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The aim of this study was to conduct a primary examination of people’s perceptions toward the concept of selling of naming rights for publicly owned sports facilities in Greece to explore the possibilities for this sponsorship practice to be introduced in the future.

In all, 410 research participants filled out a questionnaire that focused on the level of acceptance, in relation to variations of agreements, and considering decision outcomes scenarios, as also on other naming rights parameters, such as sponsors’ fit features. A modification of methods used in previous research in the context of consumers’ price perceptions in sport was adopted to investigate the potential effects from the provision of decision outcomes messages.

The research findings indicated that, in terms of acceptance from the public, there might be grounds to implement this type of sponsorship. It is suggested that an optimal way of introducing the concept should be with marketing campaigns outlining the main purpose and the prospective benefits.

Possibly, the participants perceived the prospect and scenarios provided as not very likely to happen and this might influence their responses. Future research should investigate the effects of other factors, such as attitudes toward commercialization, stadium identification and perceived financial status.

The study provides a basis for the consideration of naming rights as a sponsorship option for public sports facilities in Greece, and also offers a new perspective in the use of treatment messages as a tool for altering potential negative perceptions.

The study advances brand association research into participatory sports (i.e. fitness) by examining health club related dimensions and extending research into the United States (US). Data were collected from health club members (n=148) at a branded US fitness facility. Factor and regression analyses used specified brand association dimensions and revealed a predictive model of brand loyalty. Findings and discussions will assist fitness managers in brand-building, marketing strategies and member retention.

Sports gambling has a very long history, evolving with and influencing cultures, classes, genders and races from antiquity until the present. Attempts to ban it have failed, with its problems regularly emerging in new forms. Given the still limited historiography, this chapter adopts a broad-brush, qualitative, socio-historical approach. It focuses on five themes: the change over time in the various sports betting systems, such as lotteries; the changing nature of social networks in terms of sports gambling; anti-gambling attitudes and their importance in shaping legislative attempts to control or suppress it; the changing regulation of sports betting; and the way identities such as class, age and gender impacted on sports gambling.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a number of promises typically made by owners of professional sports franchises in the USA that are also typically ignored or underevaluated by public bureaus and their elected principals using the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York as a case study. Ex post subsidy outcomes are evaluated against ex ante subsidy promises in order to draw lessons that can inform and improve subsidy debates elsewhere.

The case study adopts a pre-post strategy drawing on data from multiple sources over a period of up to ten years in order to triangulate the narrative and build credibility. The franchise owner’s ex ante promises and financial projections were obtained from various media including newspaper, video and interviews between December 2003, when the arena was publicly announced, and September 2012, when the arena opened. Data on ex post outputs were obtained from financial documents and government records covering periods from September 2011 through June 2016.

The franchise owner is found to have exaggerated the arena’s financial condition, under-delivered on its employment promises, and exaggerated the scope and timeliness of ancillary real estate development. Only promises of event frequency and attendance levels, measures of the public’s demand for the facility, have been met during the first three years.

Because the evaluation is a case study, causal conclusions cannot be drawn and some aspects of the Barclays Center context may not be applicable in other jurisdictions or subsidy debates. In addition, the case study does not evaluate an exhaustive list of the promises franchise owners make.

Franchise owners have a financial incentive to overpromise public benefits, since subsidy levels are tied to what the public is perceived to receive in return. This case study demonstrates that the public sector should not take owners’ promises and projections of public benefits at face value. Moreover, the case study reveals that the public sector should put more effort into ensuring ex post policy and data transparency in order to facilitate benefit-cost analyses of such subsidies.

The data required to evaluate promises, other than economic development ones, made by franchise owners are not systematically collected across state and local governments in the USA, making large-n studies impossible. Case studies are underutilized approaches in this area of public affairs, and this paper illustrates their usefulness. By focusing on a single facility, an evaluation of the franchise owner’s less acknowledged and arguably more important promises about the facility and its local impact is possible.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how North American professional team owners are engaging in broader urban development projects that have their teams as anchor tenants in new sports facilities, by examining the case of Rogers Arena in Edmonton, Canada.

Approached from a constructionist perspective, the study employed an instrumental case study strategy as it facilitates understanding and description of a particular phenomenon and allows researchers to use the case as a comparative point across other settings (with similar conditions) in which the phenomenon might be present.

Using urban regime theory as a framework, the authors found that in Edmonton, the team owner was able to align his interests with other political and business interests by engaging in a development strategy that increased the vibrancy of Edmonton’s downtown core. As a result, the owner was able to garner support for both the arena and the surrounding development.

The authors argue that this new model of team owner as developer has several implications: on-field performance may only be important insofar as it drives demand for the development; the owner’s focus is on driving revenues and profits from interests outside of the sports facility itself; and the team (and the threat of relocation) is leveraged to gain master developer status for the ownership group.

This paper adds to the understanding of owner interests and how franchise profitability and solvency can be tied to other related business interests controlled by team owners.

This article intends to shine a light on venue-related tax increment financing (TIF) through the first comprehensive inventory of its use at the major league level.

For each 2018 venue in the five North American major leagues, data was collected on TIF contributions to direct venue capital costs as well as to projects using TIF to enable real estate development ancillary to a venue. Neighborhoods surrounding a venue were also assessed for the presence of a TIF district. With both the direct and ancillary elements, data was collected from government, industry, academic, mapping and media sources. A review of this data set and findings are followed by a discussion of implications and directions for future work.

Over one-third of the TIF eligible permanent stadiums and arenas studied in the five major leagues have a direct or strong TIF connection. Direct TIF contributions to sports venues, as well as TIF use intended to generate real estate development around these venues, are most frequent and financially significant in arenas and soccer-specific stadiums. Additionally, arena and stadium projects using TIF often accompany ancillary real estate development.

A primary purpose of this article is to provide a previously missing general reference resource to governments and citizens of jurisdictions considering facility TIF use on the scope, nature, extent and identity of TIF projects related to major league sports venues. More generally, the inventory and assessment of TIF use in professional sports venues offered by this article sets the stage for future research on associative relationships between TIF contributions and facility finance outcomes as well as the normative value of venue-related TIF.

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 study aims to adapt analytical hierarchy process (AHP) for choosing the optimal location for sport facilities. The location of a sports facility contributes significantly to its potential success or failure. Therefore, factors affecting such location-related decisions must be carefully studied and prioritized in a systematic fashion.

This study develops a seven-step framework which may be used to decide on a location from among several alternatives. Through an extensive literature review, this study first determines the factors affecting sports facility location selection and then applies AHP steps by asking several sports facility owners and managers to assess importance of the criteria.

This study determined the sport facility location selection factors as “ease of access,” “facility features,” “financial issues,” “neighborhood” and “market,” and further divided each factor into its subfactors. To illustrate the framework of using AHP as a tool to select the right location for sport facilities, we chose three candidate locations and scored them according to the calculated weight scores of the criteria, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each location.

This study provides several managerial implications that may guide sport facility investors in choosing the right location.

This study presents a method to evaluate different factors for different actors of sport industry in a systematic way. Private investors can use the method for securing sufficient number of potential customers in a well-selected location. Government institutions and public policymakers can use the method, possibly with different sets of factors, to decide on the location of public sports facilities to maximize the number of visitors or to reach disadvantaged or underserved populations.

This framework of AHP method can help private and public investors and policymakers evaluate and make the optimal decision for choosing sports facility locations. This study contributes both to sport management theory and practice as well as to operation management literature. This study also refined the scattered factors in the literature of selecting a sport facility site in a more understandable and adaptable way.