Player Mobility Research Articles

Activity Identification, Classification, and Representation of Wheelchair Sport Court Tasks: A Method Proposal.

Monitoring player mobility in wheelchair sports is crucial for helping coaches understand activity dynamics and optimize training programs. However, the lack of data from monitoring tools, combined with a lack of standardized processing approaches and ineffective data presentation, limits their usability outside of research teams. To address these issues, this study aimed to propose a simple and efficient algorithm for identifying locomotor tasks (static, forward/backward propulsion, pivot/tight/wide rotation) during wheelchair movements, utilizing kinematic data from standard wheelchair mobility tests. Each participant's wheelchair was equipped with inertial measurement units-two on the wheel axes and one on the frame. A total of 36 wheelchair tennis and badminton players completed at least one of three proposed tests: the star test, the figure-of-eight test, and the forward/backward test. Locomotor tasks were identified using a five-step procedure involving data reduction, symbolic approximation, and logical pattern searching. This method successfully identified 99% of locomotor tasks for the star test, 95% for the figure-of-eight test, and 100% for the forward/backward test. The proposed method offers a valuable tool for the simple and clear identification and representation of locomotor tasks over extended periods. Future research should focus on applying this method to wheelchair court sports matches and daily life scenarios.

Free Agent Migration in the Korean Professional Baseball League: To Move or Not to Move

Abstract: This study explores free agent transactions of the Korea Baseball Organization from 2000 to 2018. It examines whether player mobility patterns differ across free agent pitchers and hitters. The probability of free agent pitchers transferring increases with the pitching position of the starting or closer pitcher. The probability of transfer for a hitter is negatively associated with age and left-handedness. The inertia of staying with the current team increases when substantial signing bonuses are paid to the free agent pitcher. A strong contract year affects the hitter mobility model, with a higher probability of transfer and a greater contribution to team wins in the final year before free agency. The longer a free agent’s contract, the higher the probability of them moving. A huge increase in the annual salary one year before free agent eligibility hinders the movement of hitters, whereas financial compensation does not constrain pitchers’ move.

Measures for a Better Youth Development Environment in European Professional Football

Both UEFA and the EU institutions favour the local training of young sports players, to guarantee a healthy development of European sports and their players. Recent empirical research supports the idea that professional football players need initial experience in a domestic first team to realise successful careers, a requirement that is threatened by increasing international youth player mobility. Existing measures are scarce, mainly focus on a legal perspective and do not realise the envisaged objectives. This study has the objective to develop new measures to more easily retain young talents in their European domestic league, without limiting the free movement of professional players. This paper’s main contribution is the proposition of flexible, quantitative measures, based on microeconomic models, to (1) create a level playing field for player wages to increase the domestic league’s attractiveness for domestic players, (2) curtail player loans and (3) better reward clubs’ youth training efforts, while at the same time discouraging adverse international youth transfers. The impact on the overall competitive balance between leagues is assessed as well.

Growing Pains in Esports Associationalism: Four Modes of National Esports Associational Development

While million-dollar prize-pools and mega-events dominate esports news, the somewhat elusive entities of national esports associations continue to develop as a critical underbelly. Associations prop up player mobility across all scales of modernisation and play an integral advocacy role for regional esports, providing situated responses to esports governance in society. However, national associations provide sector representation that is often polemic and unwelcome by grassroots, commercial and even state-level representatives. With the continued growth in everyday esports participation and calls for better regulatory frameworks, this article explores the emerging forms and challenges within esports associationalism under the four modes of public, industry, substitute, and early adopter associations. Through qualitative, mixed methods research, these modes are outlined as distinct associational forms with local mobilities, stakeholder pressures and infrastructural challenges involved for associational development and locally tailored esports governance.

Player Mobility and Competitive Balance Regulation in Professional Sports Leagues

Competitive balance regulation is more widespread in North American than in Europan sports leagues. The present paper addresses the question whether this observation can be explained with the help of differences in the degree of player mobility. Using an extended version of the workhorse contest model of sports leagues, the paper shows that the answer depends on the kind of competitive balance regulation. While player mobility may help to explain the difference with respect to salary regulation (e.g., salary caps), the choice of revenue sharing schemes turns out to be independent of player mobility.

Every Boy’s dream: A mixed method study of young professional Danish football player’s transnational migration

ObjectivesTo examine the transnational migration experiences of adolescent and young adult Danish professional footballers’ moving to top-level European clubs; and to investigate how and why the relational support impacted the process of transnational migration. Design and methodThe study incorporated a mixed method design grounded within critical realism. Based on a database search, we administered a survey to 73 players who migrated to high-level European Leagues between 2007 and 2017, of which 36 responded to the survey. We further interviewed eight players and three sets of parents. Quantitative data were analyzed through basic descriptive statistical procedures, while interview data were thematically analyzed and guided by the three phases of the cultural transition model (Ryba et al., 2016). ResultsIn the pre-transition phase, the agents were integral and facilitated player mobility, while parents were the most influential for coping with personal and mental challenges. Adjustment in football was prioritized during the acute adaptation phase that encompassed social positioning among teammates, loneliness and earning respect. The socio-cultural adaptation phase was entered only after the players had adjusted on the field and were resourceful enough to meet the challenges in the new context. The performance culture of football weaves through and in social interactions. ConclusionsIn order to promote healthy player development, there is a significant need for home and host environments to fill the social support vacuum created as a consequence of the migration.

Assembling Success: Desire, Worker Mobility, and Value Creation in Finnish Ice Hockey

AbstractBuilding on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theories, this paper offers an ethnography of work focused on a professional ice hockey team in Finland, where hockey is the leading sport in terms of popularity and economic investment. It is an analysis of the everyday investments in developing individual players’ skills and in building teams capable of high levels of cooperation under conditions of unpredictability. By looking at team formation as an emergent set of practices, materialities, discourses, and affects, we are better able to account for how corporations of this kind mitigate the deterritorializing effects of player mobility through processes of reterritorialization. As such, the analysis offers insights into modalities of value creation in a corporate model that relies not only on the constant improvement of worker performance in ways that can be easily measured but also on intangible facets of worker collaboration that manifest as collective desire.

Professional Labor Markets in the Journal of Sports Economics

This article summarises the research findings of papers published in Journal of Sports Economics on the workings of professional sports labor markets. The article covers three main themes: pay and performance, discrimination, and player mobility. The review shows what scholars have found so far and point out various gaps that researchers can fill in future work.

Labor mobility and racial discrimination

We examine the effect of labor mobility constraints on racial wage discrimination. We show that when monopsony power is low because of relaxed labor mobility constraints, firms cannot act on their prejudice and discrimination disappears. This prediction is taken to the data by using an exogenous mobility shock on the European football labor market. The Bosman ruling lifted restrictions on European player mobility in 1995. Exploiting racial differences in a panel of top English clubs, we compare the pre- and post-Bosman ruling market. We find evidence that wage discrimination disappears only for workers whose mobility constraints have been lifted.

Labor demographics and productivity: all-star roster turnover and foreigners

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

Temporal Mobility Networks in Online Gaming.

This data-driven study focuses on characterizing and predicting mobility of players between gaming servers in two popular online games, Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. Understanding these patterns of mobility between gaming servers is important for addressing challenges related to scaling popular online platforms, such as server provisioning, traffic redirection in case of server failure, and game promotion. In this study, we build predictive models for the growth and the pace of player mobility between gaming servers. We show that the most influential factors in predicting the pace and growth of migration are related to the number of in-game interactions. Declared friendship relationships in the online social network, on the other hand, have no effect on predicting mobility patterns.

Competitive Balance and Assortative Matching in the German Bundesliga

In this paper we consider trends in the distribution of player talent across association football clubs over time. Player talent is the most important prerequisite for team success in professional sports leagues and changes in players’ assortativeness in regard to the clubs they play for may arguably be an important factor for changes in competitive balance. We offer a new approach for measuring player talent and its distribution - the partial correlation of each player with the goal margin. We use this measure to analyze the degree of competitive balance over time. This approach enables us to examine how player mobility drives competitive balance over time. Empirical results are based on 19 seasons of the first two divisions of the German Bundesliga as well as domestic cup games. Our results show a decrease in competitive balance over time; better teams tend to attract increasingly better players. We show that this is driven by an increasingly unequal inter-divisional distribution of teams, coaches and players, as well as increasing assortativeness in the 1st Bundesliga. We further demonstrate that player transfers between Bundesliga teams results in assortative matching between players and teams. These domestic transfers do not, however, explain the reduction in competitive balance over time. Furthermore, we show that UEFA Champions League payments may have contributed to the reduction in competitive balance over the last two decades.

The Contractual Dynamics of Team Stability Versus Player Mobility: Who Rules 'The Beautiful Game'?

The specific focus of this article is on present and future contractual relations between footballers and their clubs, with an examination of arguments that players should have the 'right' unilaterally to terminate contracts providing compensation is paid to the current club. The article also seeks to make sense of the changing relationship between players and clubs within the cultural and economic transformation in football - particularly with regard to the issues of the traditional self-regulation of sports governing bodies and the implementation of effective internal governance. The major contentions of the article are that the current transfer system in the domestic leagues should be reformed along the lines of the current FIFA rules; Transfer windows should be abolished and the rules defining what constitutes an unlawful approach to a player should be significantly revised. Finally, resolution of the tensions between self governance and external regulation could be achieved by the application of reflexive regulatory theory to abolish, or at least reform, the transfer system throughout the EU.

A Dynamic Networking Substrate for Distributed MMOGs

This paper proposes a distributed and dynamic networking architecture for massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). The MMOG networks deal with the challenge of update message exchange among a large number of players that are subject to both mobility (constant change of virtual location) and churn (joining and leaving the physical network at will). Ideally, a player’s update messages should be multicasted to the player’s area of effect, which is a neighborhood around the player. But, this requires the system to have a centralized indexing service that keeps record of players residing in each region, making the system less scalable as the number of players increases. The use of geometric routing helps alleviate this requirement by exploiting location addressing and thus eliminating the need for IP-search queries. However, geometric routing comes with a number of convergence and performance issues that require solutions for reducing hop-count and minimizing overall delay while providing guaranteed message delivery. In this paper, we propose a geometric routing overlay for message exchange among a large number of MMOG players that not only provides reduced delay and guaranteed delivery, but also supports player mobility and churn. In addition, we enhance our greedy routing method to more efficiently support long distance messages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme using both theory and simulations.

An Indispensable but Fragile Geopolitical Triangle: Baseball in Japan, Korea and Taiwan

Baseball is not only a popular sport, but also a central cultural and social symbol in Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese societies. These nations have produced some tremendous performances internationally, from the World Little League Competition to the Olympic Games. Most significantly, in the recently instituted World Baseball Classic, Japan won all previous tournaments – 2006 and 2009 – with South Korea winning Silver in 2009 and Bronze in 2006. Baseball in the region has, however, always been embroiled in the maelstrom of domestic politics, international relations and economic difficulties. Exchanges at all levels between these three nations have rarely been congenial, proactive or stable. As the world and baseball enter into a new era of globalisation and internationalisation, this triangular sporting relationship appears to be awkward and clumsy, even though player mobility, media exposure and international competitions continue to grow. This paper overviews the historical development of baseball in these powerhouses of Asian baseball, with an emphasis on the inevitable and fragile relationships between them, discussing the social and political factors underpinning these relationships.

Does Player Mobility Lead to Higher Earnings? Evidence from the Nhl

A superficial examination of NHL earnings data shows that players who have changed teams earn more, on average, than players who have not. Extensive media coverage of player movement at trading and free agency deadlines has generated the perception that players on the move are consistently moving to higher salaries. Using career data for players in the National Hockey League, we estimate an earnings function and find, perhaps surprisingly, that the cumulative effect of moving on earnings is negative. Players who have changed teams many times during their careers earn less than those who remained with the same team throughout their career. We show that the negative impact of moving holds for free agents and highly talented players only if they move often.

Testing Coase theorem: the case of free agency in NBA

This study seeks to test the applicability of the Coase theorem to the allocation of players within. According to the Coase theorem, a player's final allocation would be the same no matter who has ownership of his playing rights if there are no transaction costs. What ownership affects is just the allocation of wealth. Using data from the National Basketball Association (NBA), this article argues that player mobility is likely to be affected by player ownership due to transaction cost imposed by the institution. It is also concluded that performance indicators used for value estimation vary by position and that this also affects player transfer.

Differing trajectories: football development and patterns of player migration in South Africa and Ghana

This essay employs a comparative approach to the dynamics underpinning the transnational migration of African football players. More specifically, it assesses the extent to which divergent levels of professionalism and football development across the game in South Africa and Ghana shape and contour patterns of player mobility. This analysis, rooted in ethnographic research in both locales, reveals that significant economic divergences between the Premier Soccer League (PSL) in South Africa and the Ghanaian Premier League produce dramatically different patterns of inward and outward football migration. These patterns reveal that while Ghana’s most talented players typically seek careers outside of the country, the PSL is not only able to retain highly skilled South African football labour but also represents an attractive destination for footballers from elsewhere in the continent.

Progressive Revenue Sharing in Major League Baseball: The Effect on Player Transfers and Talent Distribution

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.

Playing Life and Living Play: How Hybrid Reality Games Reframe Space, Play, and the Ordinary

Hybrid reality games (HRGs) employ mobile technologies equipped with Internet access and location awareness to create a multiuser game space that occurs simultaneously in physical, digital, and represented spaces as denoted by the player's mobility. This essay analyzes and compares two HRGs: I Like Frank and Day of the Figurines. The goal is to understand games and play as activities intrinsically and inseparably connected to our physical spaces and to our daily lives by focusing on the interconnection between play and ordinary life, game community, and player identity. The essay also interrogates how these games reconfigure and reflect current concepts of surveillance, community and anonymity in city spaces. The development of these concepts expands current research about how new Internet-connected mobile communication technologies change our experience of physical spaces by adding to them imaginary playful layers that influence player mobility through the city and promote singular types of interactions among physical, digital and represented spaces. Our analysis considers the intertwined and complex consequences of HRGs and other locative media, illustrating how such media can both normalize and provide modes of resistance to certain power relationships.