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Background: The tremendous physical demands of elite performance increase the risk of elite athletes sustaining various orthopaedic injuries. Hip pain is common in high-level athletes representing up to 6% of all athletic injuries. Expedient diagnosis and effective treatment are paramount for their future sporting careers and to prevent subsequent joint degeneration. Purpose: This systematic review aimed to evaluate the outcome and the rate of return to play (RTP) following arthroscopic procedures in the hip (osteoplasty, chondroplasty, labral repair and/or debridement, capsulotomy, capsulorrhaphy or any soft tissue procedure) in elite athletes. Elite athletes were defined as those who represented their country in international contests or were competing professionally for the purpose of this study. Methods: A computer-based systematic search, following the PRISMA Guidelines, was performed on CENTRAL, PUBMED, EMBASE, SCOPUS, EBSCO, Google Scholar and Web of Science from inception until January 1, 2020, identifying studies that looked at return to sports post-hip arthroscopy in elite athletes. Weighted means were calculated for the RTP rate and duration and for patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). Results: After eligibility screening, 22 articles were included with a total of 999 male and seven female patients, 1146 hips and a mean age of 28.4 ± 3.2 years. The mean follow-up period was 35.8 ± 13.4 months and 15.9 ± 9.6% of athletes had undergone bilateral procedures. Overall, 93.9% (95% CI: 90.5, 96.6, P < 0.0001) of patients demonstrated RTP after 6.8 ± 2.1 months post-surgery and all PROMs improved post-operatively. During follow-up, 9.6% (95% CI: 5.2, 15.2, P = 0.025) patients needed further intervention. Conclusion: A high percentage of elite athletes return to the same level of competition after hip arthroscopy, with a low rate of further interventions. Hip arthroscopy appears to be an efficacious treatment for hip and/or groin pain, caused by pathologies such as FAI or labral tears, in elite athletes in the shorter term. Long term outcomes need further evaluation. [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]

There is increasing attention on the intersection of sports and politics, with a particular focus on tying owners' political donations to organization-level outcomes. However, the extant research leverages within-league panels of donations over time, so we know little about inter-league heterogeneities of political donations. Furthermore, extant work does not explicitly investigate the effect of election cycles on owners' donation patterns. These limitations create questions about the generalizability and model robustness of current research. This paper analyzes N = 2,789 donations made by 158 team owners across six professional sport leagues during the 2016, 2018, and 2020 election cycles. Models suggest that donations from WNBA owners were significantly smaller and went to more progressive recipients on average than donations from owners in other leagues. Results also suggest that donations from WNBA, NASCAR, and NHL owners became significantly more moderate during presidential election cycles than during the midterm election cycle. Implications for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is conventional in the sports economics literature to assume that professional sports teams are local monopolists and that stadium attendance below capacity has approximately zero marginal cost, implying that prices should optimally be set at the point of unit elasticity, regardless of whether teams are win maximisers or profit maximisers. The empirical literature has puzzled over the finding that prices appear to be set on the inelastic part of the demand curve. This paper approaches the problem in a different way. If the assumptions are true, then tax theory implies that an ad valorem tax such as VAT should be absorbed in full by the sellers. The paper uses company records that identify attendance and gate revenue for over 6000 English Football League games between 1971 and 1974, to examine the impact of the adoption of 10% VAT in the UK on April 1, 1973. The data suggests that pass through rates varied considerably, averaged around 25%, and were seldom zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A peculiarity in professional sports is the fact that leagues regularly hold monopoly power within their sports. However, whether and to what extent these leagues may compete with other leagues across sports is relatively unexplored. This paper contributes to the literature by analyzing competition and fan substitution in Germany, where top-tier league managers in handball, basketball, and ice hockey have recently claimed that their teams suffer from football's dominant position. Our attendance demand models confirm the existence of significant substitution effects in this setting, which suggests that leagues indeed do compete economically across sports for fan attendance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports have been deemed beneficial for the better functioning of a person. Indulgence in sporting activities is a rich and rewarding experience. However, the amount of mental stress increases for athletes who compete in professional sports and academic students. The challenging characteristics in the mental state of sports students include: Lack of Proper fitness, Poor skill development, and Overtraining enrollment are considered essential factors. Hence, in this paper, a human–computer interaction-based Augmented intercommunication framework (AICF) has been proposed to enhance the sports student's current competitiveness, performance experience, and mental state analysis. The location-based strategy is introduced to improve mental strength and training in preparation for the sports student. The behaviour recognition algorithm is integrated with AICF to boost sports students' skill production, both physically and mentally. The simulation results show that an augmented intercommunications system achieves 97% accuracy, a performance of 98%, feasibility of 95%, resilience of 16%, and an efficiency of 99%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As major sport events have been cancelled and postponed in response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the necessity to protect and provide a holistic approach to the professional athlete has never been greater. To do so one must understand the negative consequences for athletes in relation to the cancellation and postponement of such events caused by a communicable pandemic. The aim of this paper is to give a brief overview of how athletes were affected during the current COVID-19 pandemic. It will also discuss the role of athletes during a pandemic. Athletes like other celebrities can be role models. They can encourage appropriate behaviours including social distancing to help stall the spread of the virus through social media. The article ends with a short discussion on the resumption of sports after lockdown. In such a context of uncertainty, maximum caution is needed for resumption of sports to ensure a smooth return to previous high levels of training and fitness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on customer discrimination in the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL). Using the 2005–2017 annual spectator attendance data, we first show that inverse customer discrimination exists for international players. We next explore the roots of customer discrimination from the perspective of economics alongside social psychology. We find customer discrimination in the CPBL a combined outcome of taste-based and statistical discrimination, and can be explained by reference group theory. This study thus aims to develop a sports fans' customer discrimination scale, which is demonstrated to consist of three major elements: players' characteristics, prestige and experience, and spectators' confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In elite sports, training schedules are becoming increasingly complex, and a large number of parameters of such schedules need to be tuned to the specific physique of a given athlete. In this paper, we describe how extensive analysis of historical data can help optimise these parameters, and how possible pitfalls of under- and overtraining in the past can be avoided in future schedules. We treat the series of exercises an athlete undergoes as a discrete sequence of attributed events, that can be aggregated in various ways, to capture the many ways in which an athlete can prepare for an important test event. We report on a cooperation with the elite speed skating team LottoNL-Jumbo, who have recorded detailed training data over the last 15 years. The aim of the project was to analyse this potential source of knowledge, and extract actionable and interpretable patterns that can provide input to future improvements in training. We present two alternative techniques to aggregate sequences of exercises into a combined, long-term training effect, one of which based on a sliding window, and one based on a physiological model of how the body responds to exercise. Next, we use both linear modelling and Subgroup Discovery to extract meaningful models of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orienteering has gradually changed from a professional sport to a civilian sport. Especially in recent years, orienteering has been widely popularized. Many colleges and universities in China have also set up this course. With the improvement of people's living conditions, orienteering has really become a leisure sport in modern people's life. The reduced difficulty of sports enables more people to participate, but it also exposes a series of problems. As the existing positioning technology is relatively backward, the progress in personnel tracking, emergency services, and other aspects is slow. To solve these problems, a new intelligent orienteering application system is developed based on the Internet of things. ZigBee network architecture is adopted in the system. ZigBee is the mainstream scheme in the current wireless sensor network technology, which has many advantages such as convenient carrying, low power consumption, and signal stability. Due to the complex communication environment in mobile signal, the collected information is processed by signal amplification and signal anti-interference technology. By adding anti-interference devices, video isolators and other devices, the signal is guaranteed to the maximum extent. In order to verify the actual effect of this system, through a number of experimental studies including the relationship between error and traffic radius and the relationship between coverage and the number of anchor nodes, the data shows that the scheme studied in this paper has a greater improvement in comprehensive performance than the traditional scheme, significantly improving the accuracy and coverage. Especially the coverage is close to 100% in the simulation experiment. This research has achieved good results and can be widely used in orienteering training and competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contract cheating – outsourcing student assignments for a fee – presents a growing threat to the integrity of higher education. As contract cheating is based on students purchasing assignments that are original (albeit not created by the student), traditional plagiarism detection tools remain insufficient to detect contract cheating. Part of the problem is that proving contract cheating is difficult. As a result, instructors may find it hard to prosecute students (i.e. put them through university academic dishonesty proceedings). To help address the problem, this conceptual paper builds upon extant scholarship on contract cheating and argues that a novel evidence-based approach is needed. Such an approach should allow instructors to detect and prosecute cases of contract cheating effectively and efficiently. The paper then presents an outline of such an approach and calls it the "Doping Test" approach as it mimics some aspects of doping testing in professional sport. [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]

World financial crisis has caused a great impact to our daily lives. The price reflects the difficulty not only to transportation but finance status. In this paper, an adaptive scheduling algorithm for professional sports games was proposed, which greatly improved the performance of conventional game-match scheduling results by hybridizing the Tabu Search algorithm and Genetics algorithm. The purpose of this work is to reduce the travelling cost of all teams. The information of famous sports league (e.g. NBA and MLB) was adopted as preliminary experiment data. Using the new method proposed, it is efficient to find better results than approaches developed before. In addition to finding a feasible schedule that meets all the timing restrictions, the problem addressed in this paper has the extra complexity of having the objective of minimizing the travel costs and every team has the balancing number of the games in home. We formalize the scheduling problem into an optimization problem and adopt the concept of evolution strategy, with consideration of sequential events in a socially world, to solve the challenging issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation in soccer match-play leads to acute and transient subjective, biochemical, metabolic and physical disturbances in players over subsequent hours and days. Inadequate time for rest and regeneration between matches can expose players to the risk of training and competing whilst not entirely recovered. In professional soccer, contemporary competitive schedules can require teams to compete in excess of 60 matches over the course of the season with periods of fixture congestion occurring, prompting much attention from researchers and practitioners to the monitoring of fatigue and readiness to play. A comprehensive body of research has investigated post-match acute and residual fatigue responses. Yet the relevance of the research for professional soccer contexts is debatable, notably in relation to the study populations and designs employed. Monitoring can indeed be invasive, expensive, time inefficient, and difficult to perform routinely and simultaneously in a large squad of regularly competing players. Uncertainty also exists regarding the meaningfulness and interpretation of changes in fatigue response values and their functional relevance, and practical applicability in the field. The real-world need and cost-benefit of monitoring must be carefully weighed up. In relation to professional soccer contexts, this opinion paper intends to (1) debate the need for post-match fatigue monitoring; (2) critique the real-world relevance of the current research literature; (3) discuss the practical burden relating to measurement tools and protocols, and the collection, interpretation and application of data in the field; and (4) propose future research perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks whether stealing bases contributes to scoring runs and winning games in Major League Baseball. A successful attempt advances the runner to the next base, which raises his chances of scoring a run; being caught stealing results in an out. Exploiting a dataset that includes all professional MLB teams and 15 regular seasons of play (1990–2004), the empirical results suggest that players attempting to steal bases are successful two out of three times. On the average and other things being the same, a one-standard deviation increase in the number of stolen base attempts results in 3.65 more games won per season. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of anti-scalping laws on the face value of tickets in professional football and baseball. Previous theoretical models have suggested that scalpers might cause an increase in prices at the ticket window because they represent an increase in demand. This paper provides a model in which ticket scalping has an ambiguous impact on ticket window prices, making the actual impact an empirical question. Empirical analysis suggest that in cities with anti-scalping laws average per-game season ticket prices are approximately $2 greater in baseball and $10 greater in football. Anti-scalping laws actually increase team revenues, as the laws have no adverse effect on attendance. Thus, event promoters might have sufficient pecuniary incentive to tacitly or explicitly support anti-scalping legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to analyze the role of technical-tactical innovation in creating value for professional football clubs. Over the last few years, the sector of professional sport has often been investigated to study the economic benefit generated by introducing technological innovation. From the analysis carried out on the sector of professional football, it is, however, clear that there are very few studies examining the role of technical-tactical innovation in creating value for football clubs. To fill this gap in the literature, the present article is concerned with understanding whether innovation of this kind can generate value for the football clubs in which it is used. The aim of this article is to verify whether the economic and sports results achieved by football clubs can be connected to the skill of their coaches/managers in acquiring and consolidating expertise based on innovative tactical formations. The objective of this research is to analyze the main changes brought to the football sector over the years, and then to concentrate on more recently introduced types of technical-tactical innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concussions in professional sports have received increased attention, which is partly attributable to evidence that found concussion incidence rates were much higher than previously thought (Echlin et al. Journal of Neurosurgical Focus 29:1-10, ). Further to this, professional hockey players articulated how their concussion symptoms affected their professional careers, interpersonal relationships, and qualities of life (Caron et al. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology 35:168-179, ). Researchers are beginning to associate multiple/repeated concussions with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a structural brain injury that is characterized by tau protein deposits in distinct areas of the brain (McKee et al. Brain 136:43-64, ). Taken together, concussions impact many people in the sporting community from current and former professional athletes and their families to medical and health professionals and researchers. In light of the growing awareness and sensitivity towards concussions, the purpose of this paper is to provide recommendations that are designed to improve player safety in professional hockey and address the ethical issues surrounding these suggestions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a simple model of professional sports contests that can provide a number of useful insights into the operations of professional sports leagues. The model incorporates a concern for competitive balance on the part of fans and has the advantage that a number of league market structures can be analyzed using standard industrial organization techniques. The model can also be used to determine the effect of a number of league rules including revenue sharing, payroll caps, and luxury taxes on the respective demands for talented players. In addition, it can be shown that the model of professional sports contests developed here has a useful parallel with a standard model of differentiated products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines racial messages in sport and how racial ideologies may be communicated through media sources dedicated to sports coverage. Our research specifically explores the changing participation levels of black and white athletes in professional basketball and football, and the extent to which these athletes were featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine between 1954 and 2004. As an institution, sport has played a major role in both revolutionizing and reinforcing racial attitudes. Since the 1960s, corresponding with the Civil Rights Movement, the number of professional minority athletes has increased greatly. Their representation on the cover of Sports Illustrated has also increased, but not necessarily in relation to their participation rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we apply a three-stage-DEA model to the Spanish Professional Football League, which means separating the teams' economic behaviour into three components: operating efficiency—of the offence and defence — athletic or operating effectiveness, and social effectiveness. The results showed that the technical inefficiency of the defence is greater than that of the offence, both being caused by aspects linked to the poor management of players' abilities and by the football team's size. Teams showed a favourable evolution of their offensive and defense efficiency during the 2004/2005 season and to a lesser extent m the season before. The point system assigned by the professional football league regulations evaluates the teams athletic effectiveness, but we detected that the teams with the most experience perform athletically in a more effective manner. Their social effectiveness is strongly related to the level of play in itself and to factors linked to their PFL ranking: participation in international competitions for important football teams; or the struggle of minor football teams to stay in the first division. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In professional team sports, like Rugby League, performance analysis has become an integral part of operational practices. This has helped practitioners gain deeper insight into phenomena like team and athlete behaviour and understanding how such behaviour may be influenced by various contextual factors. This information can then be used by coaches to design representative practice tasks, inform game principles and opposition strategies, and even support team recruitment practices. At the elite level, the constant evolution of sports technology (both hardware and software) has enabled greater access to information, making the role of the performance analyst even more valuable. However, this increase in information can create challenges regarding which variables to use to help guide decision-making, and how to present it in ways that can be utilised by coaches and other support staff. While there are published works exploring aspects of performance analysis in team sports like Rugby League, there is yet to be a perspective that explores the various operational uses of performance analysis in Rugby League, the addition of which could help guide the practices of emerging performance analysts in elite organisations like the Australian National Rugby League and the European Super League. Thus, this narrative review—with accompanying case examples—explores the various ways performance analysis can help address pertinent operational questions commonly encountered when working in high-performance sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Major League Soccer data from 2004 to 2018 seasons as a rich dataset, this study examines the role of economic and personal freedom at subnational (state) level in determining team performance. Inspired by public economics studies and issues related with labour migration, unlike previous studies, we investigate the relationship between the quality of a state's institutions and team (firm) outcome. Our estimates suggest that un(freedom) has statistical significant and harmful but not large impact on sports results in soccer. The magnitude of the effect depends on the initial level of team performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local governments often justify subsidizing sports stadiums as economic development projects that have positive returns on investment. If this is true, economic and quality-of-life spillovers that are capitalized in local property values ought to generate additional tax revenue for host municipalities through increased property assessments. This analysis uses the synthetic control method to estimate the effect of a new publicly-funded professional baseball stadium and team relocation on property assessments in Cobb County, Georgia. Cobb assessment values did not increase relative to other metro-Atlanta counties following the stadiums' announcement or opening, which is inconsistent with the stadium having a positive fiscal impact, even with its desirable location and accompanying mixed-used development. The findings are consistent with past economic studies and are likely generalizable to other stadium projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Researchers are capitalising on the strong connections that sport fans have with their teams for health promotion programmes, yet no existing systematic reviews have evaluated the effectiveness of interventions delivered through professional sport. Objective: The aim of this study was to systematically collate, evaluate, and synthesise the evidence on health promotion interventions implemented in professional sport settings. Methods: Randomised controlled trials reporting on adult health promotion initiatives delivered in professional sport settings were identified through electronic database searches in CINAHL, MEDLINE, SPORTDiscus, Scopus, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), and Google Scholar. Data on health-related outcomes (e.g., weight, physical activity, dietary intake) were extracted and synthesised, and random effects meta-analyses were conducted to examine effects for weight and waist circumference. Risk of bias was examined using the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomised controlled trials (RoB 2). Results: Six studies reporting on five unique interventions met the inclusion criteria, and all included studies were gender-sensitised and exclusively targeted men. Intervention effects were observed for several health outcomes, including physical activity, dietary intake, and psychosocial health. All studies aimed to reduce weight, and for most studies (n = 4), weight was a primary outcome, either of the included study or to inform a future definitive trial. Findings from the meta-analysis revealed an overall significant difference in change in weight of − 3.2 kg (95% confidence interval [CI] − 4.6 to − 1.8) and waist circumference of − 3.9 cm (95% CI − 4.9 to − 2.8), both in favour of the intervention group at 12 weeks. Intervention effects were also reported for several other health outcomes (e.g., physical activity, dietary intake, psychosocial health); however, they were not consistently measured across the studies and thus were not meta-analysed. Conclusion: Health promotion interventions delivered through professional sporting organisations can significantly improve weight- and lifestyle-related health outcomes. Representation across the socioeconomic spectrum and across culturally and linguistically diverse groups was limited. As only a limited number of studies met the inclusion criteria for this review, a need exists for rigorously designed interventions, standardised intervention approaches, with long-term follow-up, and the potential for scalability. PROSPERO Registration Number: CRD42019123295. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional athletes are both highly paid and highly mobile workers. Previous research has shown that athletes respond to state income taxes differentials through bargaining and migration. If athletes are compensated for state tax burden, teams located in higher taxed states may be at a competitive disadvantage. I examine the effect of state income taxes on professional sports team performance. Using within-team variation in state top marginal income tax rates, I show that, only after the availability of free agency, did state income tax increases lower team winning percentages. I find that for each percentage point increase in state income tax rates, team winning declines by 0.70 percentage points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that free agent signings in U.S. professional sports are associated with localized sentiment trading effects. Responses are influenced by player performance, labor contract and sport structure characteristics unique to each league. Football signings lack guarantees and are noisy signals while the most informative baseball signings reflect player performance. Sentiment effects of basketball signings are mixed. Investors respond positively to contract extension announcements, but negatively to new contract negotiations, with either the current team or a different franchise. Exceptions are for free agents with high performance rankings or who are perceived to improve the odds of winning a championship. We also provide some evidence that sentiment trading is driven primarily by retail investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reverse order college draft gives the worst teams in the National Football League (NFL) the opportunity to hire the best amateur talent. For it to work effectively, teams must be able to identify the 'best' talent. Our study of NFL quarterbacks highlights problems with the draft process. We find only a weak correlation between teams' evaluations on draft day and subsequent quarterback performance in the NFL. Moreover, many of the factors that enhance a quarterback's draft position are unrelated to future NFL performance. Our analysis highlights the difficulties in evaluating workers in the uncertain environment of professional sports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sporting performance of professional football teams has often been assessed considering their results in the major regular competition, namely the national league. Here, we show that evaluating league performance without controlling for extra games played in other competitions might produce misleading results. Using Data Envelopment Analysis, we assess the performance of Spanish professional football teams in the League controlling for the extra games played in the King's Cup, Champions League and UEFA Cup. Results show that assessing performance omitting extra games underestimates teams' true performance in the League, the more extra games played leading to greater bias. Consequently, the multioutput nature of football must be considered when assessing team performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the effect of national diversity on sports team performance. Authors anticipated that the productivity of the sports team will lessen with the number of nationalities due to language barriers. However, the authors believe that the introduction of nations and aspects of different cultures will eventually result to additional skills within the team. Hypothesis presented in this paper is evaluated on a seasonal individual team basis. It is found in this study that the influence of national diversity on team performance relies on the nature of the fundamental task.

We examine the temporal movements in three anthropometric measurements of a professional sport's athlete population. Specifically, we examine unit root test results, traditional, nonlinear, and those that allow of possible structural breaks, for average player height, weight, and body mass index for the population of Major League Baseball athletes over the period 1901–2019. These anthropometric measures are likely associated with the athletes' level of productivity. In the end, we find that the average values for the measures of players' body mass index and weight are found to be nonstationary, while the average values of players' height are stationary around a nonlinear trend. We further find that these series have been subject to a number of structural shocks. These shocks correspond to well-known events in Major League Baseball history, such as its 'Deadball' era, racial integration, periods of Major League Baseball expansion, innovations with respect to player management, the advent of free agency, and the so-called Steroid Era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the recent years, the French sports élite became one of the most important political representatives of the grande nation. The latest achievements were the triumphs in the Soccer World and European Championships, which not only became the symbol for France's abilities, but also the symbol for the ability of the French integration model. This paper discusses the social and political foundations, which ensure the development of the sports élite. I conclude that since the 60s the centralist state established a system of educating the sports élite analogously to the well-known traditional model of élite-recruitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home advantage in professional sports is a widely accepted phenomenon despite the lack of any controlled experiments at the professional level. The return to play of professional sports during the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to analyze the hypothesized effect of home advantage in neutral settings. While recent work has examined the effect of COVID-19 restrictions on home advantage in European football, comparatively few studies have examined the effect of restrictions in the North American professional sports leagues. In this work, we infer the effect of and changes in home advantage prior to and during COVID-19 in the professional North American leagues for hockey, basketball, baseball, and American football. We propose a Bayesian multi-level regression model that infers the effect of home advantage while accounting for relative team strengths. We also demonstrate that the Negative Binomial distribution is the most appropriate likelihood to use in modelling North American sports leagues as they are prone to overdispersion in their points scored. Our model gives strong evidence that home advantage was negatively impacted in the NHL and NBA during their strongly restricted COVID-19 playoffs, while the MLB and NFL showed little to no change during their weakly restricted COVID-19 seasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The kinds of research questions asked in the sociology of sport are no different from those generated by other substantive areas of sociology. However, while the more established areas of social inquiry have developed methods of research specifically suited to the situation in which their research is done, the sociology of sport has not yet reached this stage of development. The theoretical frameworks borrowed from other areas in sociology generate relevant questions, while the research methods borrowed from other areas in sociology often require adaptation to the particular situations found in the sociology of sport. This paper looks at three specific areas of sports study, and points to those problems that require new adaptations of the available research methods in order to deal with specific situational constraints. These areas may be roughly defined as: (a) the analysis of patterns of ownership in professional sports; (b) the analysis of athietic careers within the occupational culture of sport and (c) the analysis of sports audiences. The authors conclude that theoretically informed and relevant research can be conducted in these areas provided that researchers are able to find imaginative adaptations of their techniques and procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an incumbent league's entry-deterrence strategies in a professional-sports market. The strategy of staggering long-term contracts offered to star players is analyzed and shown to reduce the wage bill of an incumbent league. However, if long-term contracting reduces player effort, the incumbent balances the benefits of a lower wage bill with the cost of reduced sales revenues. An optimal contract duration in the presence of such moral hazard is characterized in terms of the parameterization of the model. Extensions to the model are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental challenge for practitioners in high-level sporting environments concerns how to support athletes in adapting behaviours to solve emergent problems during competitive performance. Guided by an ecological dynamics framework, the design and integration of competitive performance preparation models that place athlete-environment interactions at the heart of the learning process may address this challenge. This ecological conceptualisation of performance preparation signifies a shift in a coach's role; evolving from a consistent solution provider to a learning environment designer who fosters local athlete-environment interactions. However, despite the past decades of research within the ecological dynamics framework developing an evidence-based, theoretical conceptualisation of skill acquisition, expertise and talent development, an ongoing challenge resides within its practical integration into sporting environments. This article provides two case examples in which high-level sports organisations have utilised an ecological dynamics framework for performance preparation in Australian football and Association Football. A unique perspective is offered on experiences of professional sport organisations attempting to challenge traditional ideologies for athlete performance preparation by progressing the theoretical application of ecological dynamics. These case examples intend to promote the sharing of methodological ideas to improve athlete development, affording opportunities for practitioners and applied scientists to accept, reject or adapt the approaches presented here to suit their specific ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Performance analysis research in association football has recently cusped a paradigmatic shift in the way tactical behaviours are studied. Based on insights from system complexity research, a growing number of studies now analyse tactical behaviours in football based on the collective movements of team players. Objective: The aim of this systematic review is to provide a summary of empirical research on collective tactical behaviours in football, with a particular focus on organising the methods used and their key findings. Methods: A systematic search of relevant English-language articles was performed on one database (Web of Science Core Collection) and one search engine (PubMed), based on PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses) guidelines. The keywords 'football' and 'soccer' were each paired with all possible combinations of the following keywords: 'collective movement behaviour', 'collective behaviour', 'tactical behaviour', 'interpersonal coordination', 'space', 'Voronoi', 'synchronisation', 'tactical analysis', 'constraints', 'ecological dynamics', and 'dynamic positioning'. Empirical studies that were related to tactical analyses of footballers' positional data were sought for inclusion and analysis. Results: Full-text articles of 77 studies were reviewed. A total of 27 tactical variables were identified, which were subsequently organised into 6 categories. In addition to conventional methods of linear analysis, 11 methods of nonlinear analysis were also used, which can be organised into measures of predictability (4 methods) and synchronisation (7 methods). The key findings of the reviewed studies were organised into two themes: levels of analysis, and levels of expertise. Conclusions: Some trends in key findings revealed the following collective behaviours as possible indicators of better tactical expertise: higher movement regularity; wider dispersion in youth players and shorter readjustment delay between teammates and opponents. Characteristic behaviours were also observed as an effect of playing position, numerical inequality, and task constraints. Future research should focus on contextualising positional data, incorporating the needs of coaching staff, to better bridge the research-practice gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automation is the holy grail of performance assessment. Cheap and reliable automated systems that produce consistent feedback on performance. Many such systems have been proposed that accurately measure the state of a product or the outcome of a process. Procedural faults can be detected and even mitigated without the need for human interference. In production industry and professional sports, this is a natural part of business. However, in macrocognitive team performance studies, human appraisal is still king. This study investigates the reliability of human observers as assessors of performance among virtual teams, and what they base their assessments on when only able to monitor one of the team members at a time. The results show that expert observers put a lot of emphasis on task outcomes and on communication and are generally reliable raters of team performance, but there are several aspects that they cannot rate reliably under these circumstances, e.g., team workload, stress, and collaborative problem-solving. Through simple algorithms, this study shows that by capturing task scores and different quantitative communication metrics, team performance ratings can be estimated to closely match how the expert observers assess team performance in a virtual team setting. The implication of the study is that numeric team performance estimations can be acquired by automated systems, with reasonable accuracy and reliability compared to observer ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although professional sports are a major interest for consumers and a soaring contributor to economic growth, very little is known about how sports brands are built over time and what makes some sports clubs’ market performance so much stronger than others. Based on a unique dataset of 40 German professional soccer brands tracked from 1963 through 2014, this research studies how the value drivers recruitment, winning, and publicity feed sales-based brand equity (SBBE) and attendance. One of the novel findings is that not only do strong brands benefit from higher levels of SBBE, but they are also able to leverage SBBE more effectively the longer they are on the market, which widens the gap between strong and weak brands across time. We also find that the effect of the value drivers on attendance evolves from direct to indirect via SBBE. Overall, the increasing brand leverage effect yields important implications for marketing theory and for sports brand management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extensive body of economic literature suggests that in the United States, there is little gain to a city from using tax revenues to subsidize or in other ways support professional sports franchises. One of the difficulties with these studies is the stability of professional team location. Manchester, England provides an opportunity to examine the growth effects associated with adding and subtracting top tier teams from a single sport in a single area over the course of several decades. Five different Greater Manchester area teams have been in the Premiership with as few as one and as many as four in any given year since the founding of the Premiership. Using Greater Manchester borough level data from 1991 through 2013 we look for changes in gross value added overall and in categories associated with professional sports when Premiership status changes. We find no sustained role for Premiership status, but do find a one off gain in gross value added growth when a team is promoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficacy of industry policy implementation is enhanced when governments expedite resolution of private sector uncertainty. This study reinforces the mechanism through which production outcomes improve, via program evaluation analysis from professional sports. An alternative determination rule for allocating picks in reverse-order drafts-fewest games played when eliminated from playoffs-is considered in comparison with the current standard (fewest wins at end-of-season). Elimination timing is estimated via Monte Carlo simulation. Using MLB and NBA data from 2005-2013, results from a quasi-natural experiment show that when a team's perverse incentive to underperform is effectively removed prior to its final game of the season, its subsequent performance improves significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the difference in the concentrations of testosterone, 17-β estradiol and progesterone between female patients with and without ACL rupture and the possible effect of these hormones on generalised joint laxity. Methods: Female subjects with non-contact knee joint injury were included in this study. They were divided into two groups: the examined group, consisting of female subjects with ACL rupture, and the control group, consisting of female patients without ACL rupture. In the next step, the patients from these two groups were paired off on the basis of three factors: the level of professional sports involvement (including the type of sports activity), the side of the body where the injury had occurred (left or right) and the age of the subjects. In the end, there were 12 pairs (24 subjects). The concentrations of sex hormones were established from saliva specimens with the aid of the Salimetrics enzyme immunoassay. Generalised joint laxity was tested with the aid of the 'laxity score' according to Beighton, Solomon and Soskolne. Results: Female subjects with ACL rupture had significantly lower concentrations of testosterone ( p < 0.01), significantly lower concentrations of 17-β estradiol ( p < 0.05) and significantly lower concentrations of progesterone ( p < 0.01) than female subjects with intact ACL. Conclusions: Decreased concentrations of testosterone, 17-β estradiol or progesterone may be a risk factor leading to ACL rupture. The concentrations of these hormones do not affect generalised joint laxity. Additional research on a larger group of patients is necessary to further determine the effects of these hormones on generalised joint laxity and ACL ruptures. Young female athletes with lower concentrations of sex hormones are more prone to anterior cruciate ligament rupture which is why they need to reduce their sports activities during the pre-ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle, when these concentrations are additionally reduced. Level of evidence: III. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of concussion in football is of substantial interest to players, coaches, fans, and physicians. In this article, we review specific cultural hindrances to diagnosis and treatment of concussion in football. We review current trends in management and identify areas for improvement. We also discuss the obligations that physicians, particularly neurosurgeons and neurologists, have toward brain-injured football players and the larger societal role they may play in helping to minimize football-associated brain injury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a summary of the research `A Model of a Professional Sports League,' by Daniel A. Rascher. Effect of decision making outcomes on labor market issues; Discussion on cartel innovation and stability; Effect of degree of the salary cap restriction.

Professional athletes are subject to massive somatic, social, and mental stress. Despite great public interest for athletic achievements, the emotional strains thereof are very poorly investigated and discussed. The main reason for this is the widespread assumption that only emotionally very strong athletes are able to compete at the highly professional level and therefore mental disorders do not exist in professional sports. But available research data about the prevalence of mental disorders in this area suggest that this hypothesis must be revised. With respect to depression and the overtraining syndrome, attempts have been made to demonstrate the difficulties with etiology, diagnostics, and treatment for sports psychiatry and psychotherapy. Scientifically, sport psychiatry and psychotherapy can be defined as a discipline, whose focus is the investigation, treatment, and prevention of the extreme and sports-specific emotional strains and disorders. In addition to sport psychology, which focuses mainly on performance enhancement, mental stress, and disorders can hereby be recognized, disorders be treated and the athletic performance sustained. With the foundation of the Task Force for Sports Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the German Association for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, scientific research, further education, prevention, and treatment for mental disorders in professional sports will be improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an area of great interest, yet little is known about how CSR is perceived and practiced in the professional sport industry. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, including a survey, and a qualitative content analysis of responses to open-ended questions, to explore how professional sport executives define CSR, and what priorities teams have regarding their CSR activities. Findings from this study indicate that sport executives placed different emphases on elements of CSR including a focus on philanthropic activities and ethical behaviors. The data suggest that professional sport executives view CSR as a strategic imperative for their business. Sport executives indicated that a number of factors influenced the practice of their CSR including: philanthropy (altruistic giving), an emphasis on the local community, partnerships, and ethical concerns. We also examine important organizational variables for sport (winning, revenues, and team value) and highlight their relationship with reported CSR involvement. We discuss the implications of the findings and propose recommendations for both theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major League Baseball’s system of sharing revenue between clubs was altered significantly in 1997. The arrangement progressively redistributes income from the highest toward the lowest revenue-generating clubs. The purpose of the new method was to alleviate growing disparity in revenue generation. However, under the progressive system the lowest revenue producing clubs bear the highest marginal tax rates, and theoretically problems of competitive imbalance may be amplified. Changes in talent distribution are observed by analyzing player mobility; an empirical model of player transfers is developed and tested. Confirmation is obtained that low revenue clubs acted on increased incentives to divest talent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the environmental agenda for Formula 1 (FI) automobile racing. FI head Max Mosley wants the sport to develop energy-efficient technology that will also work in road cars. Particularly, he aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. F1 can achieve its goals by letting the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile rewrite the technical rules for the championship.