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Overdue athletes' salaries, i.e. late, partial or nonpayment of athletes' salaries in professional sports, increases the risk for match-fixing as athletes are rendered more vulnerable to match-fixing approaches and for giving in to such proposals. Even though research and stakeholders recognize the aforementioned risk, the body of literature addressing the issue from a preventative legal perspective is slim to nonexistent. While the Council of Europe's Macolin Convention has stimulated various measures to tackle match-fixing in both ratifying and signatory States, this paper focuses on the Convention's prevention objective by examining how international, European and Belgian football organizations enforce compliance by their affiliated members with their contractual and other obligations. The paper argues that while football federations do take initiative in the matter, they may not yet have found a way to effectively protect the integrity of their competitions when it comes to their approach towards the issue at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With recent technological advancements, quantitative analysis has become an increasingly important area within professional sports. However, the manual process of collecting data on relevant match events like passes, goals and tacklings comes with considerable costs and limited consistency across providers, affecting both research and practice. In football, while automatic detection of events from positional data of the players and the ball could alleviate these issues, it is not entirely clear what accuracy current state-of-the-art methods realistically achieve because there is a lack of high-quality validations on realistic and diverse data sets. This paper adds context to existing research by validating a two-step rule-based pass and shot detection algorithm on four different data sets using a comprehensive validation routine that accounts for the temporal, hierarchical and imbalanced nature of the task. Our evaluation shows that pass and shot detection performance is highly dependent on the specifics of the data set. In accordance with previous studies, we achieve F-scores of up to 0.92 for passes, but only when there is an inherent dependency between event and positional data. We find a significantly lower accuracy with F-scores of 0.71 for passes and 0.65 for shots if event and positional data are independent. This result, together with a critical evaluation of existing methodologies, suggests that the accuracy of current football event detection algorithms operating on positional data is currently overestimated. Further analysis reveals that the temporal extraction of passes and shots from positional data poses the main challenge for rule-based approaches. Our results further indicate that the classification of plays into shots and passes is a relatively straightforward task, achieving F-scores between 0.83 to 0.91 ro rule-based classifiers and up to 0.95 for machine learning classifiers. We show that there exist simple classifiers that accurately differentiate shots from passes in different data sets using a low number of human-understandable rules. Operating on basic spatial features, our classifiers provide a simple, objective event definition that can be used as a foundation for more reliable event-based match analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been a significant interest around leadership development practices within the field of management. Leadership development is particularly important within the highly competitive sport industry, where leadership performance is under constant and ever-increasing scrutiny. For sport organizations, strong leadership can be a source of significant competitive advantage, and hence, increased focus on leadership and investment into the development of talent has occurred. However, there has been a surprising lack of scholarly research into leadership and the associated processes within the sport management field, particularly from an Australian perspective. This paper addresses this gap as it examines the nature of experience-based leadership development practices within three of Australia's leading professional sport organizations. Following a qualitative multicase study approach, the thematic analysis of 15 in-depth semistructured interviews with members of the senior executive of each case organization suggested that the national sport organizations placed significant emphasis on experience-based opportunities as a way of developing their workforce. Via the adoption of McCall's experience-based leadership development framework, four main themes emerged: the importance of experience-based opportunities for leadership development; leadership development through involvement and exposure to experiences; networking opportunities gained from experienced-based exposure; and the relationship between on-the-job experience and formal leadership education. These findings extend our knowledge of current leadership development and practices implemented in national sport organizations and highlight the importance of effective leadership within highly competitive sport markets. Based on these findings, implications are provided for current practice illustrating the benefits that an experience-based approach to leadership development within sport organizations can have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how professional wrestling expanded stereotyped race, national, and class images toward the Spanish public in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The professional wrestling circuit of music halls, theaters, and circuses helped connect a myriad of grappling practices spanning different national traditions. Nonetheless, it also helped convey different racial, ethnic, and national images within a frame of social class divide at a time of rampant imperialism and colonial domination. In this context, Spain experimented with a short-lived wrestling mania, with several international wrestling tournaments and jujutsu exhibitions before World War I. In these tournaments, both fighters and patrons exploited racial stereotypes as a way to better sell the activity to the paying audience, connecting with, but also reinforcing, the perceptions that populated the collective imagination about different people, due to ethnicity or nationality linked also to social class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the gendered, disruptive effects and affective intensities of COVID-19 and the ways that women working in the sport and fitness sector were prompted to establish more-than-human connection through technologies, the environment, and objects. Bringing together theoretical and embodied insights from object interviews with 17 women sport and fitness professionals (i.e., athletes, coaches, instructors) in Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper advances a relational understanding of the multiple human and nonhuman forces that shape and transform women's wellbeing during pandemic. Drawing upon particular feminist materialisms (i.e., Barad, Braidotti, Bennett), we reconceptualize wellbeing to move beyond biomedical formulations of health or illness. Through our analysis and discussion, we trace embodied ways of knowing that produce wellbeing as a more-than-human entanglement, a gendered phenomenon that can be understood as an ongoing negotiation of affective, material, cultural, technological and environmental forces during a period of disruption and uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has heavily affected a wide range of stakeholders in the sport sector. Yet, some professional sports managed to gain exceptions from the restrictive anti-COVID-19 policies. The current paper assumes that the effects could have been ambiguous. On the one hand, professional sports could have benefitted from its position as provider of live TV events. On the other hand, the exceptions for professional sports could have stirred the anger of a frustrated public. We explore these questions by examining two unique dataset on TV ratings for and identification with the German men's national team during the EURO 2020. We find that the national football team, which has been depicted as last national 'campfire', has been a relative loser in terms of viewership, which might, however, also reflect the team's long-term decline. We find also that approval of a special treatment for professional football has been linked to higher team identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports referees are not always as unbiased or impartial as they ideally should be. Studies have shown, for example, that in their decisions, referees seem to be biased against people of different race, gender or height or biased in favour of the home team. There is no doubt that such partiality work against official ideals of fairness and non-discrimination in sport. The problem with this is that being affected by implicit biases potentially causes the referees to make unfair decisions, with the result that some people are penalised disproportionately within the realm of sport. In this paper, we argue that sports organisations ought to require referees to undergo implicit bias testing as part of their mandatory training, in order to gain knowledge about biases and to take the proper counter-measures to combat such biases. Finally, we present and critically discuss four objections to our argument and conclude that none of them are plausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data analysis and action recognition algorithms to conduct in-depth research and analysis of professional sports competition judging and designs a professional sports competition-assisted judging system for use in actual judging. In this paper, a wearable motion capture system based on an inertial sensing unit is developed and designed for kayaking technical motion monitoring to achieve the acquisition, analysis, and quantitative evaluation of kayaker motion data. To limit the gyroscope and pose estimation error, a gradient descent method is used for multisensor data fusion to achieve athlete pose update, and a quaternion-driven human skeletal vector model is proposed to reconstruct the kayaker's paddling technical movements. By calculating the angular sequences of the left shoulder, right shoulder, left elbow, and right elbow joints of the athlete's upper limbs and comparing them with the optical motion capture system, the results show that the motion capture system developed in this paper is comparable to the optical motion capture system in terms of measurement accuracy. It ultimately affects the result of pose estimation. Therefore, high-resolution networks and low-resolution networks can continuously maintain high-resolution features of the image by allowing each representation layer to repeatedly accept the representation information of other networks. A step matrix model is constructed to encode the multiscale global temporal information of action sequences, and action classification is achieved by calculating the response of the step matrix of test samples to the step matrix of each category of actions. The algorithm achieves 78.96%, 91.84%, and 91.18% accuracy of action classification on the Northwestern-UCLA database, MSRC-12 database, and CAD-60 database, respectively. The designed visual motion tracking system was applied to record the motion data of the experimental subjects in the fine motion assessment task and construct the motion assessment database. The experimental results show that the average error between the prediction results of the proposed action assessment method and the manual scoring is 1.83, and the automated assessment of fine movements is effectively realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multilayer Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (MFCM) represents an approach for analyzing situations, which allows the simulation, inference, theorem proving of tendencies, and verification of theories, among other things. This paper reviews the promise of this method in a novelty case study of management of professional sports clubs. Professional sports clubs have the possibility of making their management profitable through the proper management of their commercial product portfolio. This possibility is conditioned by the adequate configuration of each component of the commercial product portfolio, namely: Brand licensing, sponsorship, television and media rights, sporting and training rights, and hospitality. Each component of the commercial portfolio must maximize its attractiveness and desirability for each target customer segment. For these purposes, tools that contribute to manage the sports products will be vital to guarantee their commercial success. This article proposes a model based on MFCMs for supporting the management of products in professional sports – an intelligent decision-making system –, conceptually based on the "par conditio" principle. The model considers different aspects related to the "par conditio" principle, such as the socioeconomic environment where the sports activity is carried out, the legal bases of the professional competence, and other sporting aspects (stadium, fans, etc.), which are organized in layers, to analyze the behavior of the different components of the commercial portfolio. It is tested for the two most common sports in Latin America, football and baseball, considering countries of this region where these sports have good economic performance, both to analyze and understand the current situation of the sports products, and infer more appropriate configurations. Several specific case studies are carried out with encouraging results. The paper successfully shows the potentialities of MFCM for diverse purposes, particularly those named above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Academic endeavors and societal demands have propelled the growth of sport management as a field of study. Although internationally renowned sport management-related journals provide a broad range of study topics, the lists of papers featured in these publications are not exhaustive in terms of geographic coverage. Determining the evolution of sport management research necessitates an evaluation of research trends in each region. Method: To reach our objective, we conducted a fiveyear bibliometric evaluation of Japanese sport management-related periodicals. Five major Japanese sport management-related magazines have published a total of 115 articles over the past five years. Results: The majority of research was classified under the marketing category, followed by the management, sport for development, and sport development categories. These results indicate that each of the five journals has a concentration on sport management research, but also has specialized areas that distinguish it from the others. By cross-tabulating the categories and settings of published publications, we discovered that the vast majority of research on professional and elite sport as well as sport events was undertaken in the marketing realm. There are numerous professional and amateur sport leagues in Japan, as well as two mega-sporting events that have taken place in the last three years: the Rugby World Cup and the Olympic and Paralympic Games. This has led to a large number of studies in the marketing domain focusing on the professional sport and sport event category. Conclusions: In conclusion, three potential research directions for sport management have been identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, because the complex system discrete model has brought good results in the application of many research directions such as human management analysis, control system prediction, and animal group prediction, how to combine the complex system discrete model with the prediction of enterprise brand communication effect has become a current research hotspot. Based on this, this paper studies the application of the discrete model based on the complex system in sports club to enterprise brand communication and designs a model of the impact of professional sports club on enterprise brand communication based on the SIR model and PSO algorithm. Firstly, this paper analyzes the research status of the impact on enterprise brand communication at home and abroad and optimizes and improves the impact of professional sports clubs on enterprise brand communication and the shortcomings of big data analysis technology in the current research. The complex system discrete model can accurately analyze the enterprise brand communication and conduct big data mining analysis with known professional sports clubs to achieve accurate calculation. The results show that in the process of analyzing the impact of professional sports clubs and enterprise brand communication, the communication mode design of professional sports clubs based on SIR-PSO algorithm can not only effectively deal with various complex discrete data evaluated by club users but also analyze and evaluate the impact of professional sports clubs on enterprise brand communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates determinants of local market television viewership demand for Major League Soccer (MLS). We examine the effects of team quality and outcome uncertainty and compare our estimates to recent work on the determinants of MLS attendance. We find that local viewership for MLS is not particularly sensitive to uncertainty over game outcomes. However, we do find effects of local team quality and visiting superstars on viewership levels. The results also exhibit evidence of pure substitution effects where viewership transfers to attendance demand as the season progresses, and in which viewership is substituted for attendance in the face of sellouts or poor weather conditions. Team strategy and league policy implications are discussed, along with directions for future research on MLS and local viewership demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to examine the "external effect" of a migrated star player on their domestic sport industries. By exploring the new aspect of star power, this study provides important insight and critical implication to many relevant stakeholders in the professional sports league. Particularly, this is critical under the recent circumstance where the globalization of sports products becomes the central strategic issue of the world-class leagues. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the external effect of star players migrated from three Asian leagues (Japan, Korea and Taiwan) to Major League Baseball in the USA, the world-class baseball league, on their domestic league attendance demand was empirically investigated. For the analysis, comprehensive historical data from various reliable sources from each league were collected. Findings: The findings of the paper strongly support the external effect of migrated stars significantly existing in all the three leagues. The effect is consistent across various measurements of migrated star players. More interestingly, the effect was found to be mixed across different leagues; for example, migrated star players increases in domestic league attendance in Japan, while it decreases in Korea and Taiwan. This indicates that the external effect of migrated star players depends on the characteristics of the domestic leagues. In addition, it was found that the external effect was substantial enough to compare to the effect of major demand drivers such as team winning, competitive balance and star power. For managerial implications, this study also provides revenue projections induced by the impact of migrated star players. Originality/value: This study opens a new chapter related to star power topic and immediately calls for future studies regarding this external effect, particularly, theoretical and behavioral approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the progress of society and the development of science, the competition of competitive sports has become extremely fierce, and the talents of competitive sports have gradually shown their strong vitality. Elite athletes are an important group for the development of China's competitive sports industry. To continue to progress and develop, it is inseparable from the careful training of elite athletes. In order to closely integrate the needs of China's socialist modernization and the training of elite athletes, sports schools that focus on cultivating elite athletes need to strengthen their sense of urgency and mission. It is necessary to meet new challenges at the height of social development and constantly optimize the construction of the curriculum system and the reform of the teaching operation mechanism. The discussion and research of the current elite athlete's talent training model has become a real problem faced by sports colleges, education departments, and sports departments. This paper conducts an experiment on the modeling of the sports athlete's social network based on machine learning, and the experimental data are shown as follows: among the athlete social network pictures optimized by machine learning, there are 1,200 male athletes, accounting for 48%, and 1,000 female athletes, accounting for 40%. Before the optimization, male athletes accounted for 70.58% and female athletes accounted for 16.3%, which was a decrease of 22.58% for male athletes and an increase of 23.7% for female athletes. From the above data, it can be seen that after the research on the social network of sports athletes through machine learning, it has a positive effect on the development of the social network of athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically assesses peer effects of high performing team members in reciprocally interdependent team production. Using data from the National Basketball Association (NBA), we identify peer effects by exploiting unforeseen in‐game injuries of high performing players. Results indicate that without a high performing player, other team members maintain efficiency and the division of tasks among each other. However, they slightly increase risk taking and decrease their individual output, resulting in an inferior overall outcome. These effects depend on whether a high performing player has a team‐oriented or a self‐oriented role in the team. Additionally, we observe that relatively skilled players try to step in for the absent high performing player. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to obtain scientific quantitative decision-making of physical education integrated ideological and political teaching in college, and improve the teaching effect of college physical education integrated ideology and politics, a teaching effect evaluation model of physical education integrated ideology and politics based on principal component analysis is proposed. Clear teaching contents, activities planning and organization, sports teams, such as evaluation index, according to each evaluation index, data collection and initial evaluation, in combination with principal component analysis (pca), assimilation process evaluation index, and correlation matrix eigenvalue and characteristic vector and determine the number of principal components, fuse the sports education teaching effect evaluation model of the building. Experiments show that the model of the linear correlation coefficient and the rank correlation coefficient of average 97.3% and 96.7%, respectively, were higher than other methods, fusion and its various professional sports education teaching effect are present must rise, the score of one of the English major students score increased 0.75, the lowest building professional and a higher level of ascension 0.12. The accuracy of the evaluation results of the model in this paper is higher, which can effectively improve the effect of college sports integrated ideological and political teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate assessment of physical fatigue is crucial to preventing physical injury caused by excessive exercise, overtraining during daily exercise and professional sports training. However, as a subjective feeling of an individual, physical fatigue is difficult for others to objectively evaluate. Heart rate variability (HRV), which is derived from electrocardiograms (ECG) and controlled by the autonomic nervous system, has been demonstrated to be a promising indicator for physical fatigue estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel method for the automatic and objective classification of physical fatigue based on HRV. First, a total of 24 HRV features were calculated. Then, a feature selection method was proposed to remove useless features that have a low correlation with physical fatigue and redundant features that have a high correlation with the selected features. After feature selection, the best 11 features were selected and were finally used for physical fatigue classifying. Four machine learning algorithms were trained to classify fatigue using the selected features. The experimental results indicate that the model trained using the selected 11 features could classify physical fatigue with high accuracy. More importantly, these selected features could provide important information regarding the identification of physical fatigue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This theoretical paper discusses philosophical and methodological approaches underlying the study of fatigue and the existing models and hypotheses of fatigue. In our view, the most suitable framework for analyzing the phenomena of nature and physiological states of the human organism is that of dialectical materialism, contrary to the commonly held reductionist and idealist approaches. As such, we show that psychophysiological, environmental, and temporal factors interact simultaneously during physical activities, with quantitative changes in their constituent elements. If, or when, these quantitative changes reach a certain magnitude, there is a qualitative change in desired performance, in other words, fatigue. We also show how the relations between different factors that contribute to fatigue influence such quantitative and qualitative changes. Our proposed model is useful for scientists and sports professionals with a contextual understanding of the factors that contribute to fatigue, and consequently can provide insights into the development of interventions to improve physical-technical-tactical performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this article is to present the history of Polish football fandom as a social process which has coincided with the processes of transformation of Polish society over the last few decades. The fan movement in Poland dates back to the early 1970s when the communist authorities attempted to channel the activity of supporters. The 1980s, however, brought the development of a spontaneous movement with strong accents of hooliganism. The post-1989 transformation led to an economic and social crisis, with the rule of anarchy in football stadiums. Along with the formation of the democratic order, the fan movement evolved into different sections focused on particular aspects of activity. The paper is also devoted to the ideological dimension of fan culture, related to the confict with the government at the turn of the 2010s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Injury rates in runners are as high as 80%. here, we focus on the concept of foundational health including sleep, recovery, nutrition, stress and physical health and how it can reduce injuries. METHODS: The literature was reviewed to find papers linking running injuries and athletic performance to the foundational health topics discussed. RESULTS: There are many factors that can improve athletic performance and reduce injuries in runners other than the often-discussed topics: training philosophies, footwear, and running form. This paper shows how a multidisciplinary approach including education on sleep, rest, stress, nutrition, strength, and mobility all can improve performance and reduce injuries. CONCLUSIONS: The care and management of an injured runner is multifactorial and the treatment should be as well. By optimizing foundational health, the sports medicine professional will not only reduce injury risk, but also improve performance and overall health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the development of economic ties between professional sports and media in the past ten years by the example of the Olympic Games media coverage. The main purpose of the research is to identify the regularities that are formed in the communicative environment of elite sports. The paper is focused on the Olympic Games as the global sports events that include several types of sports competitions. The subject of the study is the sport as a product. The object of the study is the sport entertainment products in the media sphere. The relevance of the research is that the interconnections between sports and media expand and change rapidly and are influenced not only by the development of new technologies but also by a coronavirus situation. The systematization of literary sources on the selected matter indicated the need for further studies to reflect the rampant evolution of sports media and the lack of unified terminology for viewing professional sports through the prism of mass media as a media product. The methodology of the research is based on the analysis of open-source statistical data and a set of empirical materials (official websites of sports organizations, TV channels, and social media pages). The author viewed these materials from four perspectives: the audience, the marketing approach, the sports themselves as a source of information, the mainstream and the new media. The results allowed identifying the main trends of the information space formation around the object under study. These trends prove that the structure of the «Elite Sports» media product is becoming more complex, and the number of communicative links and broadcasting opportunities of sports events has increased. Finally, the author proposed a conceptual model of representing professional sports as a media product on the example of the major sports events, through defining its communication links. The findings of the research could be useful for setting vectors for studying mainstream and new media in the chosen area. The study can be of interest to sports journalists, bloggers, managers, and officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the prevalence of professional sport in contemporary societies, there is little known by academics about professional sports consumers. We know much more about other cultural domains, such as music and the arts. This study examines consumption and sport in Canada to further understand how patterns of sports consumption fit into broader leisure lifestyles. Through investigation of how five professional sports leagues in Canada are consumed, this paper draws conclusions about the lifestyle of these consumers to assess which prevailing theories of cultural consumption are most useful for this segment. By utilising latent class analysis and regression modelling, this paper finds that cultural omnivores are the most likely consumers of these leagues. This group also maps onto theorisations of omnivores as high-status persons. Additionally, this paper suggests that theories of cosmopolitanism in omnivorous consumption may have particular salience for the Canadian case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence, nature, and social make-up of the cultural omnivore has been a topic of consistent scholarly inquiry in recent decades. Studies exist examining these dynamics both across cultural fields (inter-domain) and fully within them (intra-domain). However, even as one of the most culturally salient domains of leisure, sport is often relegated to the side-lines of these debates. This study sets out to analyse the leisure 'following' of professional sports. Using large-scale survey data from Canada, and employing a variety of statistical methods, this paper finds numerous distinct omnivorous categories, as well as a univorous group of professional sports consumers. The results reveal that the omnivorous groups have elevated levels of cultural and economic capital. However, it is two more selective omnivorous profiles, rather than the most omnivorous group, that show the highest concentration of cultural and economic capital. These results shed doubt on the status of intra-domain omnivores by volume as the consumption profile of high status groups. This paper also presents gendered results from these consumption groups in the first large scale investigation of female professional sports following in Canada or elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The addition of products to the core of matches by professional sports teams (PSTs) has received much coverage. However, there has been limited work as to how their stadiums are used to stage non-sporting events. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how clubs in the English Football League (EFL) use their venues to diversify into other markets. Design/methodology/approach: Secondary sources were used to categorise the teams who played in the EFL by: average division turnover, stadium capacity and stadium age. Semi-structured interviews were held with a member of the commercial teams of 21 clubs. Findings: Clubs use their stadiums to supply a range of products and working with partners is commonplace. These products are targeted at a range of stakeholders, such as supporters, the local community and regionally based organisations. In addition to their own efforts, increased geographical coverage for clubs usually develops in three ways: via internal marketing by local organisations who use the facilities, agents who market the stadium for the club and the EFL who market the league/clubs holistically. Research limitations/implications: The use of a stadium allows PSTs to diversify by providing new products for new markets. In this instance it has led to the development of capabilities in areas such as conferencing, funerals and weddings. Originality/value: This is one of the first papers to examine the capabilities developed by PSTs that lie outside the staging of matches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Czechoslovak national team finished as the runners-up of the 1934 FIFA World Cup in Italy but it was welcomed as moral winners by hundreds of thousands in their home country. Never before had a sporting event been followed so keenly by the largest social strata, thanks to the live radio broadcast of the final match. The tournament left a deep imprint not only in the collective memory but also in popular culture. This paper traces the reception of the event, showing how its image was used as the showcase of the First Czechoslovak Republic, how it was transformed and misused gradually by the communist regime that presented it as a deterrent example of elitism and prima donna behaviour in professional sport, and finally reinvented at the beginning of the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organizational field that constitutes English rugby union has undergone substantial change since 1995. This paper builds on earlier work by O'Brien and Slack (2003a) that established that a shift from an amateur to a professional dominant logic in English rugby union took place between 1995 and 2000. Utilizing ideas about institutional logics, isomorphism, and diffusion, the current paper explores how this shift in logics actually evolved. Data from 43 interviews with key individuals in English rugby union form the main data source for the study. The results show that isomorphic change in accord with a new professional logic diffused throughout the field by way of three distinct diffusion patterns: status driven, bandwagon, and eventually, the social learning of adaptive responses. An initial period of high uncertainty, intense competitive pressures, and sustained financial crises resulted in unrestrained mimesis in the first two seasons of the professional era. However, this gave way in the third season to increased interorganizational linkages, coalition building, and political activity that promoted normative and coercive pressures for a consolidation of the game's infrastructure and future development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper maps the current ownership patterns of North American major professional sports franchises in order to assess the extent to which they are interconnected with media/entertainment conglomerates. First, the 120 franchises are classified according to owner's industrial sector. Second, five models of linkages between franchises and media/entertainment corporations are followed by case studies representative of each. The paper concludes that indeed empirical evidence supports the alleged increasing control of North American pro sport franchises by large media/entertainment conglomerates. However, the paper also demonstrates that the phenomenon involves much more diversity than the major conglomerates commonly identified in the current literature. Finally, the paper discusses the impacts of this trend on sport, as well as on fans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information related to various research papers on sport management. The research paper entitled "Taking sports out of the courts: Alternative dispute resolution and the international court of arbitration for sport," by C.J. Burger focused on the reasons why the International Olympic Committee's Court of Arbitration for Sport can be utilized as a blueprint for the proper use of arbitration in sport. Research paper "A mass sports disaster-Hilisborough ten years on: An overview of the legal processes and outcomes," by H.J. Hartley provides an overview of the legal processes and outcomes, which followed the Hilisborough sporting disaster on April 15, 1989. Pertinent information throughout the article included the factors that contributed to the disaster, including a catalogue of failures in the previous 12 years which led up to the disaster; what crowd management procedures should have been taken,and the legal decisions made by the court. Another article entitled "Playing with family values: The attraction of minor league baseball," by M.H. Rodgers dealt with fan dissatisfaction with Major League Baseball and how there is an increasing infatuation for minor and independent leagues. The author discussed the appeal of minor league baseball along with the idea that minor and independent league baseball are a thriving and profitable new business.

The article presents information related to research papers sports, published in different journals. "Performance productivity and quality of frontline employees in service organizations," by J. Singh adds to the discussion on the importance of frontline employees to the success of service organizations. The significant findings in this paper suggest that there is a distinction between productivity and quality, and when burnout increases, frontline employees tend to maintain their current productivity levels while quality declines. This paper was published in the Sociology of Sport Journal. The purpose of the research paper, "Sports marketing. Going for gold," by R. Gardyn, is to investigate the state of Olympic fandom and the various issues surrounding marketers' ability to make an impact with consumers during the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. This article is published in the journal, American Demographics. The research paper by D. James, "The tipoff: How NBA can regain its game," published in the journal Marketing News, investigates the status of the National Basketball Association among fans and marketers. A number of factors are examined to shed some light on the apparent decrease in fan interest.

Previous research has found that sports games increase certain crimes including theft and vandalism, but the relationship between sports and other offenses such as motor vehicle theft, robbery, and assaults is mixed. Using regular season National Hockey League (NHL) game data and city-level, incident-level crime data from four large U.S. cities, this paper estimates if professional ice hockey games played at home is associated with increases in property crimes, alcohol-related crimes, and assaults during and right after games the over course of four NHL seasons. Results show that NHL games lead to small but significant increases in property crimes and assaults. There is no significant effect for alcohol-related crimes. Implications and suggestions for future work are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines epistemological and ontological issues in ethnographic research and texts. Based on my experiences as a subject in an ethnographic study of pro wrestling. I present an ethnography of the ethnographer. In this paper, I discuss problems arising from a hierarchy of understanding that privileges the ethnographer, the primacy of visualism, and a desire to penetrate and uncover hidden truth. I propose that a performative approach to ethnography recognizes the agency of the ethnographic object and opens access to other sensorial phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid technological advances in sports, the number of athletics increases gradually. For sports professionals, it is obligatory to oversee and explore the athletics pose in athletes' training. Key frame extraction of training videos plays a significant role to ease the analysis of sport training videos. This paper develops a sports actions' classification system for accurately classifying athlete's actions. The key video frames are extracted from the sports training video to highlight the distinct actions in sports training. Subsequently, a fully convolutional network (FCN) is used to extract the region of interest (ROI) pose detection of frames followed by the application of a convolution neural network (CNN) to estimate the pose probability of each frame. Moreover, a distinct key frame extraction approach is established to extract the key frames considering neighboring frames' probability differences. The experimental results determine that the proposed method showed better performance and can recognize the athlete's posture with an average classification rate of 98%. The experimental results and analysis validate that the proposed key frame extraction method outperforms its counterparts in key pose probability estimation and key pose extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International sports are dominated by Western nations for many decades. The popularity of tennis has risen from the aristocratic entertainment of the elite upper class to the sport of the middle class. Tennis is one of the most successful women's sports worldwide, the female tennis players among the highest paid athletes. Players from the former socialist countries are taking on an increasing role inglobal tennis, which has developed into a professional sport. The article describes the causes of the phenomenon focusing on the already retired and still active elit hungarian women tennis players. The research was carried out among retired and active Hungarian elite tennis players. Data was collected with the help of questionnaries. Statistical analysis confirms that the success of tennis players' sports performance and sports culture is influenced by different factors. The main contribution of our paper is that a tennis career already functions as a livelihood model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Professional sport occupies a prominent cultural position in societies across the globe and commercial organisations make use of this to promote their products. The present scoping review explores existing academic literature on the relationship between professional sports clubs and food and drink marketing and considers how this relationship may impact upon the public's health.Design: The scoping review searched six databases. Experts were also consulted. Records written in languages other than English were excluded. We also excluded records relating to mega events (e.g. Olympics, Football World Cup) and alcohol marketing, because of the attention already given to these.Setting: Professional sports clubs.Results: We identified 18 166 titles, reviewed 163 abstracts and read twenty-six full texts. We included six papers in the review. Four were from Australia and New Zealand. The Australasian literature focused largely on the marketing of foods and beverages to children and the potential impact on consumption. Single papers from researchers in Turkey and the USA were identified. The Turkish paper analysed shirt sponsorship in football leagues internationally and showed food and beverage (including alcohol) companies were the most common sponsors. The US paper examined a mixed reaction to a football team named after an energy drink.Conclusions: Commercial relationships between professional sports clubs and Big Food corporations have largely eluded scrutiny in much of the world. The current review highlights the lack of public health research on these relationships. Research exploring the interdependent commercial practices of food and drink companies and professional sports clubs is urgently needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity and profitability of American gridiron football is beyond dispute. Recent polls put football as the overwhelming favorite of people who follow at least one sport and huge revenues are reported at both the professional and the university level. We know, however, that what is the case tells us little about what ought to be the case, and it is to the latter question that this paper is directed. I offer a three-pronged attack on the ethical acceptability of American football, both amateur and professional, based on (1) harm to the players, (2) objectification of the players, and (3) harm to others done by the players, leading to the conclusion that the sport, as currently constituted, is morally unacceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nutritional supplements (NS) are denned as concentrated sources of nutrients and other substances that have a nutritional or physiological effect and that are used in high frequency among athletes. The study aimed to create a prediction profile for young elite athletes to identify those athletes who have a higher relative risk for using NS. The second objective was to examine the hypothesis that the consumption of NS paves a gateway for the use of illicit drugs and doping substances. A self-designed anonymous paper-and-pencil questionnaire was used to examine the prevalence of NS consumption, doping, and illicit drug use in elite athletes with a mean age of 17 years (SD = 4 years). Logistic regression analysis was employed to assess whether NS consumption can be predicted by independent variables (e.g., biographical data, training characteristics, drug consumption behavior) to create the prediction profile for NS use. 55% and 5% of the athletes (n = 536) responded positively to having used NS and illicit drugs, respectively. Nutritional supplement consumption was positively correlated with age (OR: 1.92; CI: 1.21 to 3.05), the desire to enhance performance to become an Olympic or World Champion (OR: 3.72; CI: 2.33 to 6.01), and being educated about NS (OR: 2.76; CI: 1.73 to 4.45). It was negatively correlated with training frequency (OR: 0.55; CI: 0.35 to 0.86) and the use of nicotine (OR: 0.29; CI: 0.1 to 0.74) but did not correlate with illicit drug use and alcohol consumption. The present results show that NS are used on a large scale in elite sports. The prediction profile presented in this article may help to identify those athletes who have a high risk for using NS to plan potential education and prevention models more individually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at analysing Croatian professional sport and the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on it. Football was taken as a model for other team sports because of the share of professional sports clubs in the Republic of Croatia in football. In addition, the legal framework set in football may apply to other sports for successfully developing a similar pattern. The analyses are conducted into the revenues (sponsorships, ticketing and TV rights), and expenses (expenses on behalf of players remuneration) of the football clubs in the First Croatian Football League, providing an overview of the professional status of sports clubs, athletes and coaches. It also encompasses an analysis into measures taken by the Government of the Republic of Croatia to support Croatian sport during the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 crisis has been taken as a possible starting position for better regulation of sports in future, especially as regards the professional sports in the Republic of Croatia contributing significantly to the promotion of the Republic of Croatia worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we show that the right to determine the sequence of moves in a dynamic team tournament improves the chances of winning the contest. Because studying dynamic team tournaments – like R&D races – with interim feedback is difficult with company data, we examine decisions of highly paid professionals in soccer penalty shootouts and show that teams whose captains can decide about the shooting sequence are more likely to win the shootout. So, managerial decisions matter for outcomes of dynamic tournaments and we discuss potential reasons for this finding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Talent compression is the labor market phenomenon where the average productivity differential between participants declines and has been used to explain the overall increase in competition within some professional sports markets. A finding that competitiveness is uniquely driven by talent compression is consistent with Rottenberg (1956), who argued that resource distribution is independent of factors that are invariant to labor productivity. Design/methodology/approach: Rather than incorporate MLB team roster turnover as many of the past studies have done, we prefer to measure of all-star turnover in membership. Problematically, movement from an MLB team to an MLB team is limited by rule, finances and the fact that there are very few teams competing for player services. In contrast, All-Star membership is typically costlessly chosen by many millions of fans, league players and managers. In this way, All-Star voting should be invariant to many of the factors that affect movement from an MLB team to an MLB team. Findings: In the end, we find that a close association between all-star turnover rates and the makeup of MLB's labor pool. Originality/value: The paper offers a new measure of player mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has, among other things, a significant impact on the economic situation of sports in general and professional soccer in particular. Our paper points out the main effects of the crisis on professional soccer. To this end, the general effects of the pandemic on sports will be briefly outlined, followed by a discussion of matches played behind closed doors. Based on the general conditions and particularities of the team sports industry, possible solutions for dealing with any problems arising from the pandemic will be discussed from the perspective of economics. As a result, we prefer intra-industry market-based solutions such as a solidarity fund or measures of self-regulation to possible state subsidies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A survey of the philosophy of sport literature reveals that arguments regarding the issue of sex segregation in athletics have been advanced from time to time, but there has been little sustained discussion, no consensus, and no change in existing practice. In this paper, an effort to advance the conversation, I begin with Jane English’s seminal 1978 article as a springboard and employ existing literature on the question of sex segregation in order to raise difficulties with English’s analysis and outline the basic alternative positions that have been taken on the issue. My own contribution to the conversation is in the introduction of four distinctions – between individual and team sports, direct and indirect competition, contact and non-contact sports, and amateur and professional sports – that have not been part of the discussion about the conditions under which men and women might compete against one another. These distinctions resolve several difficulties noted by others and suggest a more nuanced conclusion about desirable changes to the structure of sporting competition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sociologists have long argued that institutions like religion or the economy can become relatively distinct spheres that facilitate and constrain action, goal setting, and decision-making. But few empirical studies have looked closely at how institutions become relatively distinct cultural and structural domains. This paper examines how institutional entrepreneurs—in this case, Major League Baseball (MLB) sportswriters—build and sustain institutional boundaries by considering how they create a distinct cultural discourse that infuses baseball places, times, and events with culturally distinct meanings. Drawing from sportswriters’ columns, documentaries, and monographs written on baseball I show that MLB entrepreneurs have developed and disseminated a discourse oriented around the generalized medium of sport exchange, interaction, and communication: competitiveness. Using these data, this article examines how baseball writing becomes quantified and embodied in tangible and intangible forms. Additionally, the paper draws on sport columns that illustrate how MLB entrepreneurs protect the autonomy of a sacred core (the Hall of Fame) from internal threats (gambling and performance-enhancing drugs) and external corruption (the influence of money). The paper ends with a discussion of implications for the applicability of the findings to other sports and institutional domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Professional sports organizations have a long tradition of utilizing stories as part of their marketing efforts. However, as the media landscape has undergone considerable change as a result of information and communication technologies, most notably through social media, the conditions under which storytelling evolve have altered significantly. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explain how storytelling in the sports sector becomes integrated in social media. Design/methodology/approach - A conceptual review in three sequential steps is carried out. First, extant literature on the role and effects of storytelling is reviewed. This is followed by a review of the interplay between storytelling and the contemporary media landscape, with a particular focus on social media. Third, the authors link both literatures and, by doing so, illustrate the dynamic interplay of storytelling and social media in the sports sector. Findings - The conceptual review shows that storytelling can enact four sequential roles that are characterized by varying degrees of co-creation which, in relation to extant literature, has strong implications for the manageability of storytelling from the perspective of professional sports organizations. Originality/value - Based on the identified sequential roles that storytelling can enact in social media, this paper contributes to the field of sports marketing by depicting how the dynamics between storytelling and the social media landscape exhibit a shifting degree of manageability with regards to storytelling from the perspective of professional sports organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much research has examined the composition of sport media and those charged with constructing it, namely sport journalists and editors, far less has explored an essential set of actors in the construction of news: sources. This study aimed to explore the construction of the sport media agenda from arguably the most important sport news sources: sport media relations managers. In particular, this paper asked: how do media staff in sports organisations influence the production of news? To answer this question, this paper is based on a qualitative, observational study of a professional Australian Rules football club in Australia, involving interviews, observations and document analysis. Research within a professional Australian Rules football club found that the club delivered high-quality information subsidies that met sports journalists’ newswork requirements. However, media access was almost solely limited to these information subsidies, which are highly subjective and negotiated, which in turn allowed the professional football club to significantly control the subsequent media agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional sport has been radically altered by global capitalism, expanding from its once highly localized origins into an increasingly internationalized, mediatized, and commoditized cultural form. Like other commodities, sport has branched out from saturated domestic markets in the West. The rapid development of Asian economies has witnessed a wave of economic and cultural modernization, and the subsequent emergence of middle-class consumption has seen internationally recognizable commodity signs like the English Premier League (EPL) desired for their symbolic link to global cosmopolitanism. This paper addresses the Malaysian context, where the nation-building process has been problematized by the complex racial, cultural and religious make-up of its population. It analyses the obstructive tension between local sporting developmental agenda and the orchestrated intrusion of global (predominantly Western) sports commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports video captioning refers to the task of automatically generating a textual description for sports events (football, basketball, or volleyball games). Although a great deal of previous work has shown promising performance in producing a coarse and a general description of a video but lack of professional sports knowledge, it is still quite challenging to caption a sports video with multiple fine-grained player’s actions and complex group relationship between players. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical recurrent neural network-based framework with an attention mechanism for sports video captioning, in which a motion representation module is proposed to capture individual pose attribute and dynamical trajectory cluster information with extra professional sports knowledge, and a group relationship module is employed to design a scene graph for modeling players’ interaction by a gated graph convolutional network. Moreover, we introduce a new dataset called sports video captioning dataset-volleyball for evaluation. The proposed model is evaluated on three widely adopted public datasets and our collected new dataset, on which the effectiveness of our method is well demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally policymakers have paid little attention to the consumption of steroids and other performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) in Australia. Yet, in recent times PIEDs have come to occupy an increasing amount of discursive space and, indeed, regulatory action. This newfound interest may be attributed to several broader developments, not least the perception of the involvement of organized crime in distributing PIEDs to the professional sports world and other sectors of this illicit market. This paper seeks to explore the empirical reality of the claim that the production and supply of PIEDs in Australia is the prerogative of organized crime groups. A retrospective content analysis of Australian PIED provider cases was conducted between 2010 and 2016. To widen our search, both media articles describing court cases, obtained from the Factiva database, and public online court records, using the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) database, were searched. Search terms included "steroid*", "doping" and "testosterone" in combination with the terms "traffic*", "production", "supply*" and "import*". In total, 477 PIED provider cases were identified yet most cases were duplicates, irrelevant or lacked sufficient detail, resulting in a final dataset of 144 cases. A coding schedule was developed based on existing PIED supply literature. Our data shows that most PIED provider cases took place in Queensland (41.7%), followed by New South Wales (25%) and Victoria (13.2%). Regarding the type of providers, the largest group consisted of people active in the gym industry (22%), followed by the healthcare sector (17%), the 'other' category (12%) and the security sphere (8%). Of the 144 steroid-provider cases, only 12% of the cases indicated the potential involvement of organized crime groups, with half of those being linked to outlaw motorcycle gangs. In contrast to the claims of authorities, our data suggests that organized crime groups currently play a proportionally small role in the illicit production and supply of steroids and other performance and image enhancing drugs in Australia. Indeed, various actors are involved of which only a small fraction are part of or involved with organized crime groups. Many suppliers are particularly active in the gym industry and healthcare sector. The relative presence of such suppliers has important policy implications, not least with regard to the role of criminal law in addressing the provision of PIEDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explored how the organizational cultural experiences of elite youth footballers shaped their identity development and behavior. The first author occupied the position of sport psychology practitioner-researcher within 1 professional football club over 3 years. Traditional ethnographic research methods were employed, including observations, field notes, reflections, and informal interviews. A cultural sport psychology perspective on identity as a social construction and research on the cultural characteristics of professional football were used as frameworks to make sense of the data. Despite the introduction of the Elite Player Performance Plan in 2012, the traditional masculine culture of professional football dominated the studied club. Creative nonfiction vignettes revealed that youth players were encouraged to develop their self-stories focused on a single-minded dedication to professional football. The limited identity-related resources offered at both club and cultural level are detrimental for players in terms of their well-being and long-term psychological development. From the results of this study, we suggest that future sports psychology practice within professional football may best be delivered at an organizational level. However, for sport psychologists to be effective in this role, they must develop an understanding of the subcultural features and characteristics of the organization. In line with this, there would be great value in introducing a focus on organizational culture within sport psychology professional training and education routes. Lay Summary: This paper explores the impact of the professional football culture on the psychological development of elite youth footballers. From the findings we suggest that sport psychology should be delivered at an organisational level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies around the world in the field of scientometrics and research trends analysis are carried out using bibliometric techniques to analyze a specific research area or a special journal. The purpose of this bibliometric study was to investigate the research trends of the journal of Sport Management Review based on the Web of Science (WoS) citation database in the period 2011-2018. The findings of this bibliometric study can be useful for sport researchers and the editorial board of the above-mentioned journal. The results of this study showed that countries such as the United States of America and Australia, and universities such as Griffith University and Deakin University have the highest number of publications in the journal of Sport Management Review. Moreover, D.C. Funk and S. Fairley are the most prolific authors. Also, based on the journal evaluation criteria of Web of Science, the Impact Factor of Sport Management Review has grown steadily over the years. The co-occurrence map based on the author-supplied keywords of the papers published in SMR indicates that the keywords sport, marketing, intercollegiate athletics, sport development, sponsorship, sport management, sport policy, social media, professional sport, and sport marketing were the most co-occurrences and the hot topics in the journal of SMR. The current bibliometric study indicates the growing importance of international journal of SMR in terms of research and citation impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]