Sports Digitalization: An Overview and A Research Agenda

Ever since its first manifesto in Greece around 3000 years ago, sports as a field has accumulated a long history with strong traditions while at the same time, gone through tremendous changes toward professionalization and commercialization. The current waves of digitalization have intensified its evolution, as digital technologies are increasingly entrenched in a wide range of sporting activities and for applications beyond mere performance enhancement. Despite such trends, research on sports digitalization in the IS discipline is surprisingly still nascent. This paper aims at establishing a discourse on sports digitalization within the discipline. Toward this, we first provide an understanding of the institutional characteristics of the sports industry, establishing its theoretical importance and relevance in our discipline; second, we reveal the latest trends of digitalization in the sports industry and unpack its implications for sports organizations; last, we propose an agenda for sports digitalization research in IS.