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The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of designing league regulatory mechanisms given the multi-dimensionality of competitive balance and the proliferation of empirical measures.

A three-stage approach is adopted. Firstly, a taxonomy of empirical measures of competitive balance is proposed, identifying two fundamental dimensions – win dispersion and performance persistence. Secondly, a simple two-team model of league competitive balance is used to explore the dispersion–persistence relationship. Third, correlation and regression analysis of seven empirical measures of competitive balance for the 18 best-attended top-tier domestic football leagues in Europe over the 10 seasons, 2008–2017, are used to (1) validate the proposed categorisation of empirical measures into two dimensions; and (2) investigate the nature of the dispersion–persistence relationship across leagues.

The simple model of league competitive balance implies a strong positive dispersion–persistence relationship when persistence effects increase for big-market teams relative to those for the small-market teams. However, the empirical evidence indicates that while leagues such as the Spanish La Liga exhibit a strong positive dispersion–persistence relationship, other leagues show little or no relationship, and some leagues, particularly, the English Premier League and top-tier divisions in Belgium and Netherlands, have a strong negative dispersion–persistence relationship. The key policy implication for leagues is the importance of understanding the direction and impact of dispersion and persistence effects on the demand for league products.

The variability in the strength and direction of the dispersion–persistence relationship across leagues is an important result that undermines the “one-size-fits-all” approach to designing league regulatory mechanisms.

Women’s football has received increasing attention in the academic literature, partly due to its growing popularity worldwide. However, women’s football research remains scattered across numerous academic domains. Focusing on the social sciences, humanities and management disciplines, the purpose of this paper is to map and organise contributions, and to identify research directions for future studies within these disciplines.

Using the keywords “women”, “girls”, “female” and “football” or “soccer” to initially identify articles, an integrative approach was followed to evaluate and analyse relevant literature. In all, 117 academic journals were classified and subsequently divided into 26 themes according to the subject area, topic and level examined.

Results of this integrative review show an increasing trend of journal publications since 1998, with a large representation of studies related to historical and sociological research, where qualitative methods are dominant. Articles investigating economic, managerial and marketing areas appeared in more recent times. Women’s football has been researched from different perspectives (players, fans, sport organisations) and across various countries.

The restricted scope of this review (i.e. its focus on social sciences) and the manual classification of articles represent two limitations of this study. However, the synthesis of academic literature provided may assist scholars who are interested in women’s football and women’s sports research to fill identified research gaps and contribute to further advance academic investigations in this area.

This paper provides an overview of salient research avenues and represents the first attempt to critically appraise the direction of academic contributions in women’s football for the purpose of advancing scholarly inquiry in this sport.

The paper analyzes the effects of financial fair play (FFP) in the competitive balance of European football industry throughout a long-term perspective.

The authors analyze the evolution of the competitive balance in the European football industry through a time-series analysis from season 1992/93 to 2018/19.

Results indicate an industry by nature dominated by a few clubs showing a general stationary behavior. FFP has had very little impact in local competitions. Just in some leagues, such as the Spanish, German, and French leagues, we can observe an increase in the imbalance in some indicators, but these results are not very robust. The improvement on the financial situation happens especially in a small group of firms that coincide with the big leagues with a strong European market orientation and strict local financial control standards.

Although the study covered 17 European Leagues, there are several leagues not accounted for and thus results should be generalized with caution.

The authors observe heterogeneity of the results of FFP in the competitive balance, associated to how the standard has been implemented in each market. This opens opportunities to study and deepen the local codes and their influence, especially in the recommendations of future financial control standards.

The authors’ main contribution to the literature is to examine the impact of the FFP rules in the competitive balance utilizing a very broad study of 17 European markets with a rich and unusual overview and long-term perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the competitive balance of the UEFA Champions League group stages. There are numerous financial and commercial benefits to clubs that participate in this competition. The current paper examines whether the seeding system operated by UEFA is hindering some lower ranked teams from qualification and, thus, the associated benefits.

Data were collected for all UEFA Champions League group stages between1999/2000 and 2013/2014. Data analysis techniques included Herfindahl-Hirschman Index to examine competitive balance and one-way ANOVAs to examine the impact of the current seeding system on club performance.

The findings suggest that there are flaws in the ranking and seeding system used by UEFA, as results show that the competition is competitively imbalanced at the group stage. Additionally, clubs that are continually placed in the highest seeding pot historically tend to accumulate more points and finish in a higher position in the group, thereby giving them a better opportunity to progress further in the competition.

The study has implications for both the clubs competing in the Champions League, who will be affected by the seeding system, and UEFA themselves when considering the sporting integrity of their flagship competition.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper of its kind to examine competitive balance in this competition, and the paper contributes new knowledge that extends the research undertaken in the field previously.

Competitive balance is critical for the survival of athletic leagues. A relationship between “uncertainty of outcome” and fan interest has been found in many sports all over the world. This paper examines competitive balance in professional netball in Australia and New Zealand by contrasting two competitions: the ANZ Championship, an elite Australasian competition that began in 2008 but was disbanded in 2016 as there was a perception of dominance by the Australian teams over their New Zealand rivals; and its Australian domestic replacement, Suncorp Super Netball, which started in 2017.

Competitive balance is gauged in three broad ways: match result concentration, which looks at the evenness of each season; team dominance, where comparisons are made across several seasons; and within game equality, which examines the results of individual games.

Several methods are used under each heading, with the results surprisingly showing that measured competitive balance was similar in the two competitions.

In sports management, quantitative analysis or sports economics, there are few published papers on netball. This is the first research to examine competitive balance in netball, and the findings have important ramifications for this women-only game, as it competes against other purveyors of professional sport.

This paper investigates the role of competitive balance among teams in a league in predicting attendance at spectator sporting events. It also controls for the demographic and economic characteristics of the league's markets, and changes in the number of teams in the league. The research relies on a sample that includes 707 non-major professional team seasonal win-loss records (12,956 games) from five sports, aggregated into 75 seasons to develop a model consistent with extant literature. The authors find that competitive balance and average income in the league's markets are significant predictors of leaguewide attendance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the consequences of two strategies of coordinating the online procurement capability and the online channel management capability on competitive performance.

A research model is presented to examine the performance impacts of these two coordination strategies, namely the balancing strategy (achieving a close match relationship) and the complementing strategy (maintaining the synergy effect), and tested using firm-level data collected from 196 manufacturing firms in China. Garen's two-stage econometric technique was used to identify the impacts of two coordination strategies on competitive performance.

Our study discusses and compares two different coordination strategies of mitigating the operational tensions across processes and deploying resource configurations for improving competitive performance. Our results show that while the balancing strategy can mitigate the risks resulted, the complementing strategy does not create synergistic effects on the focal firms' competitive performance.

The results extend our understanding of the nature of B2B digital process coordination both in IS management and supply chain operations.

This paper aims to highlight dysfunctional multi-stakeholder relations and negative business outcomes, evidenced in lose/lose results, exacerbated by failure to acknowledge strategic business focus as a means to redress problematic business thinking and practice amongst key leadership teams associated with achieving balance between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility.

The reframed strategic business focus has been developed using Eastern philosophy and Western organization theory and refers to four case examples of dysfunctional business thinking and practice.

Strategic business focus results from an interdependent and complementary positive mediating relationship between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility, which is moderated by organization culture (organization core values, including shared value) and strategic human resource management (talent and mindset).

Strategic business focus as proposed has not been empirically tested but seeks to address a conceptualization that competing business and stakeholder agendas are interdependent and complementary.

Strategic business focus seeks to redress traditional win/lose and lose/lose business outcomes, by supporting win/win results, represented by shared value amongst multi-stakeholders.

Strategic business focus seeks to provide a means whereby corporate social responsibility, particularly the social contract, plays a key role in the decisions and practices of key leadership teams and the behaviour of corporate staff in host environments when seeking competitive advantage.

Eastern thinking and behaviour are usually undervalued in the western business literature, particularly in western business practice. Joint attention, however, may improve competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility agendas in support of diverse management practices, including shared value.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of articles on sport published in leading business studies journals within marketing, organisational studies and strategy.

Based on a review of 38 identified articles within the subfields of marketing, strategy and organisation studies published between 2000 and 2015, the articles’ topical, theoretical and methodological orientation within the studied subfields were analysed followed by a cross-subfield analysis.

The authors identify considerable differences in topical, theoretical and methodological orientation among the studied subfields’ associated articles. Overall, the authors also find that articles across all subfields tend to be focussed on contributing to mature theory, even though the subfield of marketing in particular exhibits contributions to nascent theory in contrast to organisation studies and strategy.

This paper contributes by illustrating the current state of research that is devoted or related to the phenomenon of sport within three subfields in business studies. Furthermore, the authors discuss the role played by leading business studies journals vis-à-vis sport sector-specific journals and offer avenues for future research.

This paper aims to investigate the factor analysis for balanced scorecard (BSC) as measuring competitive advantage of infrastructure assets of owned state ports in Indonesia: Pelindo IV, Makassar, Indonesia.

This investigation adopts an explanatory and an exploratory qualitative case study method to analyze the effectiveness of BSC over the strategy management processes. For data collection, the researchers have used semi-structured interviews, direct observation and document collection. Data collection was made during a six-month period, which allowed gaining of deep knowledge on the culture and management methods used in alpha. Other data collected refer to the company’s documentation and reporting of online media publications. Detailed interview data are the main data sources, which allow obtaining of a detailed and holistic understanding of the experience, opinions and attitudes of the interviewees. Interviews focus on asset management to determine the relationship between various factors. This study adopts ideal BSC principle (four perspectives) to develop strategic map for infrastructure asset of Pelindo IV. Analysis tools using factor analysis for the indicators (financial, customer, learning-growth and internal process) measure the competitive advantages. The data for factor analysis from the perception of each stakeholder using questionnaire are collected.

The competitive advantages of Pelindo IV depend on 81.2 per cent from financial perspective, customer perspective, internal process perspective and learning perspective, and 18.2 per cent from the other factor. The result of measurement model of competitive advantage in Figure 2 is significantly (p-value < 0.05) measured by financial perspective performance, customer perspective performance, internal process perspective performance and learning perspective performance. On the basis of the highest coefficient loading factor, it can be shown that the most powerful competitive advantages are measured by learning perspective. The high value of competitive advantage of Pelindo IV, Makassar, Indonesia, is especially seen from the learning perspective performance. The order result of BSC for measuring the competitive advantages is as follows: learning perspective performance, financial perspective performance, customer perspective performance and internal process perspective performance.

Originality of this study looks at the following three points: first, the measurement competitive advantages. Previous studies used measurements of cost leadership strategy, differential strategy and focus strategy as competitive advantages measuring (Porter, 1985; Warf and Stutz, 2007; Clulow et al., 2003). This study uses BSCs with four indicators (financial perspective result, customer perspective result, internal process perspective result and learning perspective). Second, on the other hand, several studies have investigated the BSCs as performance measurement (Ozturk and Coskun, 2014; Malgwi and Dahiru, 2014; Binden et al., 2014). Third, this study uses the factor analysis to measure the competitive advantage by BSCs, which is different from the previous study analysis.