinavian sports.

It was found that a number of the services that led to the success of the two investigated systems are strongly context dependent. This suggests that benchmarking is only appropriate as a tool to further understanding of élite sport systems if it is approached as a way of learning, rather than copying.

The research does not consider all élite sport system services.

The research suggests that managers should be careful about tranferring practices directly from other élite sport systems.

This is the first research study to apply benchmarking to the élite sport system context.

Professional football clubs currently strive for a number of concurrent goals, ranging from on-field success to profit maximization to fan expansion and engagement. The purpose of this paper, theoretically informed by the social penetration theory, is to analyze the economics behind such goals and examine the association between team performance, commercial success, and social media followers in professional team sports.

A data set relating to 20 European professional football clubs that combines financial (revenues and costs), sporting, and digital-reach measures for three consecutive football seasons (2013/2014 to 2015/2016) was used. In addition, to elaborate on this data in terms of a descriptive study, the study constructs a range of correlation statistical tests and linear modeling techniques to obtain quantitative results.

The results indicate that all the three main sources of club revenues (match-day, commercial/sponsorship, and broadcasting) are positive drivers for Facebook followers. Staff investments (staff costs) are also positively related to Facebook followers, albeit to a lesser extent, while higher-ranked clubs seem to follow a constant approach in terms of their revenues and cost structure.

This study seeks to bridge the communication and sport economic research, providing evidence that Facebook followers are part of the cyclical phenomenon of team revenues and team performance. In doing so, it initiates a debate on the relationship between the digital expansion of a football club and its sports and financial indicators.