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This study investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the sustainability of sports business models by means of a specific case analysis, conducted on M-I Stadio S.r.l., the service management firm that provides all types of backstage activities related to football matches performed at San Siro Stadium in Italy.

Building on interviews on its management team's direct experience and on archival data, the authors depict the consequences of the pandemic in terms of corporate governance, accounting choices and overall strategic business development through information triangulation from a forward-looking perspective.

Complying with restrictions, M-I Stadio S.r.l. preserved its financial position by embracing digitalization, increasing information flows with partners and adopting a risk aversion behaviour. Overall, results indicate that the pandemic played a catalyst role in the transformation process of the football industry. Moreover, apart from the physical and virtual merge acceleration, well-being for athletes, society and the planet, transcending the gaming part of sports activities has also been taking place. The study also illustrates the foreseeable developments of sustainable sport management practices from a critical perspective.

Since the San Siro Stadium management company might represent one of the forefront companies, within the sports industry, this study results should be conveniently taken into consideration by sporting authorities and international bodies, emphasizing the relevance of sustainability (i.e. environmental and social practices within the sports industry) and digitalization so as to better prepare sports organizations and to provide the overall industry with the tools deemed necessary to navigate this important transition in a smoother way.

This paper aims to evaluate the FIFA requirement that World Cup host nations make alcohol available at World Cup stadia because of its sponsorship agreement with Anheuser-Busch. This paper suggests a framework that FIFA should use in evaluating potential host nations to address the ethical implications of alcohol at the World Cup, especially considering the recent Qatar 2022 World Cup, the first to be held in an Islamic Country.

Using historical analysis of recent World Cups and guided by the Culture-Centered Approach (Dutta, 2008) and stakeholder analysis literature, this paper examines the ethical dilemmas host nations have faced because of FIFA’s insistence on alcohol sales at World Cup stadia.

The analysis suggests that a three-step process of host country assessment, stakeholder mapping and negotiation would enable the discovery of potential ethical conflicts and thus their negotiation to mitigate the ethical conflicts FIFA’s preexisting sponsorship agreements create for some World Cup host nations, especially Islamic countries.

While the framework is conceptual and has not been tested, the components from which the authors draw are well established. The application to mega events sports hosting negotiations is an original contribution. The interdisciplinary nature of the framework also provides a contribution to the research field.

Application of the framework would enable FIFA and host countries to negotiate mutually agreeable conditions and avoid placing host nations in ethically compromising situations, which is especially timely as FIFA expands into Islamic countries. Its utilization would provide a Halal environment for World Cups hosted in Islamic and perhaps other, countries.

FIFA’s commitment to alcohol at World Cups should be questioned. FIFA should not expand this dangerous practice of associating sports with alcohol. Female fans may feel safer, as occurred in Qatar 2022.

This paper's framework uniquely combines communication and strategic management literature and applies it to mega sports events in an original way that would lead to more ethical and culturally contextualized World Cups rather than reifying the alcohol–sport nexus.

Social factors, such as fellow spectators in a stadium or other fans sharing their experiences on online platforms, play a dominant role in spectator sport consumption. This conceptual article sets out to achieve three objectives: classify customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions in the sport fan context, develop a framework that links the classification of interactions to relevant outcomes and identify areas for related future research.

The authors integrate conceptual and empirical contributions on C2C interactions in the service, marketing and sport management literature.

The article proposes classifying C2C interactions into synchronous multi- and uni-directional interactions as well as asynchronous multi- and uni-directional interactions. The C2C interaction framework (C2CIF) proposes that such C2C interactions have hedonic, social, symbolic and utilitarian value outcomes. It further suggests that physiological, psychological and social processes underlie the co-creation or co-destruction of value and identifies contingencies at both the fan and the brand level.

Based on the C2CIF, we identify relevant topics for future research, in particular relating to technology-supported and virtual interactions among fans, fan-to-fan interactions across different countries and cultural backgrounds and fan-to-fan interactions as a way to reduce societal concerns.

The impact of various factors on how TV sports audiences perceive sport event sponsors’ billboards around sports facilities has been the subject of extensive research. Despite numerous factors that impact the effectiveness of sponsor signage at sporting events, there has been a lack of research regarding the language used for such signage around sports facilities’ billboards. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effects of billboard advertisement language on TV sports audiences’ recognition, recall and search intention to sponsor signage.

This study employed an online experimental design. Participants (n = 925) were recruited from two linguistically different regions: Chinese and English. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: watching tennis video matches with billboard advertisements presented in either the Roman alphabet exclusively or in a combination of the Roman alphabet and Chinese characters.

This study revealed that although language cannot significantly impact audiences’ unaided recall of a brand, it does have a discernible effect on brand recognition and search intention among audiences. Additionally, people are more likely to search for brands in their native language. Participants from various regions tend to have different recognition rates and search intentions for sport sponsors.

This is the first manuscript examining the use of different languages in relation to audiences’ recognition and recall of sports sponsorship. It provides empirical evidence of the importance of carefully considering the language used in sponsor signage around stadium billboards to optimize the efficacy of sponsorships at sports events.

This study aims to explore spectators' awareness of and attitudes toward sponsoring firms as well as to propose a model predicting their purchase and word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions toward the sponsors of a major sporting event during a pandemic crisis.

A quantitative method was used to collect the data, with 1,259 questionnaires being effectively collected and analyzed using SPSS and AMOS. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), path analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze the data.

Factors such as sports involvement, sincerity, social media use, beliefs about sponsorship, sponsor's image, Covid-19 beliefs and emotions, awareness of and attitude toward sponsors were found to significantly predict spectators' purchase and WOM intentions.

The results support the structural equation model, providing a multidisciplinary conceptual framework that highlights the significance of comprehending the role of significant factors in sponsorship efficiency during the Covid-19 crisis. The proposed framework adds to the knowledge corpus of this field.

Although many attempts to discover key segments of sport spectators have been extant, little segmentation effort has been made to reflect pandemic situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this research is twofold: (1) to classify sport spectators into key segments based on perceived risks associated with a mass-gathered sporting event during the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) to identify each segment’s profiles.

Questionnaire surveys of spectators attending a Japanese rugby game during the COVID-19 pandemic (January–June 2021) were conducted (n = 1,410). A combination of hierarchical and non-hierarchical clustering methods was executed.

The results revealed the five-cluster solution as the optimal number of clusters representing the samples (i.e. spectators with extremely low-risk perception, those with low-risk perception, those with moderate-risk perception, those with high-risk perception and those with higher social risk perception). This five-cluster solution showed sufficient stability and validity. Moreover, each segment had different profiles regarding three background aspects – demographics, psychographics and behavioral variables.

This study is the first effort to segment sport spectators based on perceived risks associated with a mass-gathered sporting event in the pandemic situation. Despite extensive segmentation studies to explore sport fans, contribution reflecting the post-crisis situations is scant. Therefore, the findings provide insight into this realm by providing a new viewpoint for understanding sport spectators during a possible future pandemic era.

Despite increasingly persuasive women-focused marketing of gambling products, there has only been limited investigation around women sports betting. Men remain the focus of much of the conversation about sports betting as they have generally been found to be the most active sports bettors and the most at risk of experiencing harms associated with their behaviour. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring the characteristics of young women sports bettors in the United Kingdom and the relationship between sports betting and the experience of gambling harms. To do this, we created two models of analysis. Our analysis is based on data from the first wave (2019) of the Emerging Adults Gambling Survey (EAGS) dataset (n = 3,549). The EAGS is a non-probability longitudinal survey that includes individuals between the ages of 16 and 24 who were residents in Britain at the time of data collection. Firstly, we examined the associations between women sports bettors and several factors identified as important predictors of sports betting. Secondly, we sought to understand the relationship between women's sports betting and the harms associated with this activity. From these models, we found that women's sports betting was most reliably predicted according to fandom and peer influence. We also found that women sports bettors were more at risk of experiencing harms associated with difficulties with family and friends than women gamblers using other products.

This study aims to examine and compare the influence of the disposition to engage in engagement behaviors on physical and virtual engagement platforms, as well as the influence of these engagement behaviors on brand loyalty, value-in-use and word-of-mouth.

Data were collected using a survey distributed to a random sample of 10,000 fans of five teams in the Swedish top-division of elite football. An exploratory factor analysis was performed to derive a distinction between prevalent platforms, scales were validated through a confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling was used to test the research model.

Customer disposition to engage with the sports team had a significant influence on customer engagement behaviors on both physical and virtual engagement platforms. However, engagement behaviors on virtual platforms were found to be more important than engagement behaviors on physical platforms for fostering brand loyalty and value-in-use.

The results highlight the importance of engagement behaviors with a brand on virtual engagement platforms. Thus, brand managers should prioritize their presence on social media to generate the positive outcomes of customer engagement behaviors.

By examining the effects of customer engagement behaviors on both physical and virtual engagement platforms, this study provides new insights to the emerging customer engagement literature.

Recent research suggests positive links between adolescents' participation in sports and the quality of their relationships with their fathers. It is unclear, however, the degree to which the gendered nature of sports, and in particular the ways sports have been used to define and express masculinity, mean that these important links between sports participation and parent–child relationships might or might not extend to relationships with mothers. Recent scholarship connects joint recreational activities to mother–child relationships, but here we extend these ideas in connection to adolescents' formal sports participation. We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health from the United States to evaluate potential connections between adolescent sports participation and maternal relationships, focusing on the adolescent's perspective on joint activities with mother, closeness to and warmth and communication with mother, and satisfaction with the relationship with mother. We also examine whether these associations differ for boys and girls. We found that adolescents' sports participation was good for relationships with their mothers, but also that there were gender differences in how sport paid off for boys and girls. We discuss our findings in terms of contemporary shifts in gendered norms and conclude that gender may remain salient to how sports participation can promote mother–child relationships.