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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]

Purpose: This paper analyses English Premier League (EPL) and English Football League (EFL) championship clubs during the period 2002–2019 to anticipate financial distress with specific reference to footballs' Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations. Design/methodology/approach: Data was collected for 43 professional football clubs competing in the EPL and Championship for the financial year ends 2002–2019. Analysis was conducted using the Z-score methodology and additional statistical tests were conducted to measure differences between groups. Data was split into two distinct periods to analyse club finances pre- and post-FFP. Findings: The results show significant cases of financial distress amongst clubs in both divisions and that Championship clubs are in significantly poorer financial health than EPL clubs. In some cases, financially sustainability has worsened post-FFP. The "big 6" clubs – due to their size – seem to be more financially sound than the rest of the EPL, thus preventing a "too big to fail" effect. Overall, the financial situation in English football remains poor, a position that could be exacerbated by the economic crisis, caused by COVID-19. Research limitations/implications: The findings are not generalisable outside of the English football industry and the data is susceptible to usual accounting techniques and treatments. Practical implications: The paper recommends a re-distribution of broadcasting rights, on a more equal basis and incentivised with cost-reduction targets. The implementation of a hard salary cap at league level is also recommended to control costs. Furthermore, FFP regulations should be re-visited to deliver the original objectives of bringing about financial sustainability in European football. Originality/value: The paper extends the evidence base of measuring financial distress in professional team sports and is also the first paper of its kind to examine this in relation to Championship clubs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The cultivation of professional talents in leisure sports in China started late and has a weak foundation. Compared with developed countries in leisure sports, there is still a big gap in terms of curriculum setting and training direction. Urban residents have differences in the choice of leisure sports, leisure purpose, and understanding of leisure concepts due to factors such as age, gender, education, and occupation. This research mainly discusses the training mode of leisure sports talents under the background of rural revitalization strategy. Combined with the research on the leisure sports industry and high-quality development, this paper clarifies the connotation of the high-quality development of the leisure sports industry and puts forward countermeasures and suggestions to promote the high-quality development of the leisure sports industry. Over time, leisure has become an important symbol of social development and an important field closely related to the quality of life of each person. As a part of rural space, rural sports space is the main material carrier and foundation of rural residents' leisure sports activities. This paper mainly makes an in-depth investigation and research from two aspects: the status quo of rural leisure sports activities and the talent demand of some leisure sports venues. It makes specific classification standards for the types and specifications of leisure sports professionals required by leisure sports venues. This provides a scientific basis for the cultivation of leisure sports professionals. First, the article analyzes the research background and puts forward the research significance. It analyzes the research status of scholars on the leisure sports industry, high-quality development, and high-quality development of the leisure sports industry. Secondly, this paper clarifies the research content, research methods, and technical route of the research basis for the high-quality development of the leisure sports industry. It conducts conceptual discussions on the leisure sports industry and high-quality development. It adopts the grounded theory to construct a model of factors influencing the high-quality development of the leisure sports industry. It also analyzes its action mechanism from three aspects: the core industry system layer, the industry supporting factors, and the external environment system layer. During the survey, 84.4% of them believed that professionals in leisure sports should have a bachelor's degree. The quality of rural sports space directly affects the breadth, depth, enthusiasm, and effectiveness of residents' participation in leisure sports activities. This research is helpful to deepen the urban and rural sports governance and optimize the management system. It is necessary to investigate and analyze the supply quality of rural leisure sports space and propose countermeasures for the integration and layout of rural leisure sports space. The ultimate goal is to build a leisure sports space optimization development model that meets the leisure sports needs of rural residents. [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]

The main goal of this paper is to consider the necessity of founding ethical committees in professional sports. In the first part of the paper the authors consider the emergence of the first ethical committee in medicine, and the emergence of bioethics as a social movement and academic discipline. In the second part of the paper, the authors examine few examples of ethical committees in contemporary professional sport and the need to set up ethical committees within sports associations to consider numerous ethical problems: doping, match fixing, referee errors, racism, injuries, sex/gender and body issues, sexual abuse in sports etc. These topics are also an inevitable field studied within bioethics, so the following question arises: 'Is the official establishment of ethical committees in professional sports as an aspect of 'bioethicalization' of sport a real need that is imposed due to the growing ethical problems that are present in modern sports?' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New professional sports stadia have been widely advanced as flagship developments that can generate jobs and wealth, support place branding and culture-led strategies, and host mega-events. Public funding for new stadia has been secured on these bases but also challenged as stadia costs are under-estimated and the benefits, particularly for lower income communities, exaggerated. Emerging in this context, community stadia are an intriguing phenomenon as they offer the potential for professional sports stadia to deliver on community aims alongside their sporting, commercial and economic development aims. Public funding has followed with a number of community stadia built or planned in the UK, yet with limited critical analysis of the stadium type and its impact. This paper helps to fill the literature gap by learning from two community stadia case studies: The Keepmoat Stadium, Doncaster and The Falkirk Stadium, Falkirk. It finds that community stadia have the potential to deliver across the four aims, with stadia's association with the world of professional sport facilitating engagement with multiple, diverse and 'hard to reach' communities. However, they are also complex phenomena leading the paper to construct a 12-feature conceptualisation of community stadia that can advance practitioner and academic understanding of the phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper provides a conceptual discussion of the bidirectional relationship between knowledge management (KM) and intellectual capital (IC) in a specific subset of knowledge-based organisations, i.e. professional sport organisations. Through the review and conceptual discussion of two relevant research themes, i.e. KM strategies for IC value creation and IC codification, this paper aims to highlight research gaps useful to future research. Design/methodology/approach: The authors apply a systematic literature review method to analyse 66 management and accounting studies on KM and IC in sport organisations. Internal and external validity tests support the methodology adopted. Findings: The authors provide a conceptual model to explain how KM strategies about IC investments can be optimal, i.e. they create value for all the stakeholders but also suboptimal, i.e. they create value only for a group of stakeholders. Next, they provide evidence of the opportunistic use of the codification associated with IC investments that impair financial reporting information transparency and mislead managers and investors. Practical implications: The results are informative for managers, regulators and policymakers to mitigate the inefficiencies regarding KM and IC codification and decisions. Originality/value: This study contributes to the understanding of the bidirectional relationship between KM and IC in knowledge-based organisations by focussing on professional sport organisations in which KM and IC have played an important role for a long time. It also includes future avenues for advances in managing, measuring and reporting IC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use and integration of wearable technology (wearables) into professional sports is increasing rapidly. At a minimum, the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS have all integrated wearables into their training. Teams' hope the biometric data obtained from the wearables will sharpen athletic performance, create competitive advantages, enhance fan experience, and generate new revenue streams. However, to obtain these desired outcomes leagues must adequately protect their athletes' biometric data (ABD). The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the CBAs of the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS management of wearables and ABD. Specifically, this paper will discuss the potential gaps in protection of ABD within the CBA and explore whether federal and state laws are applicable to protect the data. Findings from this analysis improve our understanding of professional sport leagues management of ABD and expose the limitations of protection at the league, state, and federal level. [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]

In the modern society, sport is an indispensable part of our life. Following the development of professional sports, resolution to sports disputes is more and more important. In the 20th Century, the concept of ADR was brought into the sports field, which gave us more choice of resolving sports disputes. However, more choices also brought us more confusion: with lack of understanding the alternative resolutions, it seems really difficult to choose the appropriate one. Furthermore, the popularity of Sports ADR is low in some countries where is more difficult to choose the right dispute resolution. This paper, using the method of Multi-attribute Decision Making (MADA), found out that Mediation is the most suitable resolution to sports disputes. [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]

The article presents reviews of numerous articles, including "A stadium by any other name: The value of naming rights" by E. M. Leeds, M. A. Leeds, and I. Pistolet in "Journal of Sports Economics," 8(6), "Wrestling with 'conflict of interest' in sport management" by E. Sherry. D. Shilbury, and G. Wood in 7(3) of the journal "Corporate Governance," and "Professional sports, hurricane Katrina, and the economic redevelopment of New Orleans" by R. A. Baade and V. A. Matheson in the journal "Contemporary Economic Policy," 25(4).

Match day revenue is still an essential source of income for many professional sports clubs worldwide. This paper studies the determinants of ticket pricing in the English Premier League and examines whether and to what extent stadium goers pay a premium for sporting success and spending by clubs in the players' labour market. We estimate regression models for the cheapest and most expensive tickets of clubs playing in the English Premier League for the five seasons between 2014/15 and 2018/19 inclusive. Our study shows that ticket prices are driven by several variables including the opponent and local derbies. The impact of team performance is asymmetric affecting only the most expensive tickets. Capacity utilisation and total labour cost impact the prices of both types of tickets. This research provides insights for both leagues and individual clubs. For example, the findings can be used as a benchmark to assess the magnitude of price increases that the market may be willing to bear. Additionally, clubs can explore the extent to which greater revenues can be extracted from different types of consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case example material of sport psychologists working with psychopathology in sport settings is limited. Applied sport psychologists need to be attuned to athletes with personality disorders because the effects of various disorders require substantial management as they can seriously impede individual potential and affect team harmony. In the present paper, a case example of an elite athlete presenting with symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD) is discussed at length. Critical incidents are described to show BPD manifested in a professional sports context. The complexities of providing competent, ethical, and realistic solutions to the athlete with BPD proved to be especially challenging. Issues that posed significant ethical or practical concerns included making an initial diagnosis, the referral process, maintaining confidentiality, and secondary needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discrimination in professional sports is a long-standing phenomenon as it concerns international and national governing bodies, sports organisations and players. The focus on discrimination in football is not only due to its tarnishing of the principles and essence of this popular sport, but also its direct confrontation with fundamental values such as integration, equality, dignity, and diversity - all crucial elements of fostering community cohesion. The present paper aims to analyse a court case that centres around statements of a discriminatory nature targeting the sexual orientation of a professional player. After the National Council for Combating Discrimination (CNCD) analysed the case regarding the existence of acts of discrimination that had had as main source statements of a discriminatory nature concerning the sexual orientation of a professional football player, it issued a decision that was the subject of a complaint with the administrative court. The Court of Appeal submitted preliminary questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), regarding the application of Articles 2(2)(a), 10(1) and 17 of Council Directive 2000/78/EC establishing a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation. The judgement of the court not only addresses the specific acts of discrimination aimed at a professional football player but also serves as a landmark moment in the ongoing battle for equal treatment in employment, regardless of one's sexual orientation. This situation also offered the opportunity to transpose the EU law in the national legislation and properly apply it to build a true Union of equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategy-optimization is a fundamental element of dynamic and complex team sports such as soccer, American football, and basketball. As the amount of data that is collected from matches in these sports has increased, so has the demand for data-driven decisionmaking support. If alternative strategies need to be balanced, a data-driven approach can uncover insights that are not available from qualitative analysis. This could tremendously aid teams in their match preparations. In this work, we propose a novel Markov modelbased framework for soccer that allows reasoning about the specific strategies teams use in order to gain insights into the efficiency of each strategy. The framework consists of two components: (1) a learning component, which entails modeling a team's offensive behavior by learning a Markov decision process (MDP) from event data that is collected from the team's matches, and (2) a reasoning component, which involves a novel application of probabilistic model checking to reason about the efficacy of the learned strategies of each team. In this paper, we provide an overview of this framework and illustrate it on several use cases using real-world event data from three leagues. Our results show that the framework can be used to reason about the shot decision-making of teams and to optimise the defensive strategies used when playing against a particular team. The general ideas presented in this framework can easily be extended to other sports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The comparatively high salaries of professional players during their active athletic career should allow them to accumulate an adequate level of precautionary savings for a financially autonomous post-sport career. However, not all players succeed in accumulating sustainable financial assets. Therefore, the question arises how professional players' financial precaution within the social setting football is shaped. As no empirical analyses have yet been carried out on this issue, the study study examines football players' precautionary practices and motives. Design/methodology/approach: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 German (former) professional football players. The authors used qualitative content analysis to analyse the data, expanding the analysis to include reconstructive elements to create different precautionary types. Findings: The results reveal that players deal with both career-specific as well as precaution-related risks quite heterogeneously. Accordingly, three precautionary types characterised by distinct forms of precautionary saving practices are identified. The authors also find that although the players are aware of the uncertainties and risks related to their professional football careers, it does not say much about the concrete implementation of adequate precautionary practices. Practical implications: The findings contribute to a better understanding of precautionary saving practices among football players. Social implications: Moreover, the findings contribute to a better understanding of precautionary saving practices not only specifically among (former) football players, but generally among individuals that face high occupational career risks and earn high salaries to develop preventative concepts and approaches to sustainable financial planning. Originality/value: This paper is the first empirical study that analyses precautionary savings practices of the specific population of elite athletes in high income sports professional football. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This April 2003 issue of "The American Journal of Economics and Sociology" contains a collection of papers with a decidedly quantitative focus that attempt to measure unusual market phenomena. Each essay offers quantitative assessments of what the editor find to be interesting and unusual market phenomena. Consider Professor Stephanie O. Crofton's analysis of college tuition prices. She hypothesized that colleges that refuse to admit men in order to provide an "all women" campus experience would also end up charging higher tuition prices for their educational services. Her reason is that the preference to matriculate to a "male free" environment is held rather intensely by a small group of women. So who is discriminating really? Are the owners of the business, the trustees, certain employees already at work, or the sovereign customers? Consider the case of the professional sports association such as the National Hockey League (NHL). For quite some time the NHL explored ways to boost attendance at its games. In his contribution to this issue, Professor Rodney J. Paul examines the policy changes initiated by the NHL in terms of their quantitative impact on stadium attendance.

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]

The paper analyzes mass start competitions in professional biathlon, where 30 biathletes start simultaneously. This structure allows us to test the existence of discouragement effect, according to which biathletes reduce their efforts when lagging far behind the leaders. We use data on all 180 mass start competitions, for both genders, in World Cups, World Championships, and Olympic Games between the 2001/02 and 2019/20 seasons, and compare the gap times between the two consecutive ranks. For the same period, we execute the same analyses for all sprint and individual competitions that use interval starts. We find that, in mass starts, the 95% confidence intervals of the gap times between the two consecutive ranks overlap in the range of rankings between 3 and 25 among men and between 5 and 24 among women, with mean gaps of 6.6 and 7.7 seconds among men and women, respectively. However, that gap increases sharply for the four bottom ranks (that is, ranks 27–30), which have mean gaps of 29.8 and 31.2 sec among men and women, respectively. However, in sprint and individual races, the lag time between two consecutive ranks does not exceed 4 (sprint) and 10 (individual) seconds in the range of rankings between 10 and 60. The results suggest that bottom-ranked biathletes in mass starts strategically reduce their efforts when there is nothing at stake. Such a strategy increases the duration of TV broadcasts and does not help maximize suspense, which is one of the main drivers of TV demands in professional sports. We offer an alternative format, according to which a certain number of the bottom-ranked biathletes will be eliminated after each bout of shooting. Such a format should dramatically increase the suspense-to-time ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper "Adoption of technological innovations by sports spectators" we make a brief analysis of the importance of technology in sports and in the fans' experience, and in the last part a technology used by both athletes and fans is presented, which is revolutionizing the sports field. Just as it happens in any other field, in the case of professional sports, modern technology has produced important changes. And if we think about everyday life, instead of going up the stairs, you use the elevator, instead of writing on paper, you use your computer or laptop at the office, the phone, you pay with a card when you go to the table. Technology becomes part of our lives once we come into contact with it, so it is normal to see the world of professional sports very interested in new technologies. We already see many of these technologies in tennis, where the ball can be tracked with amazing precision, in football, where we have the replay and detailed analysis of any movement made by the players on the field. Others are there, but not so well known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates factors impacting corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns' key performance indicators (KPIs) by extending the sport sustainability campaign evaluation model (SSCEM) with three key variables: ascription of responsibility, fit between the team/sustainability initiatives, and receptivity to messaging from the team. We collected data from a US national sample using a Qualtrics panel. The specific population of interest for this part of the project was people who were able to identify a professional or college sport team local to their geographical area (N = 205), which meets the SEM sample size requirements with only 11 items in the model. This study found that fit, ascription, and attachment to the team explained 43.0% of the variance in receptivity. Ascription and receptivity explained 64.9% of the variance of sustainability intentions. The entire model explained 68.4% of the variance in support for green corporate partners. Future research can extend the SSCEM by adding these concepts, explaining additional variance, and assessing actual receptivity to team messaging about sustainability. Sport practitioners can use this model to show green corporate partners the impact of messaging by the team on corporate partner sales and show increased fan sustainability intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information related to the European Sport Management (EASM) award. It is stated that the best original and significant unpublished contribution in sport management is given this award. It is mentioned that by encouraging new researchers at the start of their career, the award stimulate diffusion of new ideas and innovative research in sport management.

The development of the field of sport expertise over the past 20 years has been remarkable, and our understanding of the varying factors affecting athlete development and motor skill acquisition has expanded considerably. Recently, there has been a push toward more sophisticated research designs to continue the advancement of our understanding of sport expertise. Even in a population of performers at the highest levels of performance and competition (e.g., participants in professional sports or those who compete at Olympic Games), there are those with obvious superiority compared to others in the cohort, such as those who win "most valuable player" awards or who are elected to the Hall of Fame. This paper builds a case that athletes who reach this level of achievement possess a more advanced level of skill than those at the elite or expert stage and we refer to this stage of development as "eminence." This paper explores the notion of eminence and provides converging forms of evidence for the division between expertise and eminence. Moreover, it explores the implications of this division for the further examination of skill acquisition across the lifespan. [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]

Transfers in the football world have become a hot topic in academic studies in recent years. Spanish league (La Liga) is one of the men's professional football leagues that have driven some of the most notorious transfers. In this way, we test determinants for the transfer relationships of football players in the Spanish League in the most expensive seasons with records (2018/2019 and 2019/2020 seasons). Furthermore, we identify determinants for the values of the observed transfers. The empirical analysis shows relevant findings. We recognize two implications. First, Spanish soccer transfers are not random and this evidence reflects the environment of imperfect competition characterizing La Liga. Second, the nonrandomness of the transfer process can be associated with an increasing inequality among teams and with a threat to the competitive balance in professional sports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in professional sports organisations highlights the positive external effects of CSR, while employee-related and organisational outcomes are widely ignored. We aim at filling this gap by analysing the relationship between perceived CSR (PCSR) and perceived organisational performance (POP) in professional sports organisations (PSOs) and how this relationship is mediated by organisational identification and employee satisfaction. Based on a systematic literature review on the organisational outcomes of CSR we derive our research model and three hypotheses that are tested using parallel regression analyses. We hypothesise that PCSR is positively related to POP and that this relationship is positively mediated by organisational identification and employee satisfaction. Our sample consists of 338 employees of professional football, basketball, handball, ice hockey and volleyball clubs in Germany. Our results suggest that PCSR among employees of PSOs is positively related to POP, when controlling for age, gender, income, education, sports discipline, and organisational level. Furthermore, our results provide evidence that the positive relationship between PCSR and POP is positively and partially mediated by organisational identification and employee satisfaction. Our paper enlarges prior knowledge on internal outcomes of CSR in professional sports organisations by quantifying existent contributions on the impacts of PCSR on POP and providing a model for how this relationship is affected by organisational identification and employee satisfaction. Our results provide scholars with a framework for further scientific investigation and practitioners with a concept for integrating the positive impacts of CSR into approaches to developing both their organisation and its employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The time of pandemic has been a challenging one for most people in sport organizations. These individuals include athletes, coaches, support staff members, and administrators, as well as sport psychology practitioners. A range of human and systemic factors have coalesced to create volatility, ambiguity, and stress for all these stakeholders, affecting how they work, relate to one another, and make decisions. Within this context, this paper centers attention on why and how practitioners of sport psychology in professional sport organizations can manifest leadership by taking actions in support of athletes and coaches, actions that are under practitioner control and influence. The leadership actions considered include promoting an interdisciplinary perspective on providing mental health support to athletes; communicating and collaborating with other professionals; emphasizing acceptance; embracing routines; manifesting humility; and engaging in the process of professional practice. This article concludes with reflections about how these leadership actions can transfer from professional sport organizations to collegiate settings and scholastic school environments. [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]

This paper evaluates Howe and Leota/Turp's accounts of gamesmanship by examining case studies of gamesmanship from professional darts. While Leota and Turp make some substantial improvements on Howe in reconceptualizing the idea of sporting excellence, I claim that there are points of criticism that must be addressed, notably in their claims that sports do not prescribe necessary skills, and that it is impossible to distinguish between legitimate sporting strategy unaccounted for by the rules on the one hand, and gamesmanship on the other. Leota and Turp criticise Howe's account of rules for being misconceived: rather than rules prescribing necessary skills as Howe claims, rules actually proscribe skills and set limits on behaviour, rather than prescribing skills. I use darts and other sports to make the case that rules actually do both things. Elsewhere, in the phenomenon of 'grouping', I argue that we find a skill completely unaccounted for by the rules of darts and not a necessary skill for playing darts, which nonetheless counts as excellence for darts. This problematizes some claims from Leota and Turp on which their account of gamesmanship hinges. An aspect of Howe, Leota and Turp's accounts on which they all agree is the importance of psychological resilience in sporting endeavours, which I discuss with reference to darts and rule changes in professional sport. The article ends with a discussion of an example from darts of a potential gamesmanship strategy, from a match between Michael van Gerwen and Darius Labanauskas, that unquestionably remains within the rules of the sport and which could not be eradicated through rule changes because it would violate the spirit of the sport. This is an interesting, controversial example for studies of the different forms of gamesmanship and their categorization, and indicates some limitations on what I say in my argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publications on elbow pain (EP) in overhead sports are increasing. The results of previous studies mostly focus on the influence of EP in the ball game and throwing sports. Thus, a bibliometric analysis of these publications may show the direction of hot topics and future research trends. The purpose of this study is to identify the research trends on EP in overhead sports. For the methods, the first step is to use the main keywords of 'Elbow pain' and 'Overhead sport' merging auxiliary vocabulary to reach the relevant global publications between 1970 and 2022 in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The literature data set is imported into EndNote literature manager software to remove duplication. Secondly, the duplication-reduced articles are imported to an Excel sheet according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria of this study. In the third step, VOSviewer software is applied as the main analysis tool in extracting data for analysis from the articles. Then, the main research results for three aspects are obtained by VOSviewer software which extracted and analyzed the parameters of author name, article title, publication journal, keywords, organization, publication country/region, and the sum of times cited from 455 qualified papers. The study found that the United States of America made the most outstanding contribution to this theme study. The research on EP in overhead sports in China requires more attention from scholars. EP in swimming is a new research direction worthy of attention. In conclusion, the research results prove the growth trend of EP in overhead sports. The EP problem not only exists in the ball game and throwing sports but also swimming. Sport commercialization and the involvement of related professional sports organizations determine the degree of EP's attention in a specific sport and the development of solutions. The development of a region or country also affects the depth and scope of EP study. Clinical research development and in-depth exploration are one of the bases to solve EP problems. Non-clinical action is beneficial to EP patients, but it still needs to be explored and studied. [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]

Motivation: Globalisation is not only about the mobility of capital and proliferation of global problems. It is also about common approaches in public governance. Modern technologies help to disseminate information on sport as well as raise interests and encourage citizens to engage in sport. Globalisation has made it easier. There is no need to travel -- Olympic Games, football matches and various other sports can be watched on TV, with broadcasts offering more insights than live watching on the spot. Globalisation, however, is also seen in various public or grass-root initiatives which, by addressing existing inequalities, support certain groups i.e. women or minorities to help them achieve more equal position in sport. Aim: The paper's aim is to analyse the impact of globalisation (use of modern, digital technologies) on public governance in sport based on the example of Poland. Poland is specific because there exists a strong gender bias and unequal involvement of men and women in professional sport. It translates into financial support. All of the above aspects will be scrutinized. Results: The analyses will be based on the available public data on the financing of professional sport as well as achievements in the Olympic Games between the years 1924 and 2016. Moreover, some light will be shed on media coverage of sports events. The applied research methods include a critical literature review and analyses of gathered statistical data. The paper fills in the gap in the existing literature where impact of globalisation on sport in terms of public governance and gender imbalance is not often discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper was to examine the invisible hand behind a corrupt structure in professional sports. Specifically, this paper sought to explain the match-fixing phenomenon in sports from the perspective of the Code of Brotherhood (CoB, yiqi 義氣) and to address the underlying mechanisms through which illegal behaviour is generated and continuously practised, as well as the dynamics serving both individual agendas and organisational interests. Taking Taiwan's Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) as a case study, the findings revealed that the origin and embodiment of CoB, the nature of CoB, and the CoB as the driver of trust illustrate how CoB functioned in and paved the way for match-fixing. The application of CoB as an emic Chinese construct helps to explain why match-fixing is conceived and realized, not just for money, but rather in the name of righteousness and loyalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Over the past decades, analyses of the functioning of professional sport leagues have been done from various angles: economic, financial and sociological; in some cases, comparisons were made between North-American and European leagues. The purpose of this paper is to look at this reality from a different angle, i.e. human capital management, by showing how different the models from both continents are.Design/methodology/approach Based on an identification of the major elements associated to human capital management in professional sport leagues in North America and Europe, this paper compares competitive and coopetitive strategies using an original framework based on consortium sourcing and pooling dimensions.Findings The paper underlines the benefits that North-American professional sport leagues get from acquiring players using a consortium sourcing perspective (coopetition). In Europe, the most powerful clubs use their financial resources to get the best players; as a result, it is always the same clubs with get the best results (competition). In the long run, the European approach might result in less attractiveness to TV viewers, and less revenues for TV networks.Originality/value This paper helps to understand the differences between professional sport leagues in North America and Europe; it also discusses the risk associated to the adoption, without any adjustment in the human capital management, in Europe of the North-American model based on a coopetitive perspective. This dimension is seldom mentioned in articles dealing with professional sport leagues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights ways that changes in the emerging digitised media and communication landscape that envelopes professional sport in Australia influence the ethics of journalism practice. The approach was adopted in the context of mediatisation research as a study of the 'transformation of everyday life, culture and society in the context of the transformation of the media' (Krotz 2017: 108-109). It uses the notion of mediatisation to help conceptualise media change and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance's Journalist Code of Ethics as a benchmark for ethical practices in Australia. Findings indicate that routine violations of core ethical standards of Australian journalism - such as 'striving for accuracy', doing the 'utmost to give a fair opportunity for reply' and achieving 'fair correction of errors' - are occurring as a result of the pervasive digitised 24/7 news cycle (MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human-resource management is a unique challenge for professional sport franchises (PSFs). A lack of research on full-time employees in sport means we know little about the perceptions of those most connected to PSFs despite the unique nature of the sport industry. This paper investigates whether communicating socially responsible behavior (SRB) in sport job postings generates more prospective person-organization fit (POFit) and greater application intention. Uncovering these relationships will help sport practitioners optimize their hiring process by targeting recruitment messages. The analysis does not support the idea that communicating SRB in a sport job posting enhances prospective POFit or application intentions, even for socially conscious applicants. These findings contradict similar exercises carried out in other industries, highlighting the distinctiveness of professional sport. [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]

The primary goal of this research was to examine current trends in sport sponsorship, particularly in the areas of goal setting, sponsorship activation and assessment of sponsorship effectiveness. The secondary goal was to identify best practices in sport sponsorship. Sponsorship executives representing North American professional sport properties, corporate partners and third-party agencies participated in in-depth interviews. Data was content analysed to produce information in three main areas of interest: sponsorship goals, activation strategies and evaluation processes and measures. The results highlight the value of customising sponsorship agreements to fit the business goals of individual sponsors as well as the strong presence of social media in sponsorship activation strategies. Greater sponsor expectations in terms of return on investment measurement and the increased role of analytics in the evaluation of sponsorship effectiveness are also uncovered. A number of best practices in sport sponsorship, practical implications and directions for future research are discussed at the conclusion of this paper. [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]

In professional sports clubs, the growing number of individual IT-systems increases the need for central information systems. Various solutions from different suppliers lead to a fragmented situation in sports. Therefore, a standardized and independent general concept for a club information systems (CIS) is necessary. Due to the different areas involved, an interdisciplinary approach is required, which can be provided by sports informatics. The purpose of this paper is the development of a general and sports informatics driven concept for a CIS, using methods and models of existing areas, especially business intelligence (BI). Software engineering provides general methods and models. Business intelligence addresses similar problems in industry. Therefore, existing best practice models are examined and adapted for sport. From sports science, especially training systems and information systems in sports are considered. Practical relevance is illustrated by an example of Liverpool FC. Based on these areas, the requirements for a CIS are derived, and an architectural concept with its different components is designed and explained. To better understand the practical challenges, a participatory observation was conducted during years of working in sports clubs. This paper provides a new sports informatics approach to the general design and architecture of a CIS using best practice models from BI. It illustrates the complexity of this interdisciplinary topic and the relevance of a sports informatics approach. This paper is meant as a conceptional starting point and shows the need for further work in this field. [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]

The modern-day landscape of Olympic and Professional sport is arguably more competitive than ever. One consequence of this is the increased focus on identifying and developing early athletic talent. In this paper, we highlight key challenges associated with talent (athlete) identification and development and propose possible solutions that could be considered by research and practice. The first challenge focuses on clarifying the purposes of talent identification initiatives such as defining what talent is and how its meaning might evolve over time. Challenge two centers on ways to best identify, select and develop talent, including issues with different approaches to identification, the need to understand the impact of development and the need to have appropriate resourcing in the system to support continued development of knowledge. Finally, we discuss two challenges in relation to the 'healthiness' of talent identification and development. The first examines whether a talent identification and development system is 'healthy' for athletes while the second focuses on how sport stakeholders could discourage the apparent trend toward early specialization in youth sport settings. Whilst this paper discusses the research in relation to these challenges, we propose multiple possible solutions that researchers and practitioners could consider for optimizing their approach to talent identification and development. In summary, talent is a complex and largely misunderstood phenomenon lacking robust research evidence, and given concerns that it is potentially unhealthy, talent identification and selection at younger ages is not recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By drawing on primary scholarly literature on the dual career in sport, this article aims to identify the key features and problems concerning the development and implementation of programs promoting school and university education for young footballers. The paper highlights the importance of bridging the gap between professional sport and learning in young footballers by promoting dissemination actions within dual-career programs. To implement these actions, the authors have investigated and examined by comparative, historical, and hermeneutical methodology the role that team manager may play to support programs that, in the context of Italian legislation and regulations, encourage the development of specific skills in young footballers. These skills deal mainly with coping with transitions affecting athlete-students and student-athletes' sports experience and post-career years. The paper will conclude with a list of educational principles to be developed as practical actions to implement dual-career programs for young footballers attending high school or university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of the cultural omnivore has been applied to many cultural domains. However, given the pervasiveness of professional sport in contemporary societies, less is known about omnivorous behaviour when it comes to consuming this cultural form. This study sets out to find if indeed there is an omnivorous consumption profile for professional sport. Using a latent class and regression analysis of survey data on five major professional sports leagues from Canada, this paper seeks to determine if this professional sport omnivore exists, how prevalent it might be, and if it maps onto wider socio-economic differentiations. The latent class analysis does show that there is an omnivorous consumption profile. However, it is the second smallest professional sport profile and does not map onto wider socio-economic differentiations, even as other patterns of professional sports' consumption do display such distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]