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Floorball is a Swedish sports innovation which emerged and started to be played about 40 years ago. The purpose of this paper is to explore value capturing in this relatively new sport and the various contributions made by different actors towards market development of the sport.

The research utilizes a theoretical framework of value capturing in professional team sports for research. The analysis is based upon 13 semi-structured interviews with representatives from three groups, “players/coaches,” “board members and “manufacturers/retailers.”

All economic actors within the research framework contribute to various extents to the market development of the sport, yet they all need to cooperate, exemplifying that innovation for market development and value for the sport can only be co-created.

The sample is taken from the Swedish market and may, thus, be considered biased.

All economic actors within the research framework contribute to market development of the sport to various degrees, yet they all need to cooperate, exemplifying that innovation for market development and value for the sport can only be co-created.

This paper provides unique insights into the development of floorball as a “new” sport.

Owners of the US-based sport teams are seeing consistent gains on their financial investments, no matter the success of their teams on the playing field or their impact on the surrounding community. Sports teams are a part of an ecosystem comprised of primary and secondary stakeholders. The authors explore this phenomenon using a stakeholder perspective to understand how different business models and ownership structures optimize stakeholder value.

The authors employ an evaluative conceptual approach to examine the dominant model in the US, European ownership structures and public-private partnerships (PPPs). T finalize these comparisons by exploring a fourth business model and ownership structure – a relatively unique option in the US deployed by the Green Bay Packers – which we refer to as the maximized value partnership (MVP). These comparisons are followed by practical advice for owners in regard to these governance mechanisms.

The MVP ownership model has the potential to level the playing field between public and private actors. This potential is realized by fusing some of the best practices from European football clubs, in particular aspects of the stock market and supporter trust models.

By evaluating the most common ownership structures for sports teams, t provide an alternative model as well as practical advice for owners.

The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the players' contribution and economic value in the soccer industry. Media visibility records provide us with comparable metrics to identify talent and make hiring decisions – these records can jointly capture sport (on-field) skills and other attractive (off-field) abilities.

This paper presents a valuation method that applies media visibility appraisals to estimate “theoretical values” of the transfer fees paid for hiring soccer players. The estimations are performed by analysing the evolution over time of the media exposure of about 5,000 individuals of more than 200 clubs.

The study’s empirical results reveal that, along with sport performance, the players' media status also affects their economic valuation, which explains why the clubs – in search of greater economic returns – fiercely compete for the most popular players. The paper also identifies the main factors determining the players' economic value. In predicting the players' transfer fees, some variables are statistically significant: individual media visibility, media visibility share of the player within his team, contract duration, status of the hiring team, years of experience, player's age at the end of the contract and the domestic league of the hiring team.

Professional sports provide reliable measures on individuals' performance that may help in the hiring process of workers. This paper identifies gifted soccer players while taking into account their skills as media leaders and the economic implications. Insofar as players' talents determine their teams' sport and economic achievements, the transfer fees paid for players must then be seen as a crucial factor. Measuring individual talent and being able to translate this talent into productivity levels entail serious methodological and empirical challenges.

Throughout this study, the authors sought to identify the antecedents and consequences of a multi-dimensional consumption-value construct. Data were collected from sports spectators in Japan (n=372) and the United States (n=396). The results indicate that three quality dimensions (functional, technical and aesthetic quality) have a significant impact on their respective value dimensions in the context of sporting events. Moreover, the constructs of entertainment and community prestige have positive effects on customers' behavioural intentions.

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.

Growth of China’s sport industry has brought tremendous opportunities to sport and non-sport organizations domestically and globally; nonetheless, the enlargement has also raised many challenges. To a great extent, China has chartered into unprecedented new sport business territories. Because of social, cultural, historical, and governmental differences, many theories and knowledge, professional experiences, best practices, and lessons learned in Western countries may or may not be directly applicable to the diverse setting(s) in China. Until now, only limited empirical evidence is available to address these challenges. Thus, formulating a special issue in the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship to examine contemporary subject matters and concerns would be significantly meaningful to help understand, stimulate, and improve sport business operations in China, provide guidance to transnational organizations for doing sport-related business in China, offer constructive suggestions for Chinese corporations going global, and ultimately build up theories and best practices to address unique perspectives of China’s sport industry. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper is conceptual and presents a review of literature.

In addition to this leading paper, there are a total of eight manuscripts selected for this special issue inquiring on contemporary matters and development of China’s sport industry, including four short articles that were formulated based on qualitative research information derived from case studies and interviews and four full-length articles that adopted a quantitative research protocol or a mixed research design involving both qualitative and quantitative information.

While it is impossible to capture all contemporary topics in the development of China’s sport industry within one journal issue, articles selected in this special issue of the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship have provided useful highlights into some of the critical issues faced by the industry and research directions by academicians. It is sincerely expected that studies in this special issue would help inspire more scholarly inquires and ultimately improve the continued formulation and advancement of a strong sport industry in China.

While it is impossible to capture all contemporary topics in the development of China’s sport industry within one journal issue, articles selected in this special issue of the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship have provided useful highlights into some of the critical issues faced by the industry and research directions by academicians. It is sincerely expected that studies in this special issue would help inspire more scholarly inquires and ultimately improve the continued formulation and advancement of a strong sport industry in China.

While it is impossible to capture all contemporary topics in the development of China’s sport industry within one journal issue, articles selected in this special issue of the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship have provided useful highlights into some of the critical issues faced by the industry and research directions by academicians. It is sincerely expected that studies in this special issue would help inspire more scholarly inquires and ultimately improve the continued formulation and advancement of a strong sport industry in China.

While it is impossible to capture all contemporary topics in the development of China’s sport industry within one journal issue, articles selected in this special issue of the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship have provided useful highlights into some of the critical issues faced by the industry and research directions by academicians. It is sincerely expected that studies in this special issue would help inspire more scholarly inquires and ultimately improve the continued formulation and advancement of a strong sport industry in China.

Some sports organizations have a strategic objective of promoting human and social development through sports. However, it can be challenging to ensure that these objectives, conveyed by the board, are fully internalized by the athletes. From the perspective of inter-organizational networks, this dissemination can occur through strategic alignment and diffusion of social capital. Therefore, the authors wanted to analyze if organizational policies from sports organizations are related to athletes' perception of social capital and strategic alignment.

The authors conducted a sequential mixed-method research. Firstly, a pilot study was conducted with two exploratory interviews with key informants from a sports organization, supported by documentary data from this organization. A thematic content analysis was carried out to identify relevant categories and subcategories to prepare a quantitative research instrument. In the second phase, a questionnaire was applied to 159 student-athletes from this organization. The collected data were analyzed by multiple linear regression.

From the pilot study, a set of five elements of strategic alignment, and three elements of social capital in the sports organization context were provided. In the quantitative phase, the authors identified that social capital is related to athletes' perception of shared values internalization in a sports organization, but strategic systems were not.

Sports managers could better promote internal policies if there is social capital among athletes rather than implementing top-down deployed communications.

Policymakers could better predict the effectiveness of a foment request by sports organizations considering not only strategic systems communication deployment but also the existence of social capital in a sports organization. It is a broader mechanism to understand the capacity of a sports organization in disseminating good values among their members.

Different from traditional companies, in sports organizations, only social capital is related to the internalization of organizational policy by athletes rather than strategic alignment initiatives.

This paper advances our understanding of the relationship between quality, value and satisfaction in the context of spectator sport services. This is achieved through an analysis and examination of relevant secondary data culminating in a conceptual model. Although extensive research has been conducted in the three separate areas of quality, value and satisfaction, to date no work has been reported attempting to develop macro models that capture the concepts and their potential interrelationships. Such macro models could enhance the communication and stimulate further research for sport marketing scholars. This paper proposes a model apposite for further research and in the process leads to the potential confirmation, rejection or indeed, adaptation of the conceptualization of sport services.

Smartphones have become ubiquitous devices that enable individuals to integrate digital resources in virtually all value co-creation processes, including visiting sport events. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to understand smartphone-enabled digital resource integration in the context of sport events from an individual intra-perspective. It thereby connects the perspectives of Service Dominant Logic and Experiential Computing.

A conceptual model was developed and empirically tested utilizing a survey of 707 visitors of eight first and second league soccer, handball and basketball matches in Germany. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was applied to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results reveal that stadium visitors integrate sport event-related and unrelated digital resources to co-create value at sport events. While event-unrelated digital resources generally have more influence on visitors' perceived value, their importance is decreasing with higher team identification. Digital resources in the form of sports betting opportunities are only relevant in some specific contexts. Hence, both individual and contextual characteristics determine digital resource integration.

This study integrates the perspectives of value co-creation at sport events and experiential computing and proposes a conceptual model exploring how sport event visitors enrich their experience through the integration of sport event-related and unrelated smartphone-enabled digital resources. By illuminating the intra-level perspective of sport event visitors' resource integration, it provides the basis for future studies on digital resource integration on higher levels of aggregation including engagement platforms and entire sport event ecosystems.

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.