Sports Entertainment Research Articles

Thrill and Agony at Ultimate Fighting Championship

This case study seeks to make evident the imperative of better stakeholder management for contemporary competition by examining the evolving corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies at the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), a world leading sports entertainment firm, over its 29-year history. Specifically, this case study illuminates that while CSR is becoming increasingly understood as indispensable for a firm’s overall strategy, corporate strategists need to design and implement CSR with dual vigilance that, (1) stakeholders’ expectations on CSR would heighten over time and (2) internal stakeholders’ needs, though often trivialized in many CSR strategies, need authentic accommodations that move beyond lip service. In addition to unpacking the issues of CSR (and) authenticity for the UFC’s stakeholder management, this case study also draws on insights gleaned from mainstream stakeholder management and CSR research and provides evidence-based analysis and recommendations for enhancing firms’ CSR strategies.

ESport como factor económico

En el campo del entretenimiento deportivo, se presenta un hecho que es notorio debido a: 1. un crecimiento exponencial del número de practicantes, audiencias y aficionados 2. una alta rentabilidad de los negocios con perspectivas de un crecimiento significativo en los próximos años. Se trata del eSport (Deporte Electrónico), una actividad que no es reconocida como disciplina deportiva por el Comité Olímpico Internacional, debido a dos factores: 1. Al énfasis que se le coloca al movimiento físico como atributo principal para ser considerada una disciplina deportiva. 2. Al rechazo general de los contenidos de violencia, agresividad y destrucción de algunos juegos (e-Gaming). Este artículo se propone dimensionar la importancia del eSport como un factor económico consecuencia de haber desarrollado un producto lo suficientemente atractivo para la población joven que por lo general representan intereses que no están en pro de los deportistas, los aficionados y los diferentes grupos de interés. En el caso del eSport esta situación no afecta a los interesados quienes están dispuestos a seguir pagando para disfrutar de su entretenimiento.

The structural relationship on sport values and continuous participation intention of the dance for all participants based on the 4 experience economy theory

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the structural relationship between the sport values and continuous participation intention of the dance for all participants based on the 4 experience economy theory. Methods Frequency analysis, correlation analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling using SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 18.0 were conducted to analyze the survey materials. Results First, the entertainment experience was a significant effect on all factors of sports value. Second, educational experience was a significant effect on all factors except sports entertainment value. Third, escapist experiences have a significant effect on all factors except physical value. Fourth, aesthetic experience has a significant effect on all factors of sports value. Fifth, social value and entertainment value was a significant influence on the continuous participation intention. Sixth, entertainment experience and aesthetic experience was a significant influence on the continuous participation intention. Conclusions Through these study results, it was confirmed that 4 experience, sport values and continuous participation intention of dance for all participants had a significant influence on each other.

Media Representations as a Form of Stacking: Male and Female Athletes Featured on Men’s Magazine Covers, 1980–2019

This study analyzed 264 athlete images featured on the covers of nine men’s magazines across a 40-year period, 1980–2019. Among males, who accounted for 227 (81%) of the 264 athletes, African Americans and Latinos each represented 6 sports, most of which involved team competition, while White males represented 21 sports, many of which were individual. Analyses of position stacking in football showed White players in positions considered “central” to contest outcomes and Black athletes assigned to more “peripheral” roles. Among females, nearly all of whom were White, more than one in three participated in professional wrestling or sports entertainment. Other female athletes represented individual sports such as tennis and swimming. Overall, the study concludes that men’s magazines reproduced stacking patterns observed in earlier research.

The unit-demand envy-free pricing problem applied to the sports entertainment industry

The unit-demand envy-free pricing problem applied to the sports entertainment industry

Olympic Games as a Digital Media Product

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. Keywords audience, communication, content distribution, professional sports, sports event.

Value co-creation in sport entertainment between internal and external stakeholders

PurposeCo-creation as a collaborative process between organizations and customers generates unique value for both internal and external stakeholders for the company. Research generally examines and portrays customer-company co-creation as a balanced and harmonious relationship. However, a successful co-creation strategy involves understanding the shared interests of the parties and resolving tensions between internal and external stakeholders to avoid co-destruction. This study aims to draw on the intersection of organizational behavior and marketing literature and to examine shared interests and conflicting tensions involved in the co-creation in the context of sports entertainment. This context allows the researchers to unpack and present a more complex process of co-creation that fosters co-creativity and innovation.Design/methodology/approachBased on a qualitative case-based approach of a major university in the USA, the authors draw on interviews and observations from their athletic administration and fans engaged in a men’s Division I team through an entire season.FindingsThis qualitative study illustrates an alternative, more complex dilemma of co-creating emotional and symbolic value based on shared interests while reconciling conflicting internal and external stakeholder interests. The findings suggest a tug of war based on tensions, where management adopted contrasting managerial strategies ranging from attempting to reconcile tension through organic co-creation to controlled manufactured creation.Research limitations/implicationsEmotional and symbolic game experience value is an interdependent process which cannot be created without consumer engagement. Both emotional and symbolic values are enhanced during games to the extent consumers perceive participation in the creative pre-game stages.Originality/valueThis study draws on sports entertainment to identify sources of tension in co-creation and discuss type of solutions among internal and external stakeholders.

ESports in K-12 and Post-Secondary Schools

eSports is a rising modality of sports entertainment in the United States and has growing implications for education. Providing competitive eSports teams in schools satisfies the growing desire to train and educate students on the skills emphasized in STEM and Career Technical Education (CTE) education, as well as in programs such as English and Language Arts. eSports develop the soft skills universities and employers like to see in a student graduating from high school. As the market continues to grow for eSports, opportunities for post-secondary education as well as for prospective employment will increase. The popularity of eSports will continue to grow, and this popularity will be reflected in the schools.

Mobile cloud based-framework for sports applications

Smartphones are increasingly becoming popular due to the wide range of capabilities, such as Wi-Fi connectivity, video acquisition, and navigation. Some of these applications require large computational power, memory, and long battery life. Sports entertainment applications executed on smartphones is the future paradigm shift that will be enabled by the mobile cloud computing environments. Many times mobile users request multiple mobile services in workflows to fulfill their complex requirements. To investigate such issues, we develop a mobile cloud based framework that detects and retrieves player statistics on a mobile phone during live cricket. The proposed framework is divided into several services and each service is either executed locally or on the cloud. Our approach considers the dependencies among different services and aims to optimize the execution time and energy consumption for executing the services. Due to the applied offloading strategy, the proposed framework turns the smartphones smarter by significantly reducing the execution burden and energy consumption of the smartphone. Experimental results are promising and show feasibility of the proposed framework to be deployed in several related applications using techniques of computer vision and machine learning.

Howzat! Navigating Gender Disruptions in Australian Young Women’s Cricket

ABSTRACT“Howzat” is colloquially used by cricketers to ask the umpire “How is that?” when they believe a batter is out. We employ this question here to frame interrogations of young women’s experiences as they navigate elite pathway cricket in an era of significant change. The global sports entertainment industry is, it seems, undergoing a form of gender disruption. The remuneration for Australian women cricketers rose by over 500 per cent between 2012 and 2017, providing opportunities for women and girls to transition to professional sport in ways quite different from historical amateur pathways. While on the surface this shapes as a time of great opportunity for aspiring sportswomen, there are unintended consequences that warrant consideration—particularly for females involved in sports with a legacy of masculine privilege. This article draws on qualitative research concerning five female pathway players and their respective parents, coaching and administrative staff who support them as they navigate the demands of playing elite cricket during adolescence. We employ Foucault’s concept of a “history of the present” to make sense of this dispositif to problematise how young women navigate gendered experiences in sports with “masculine” traditions amid a growing profile of women’s sport in Australia.

Products, Promotion, and (Possibly) Profits: Sports Entrepreneurship Revisited

Abstract This article provides two new definitions in sports history: first, the sport product, which is seen as encompassing player, spectator, and associated products; and, second, sports entrepreneurship, which covers the four categories of direct income seeking, indirect income seeking, psychic income seeking, and nonprofit promotional activities. Within these categories, attention is drawn to sports entertainment and “dark” entrepreneurs, as well as the historical importance of examining entrepreneurial failure. Two typologies of sports entrepreneurs are presented, one looking at aims and objectives and the other at function. It is argued that socio-cultural sports historians should not ignore economic aspects of sports provision.

Evaluation of Disaster Prevention and Sheltering Index of Stadiums Based on Combination of Normal and Disaster time

Urban disaster Shelters play a vital role in dealing with all kinds of major disasters in cities. As an important part of the modern city disaster prevention and refuge, the sport stadiums based on combination of normal time and disaster time have the unique advantage of emergency refuge and can play an irreplaceable role in other disaster prevention shelters. In normal times, the stadiums play sports entertainment functions, and can be converted into disaster prevention shelters when disasters occur. In this paper, by establishing the evaluation index system of the disaster prevention and shelter in stadiums, the AHP is used to analyse the potential of disaster prevention and refuge in several different types of stadiums, and then comprehensively evaluates the disaster prevention and evacuation capabilities of stadiums.

The End of Mindreading

Advances in neuroscience have formally debunked Cartesian mind/body dualism, ending, in the process, the possibility of mind reading as it has long been depicted in popular culture (Moulton, 2008, pp. 182-192). Gone, now, are the tantalizing possibilities of mental radio waves, psychic vibrations, and disembodied minds, frequently brandished by the mediums, mind readers, and mesmerists of decades past. It is my contention that contemporary mentalists are reacting – both intentionally and unintentionally – not only to these anti-dualist realities, but also to the post-truth condition. This in turn, is giving rise to a new meta paradigm of wink-eye mentalism in which – in contrast to classical mentalism – the lies are less interesting than the lying. In this paper, I explore the relationship between mentalism and two theories advanced by Performance Studies: dark play and make-belief. I further examine the curious relationships between mentalists, professional wrestlers, rock stars, politicians, and method actors; paying specific attention to what is known in the sports entertainment industry as kayfabe.

Evaluating the Service Quality of the Hotel Establishments in Sports Tourism With Regard to the Athletes

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the service quality of the hotels which are provided sport tourism by athletes according to some variables.The research was conducted with cross-sectional research method as one of the general survey models and relational screening model. Target group of the study also constituted the sample group. This sample was formed of 389 athletes in total as 247 males and 142 females from team sports in Turkish Football, Volleyball, Basketball leagues in years 2016-2017 and individual sports.“Sport Tourism Service Quality Scale” (STSQS) developed by Osmanoğlu et al. (2017) was employed as data collecting tool in this study. The scale was formed of 28 items and 5 sub-dimensions as “Sport facilities, α=0.96”, “Staff, α=0.82”, “Entertainment, α=0.90”, “Hygiene, α=0.85” and “Room quality, α=0.80”. The data was analysed by applying one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), Tukey’s Post-Hoc test and Pearson Correlation analysis. The level of significance for this study was decided as p<0.05.In conclusion with the study, service quality perception scores of the athletes were established to be high-level at room quality, hygiene and staff sub-dimensions and medium level at sport facilities and entertainment sub-dimensions. It was noted that service quality perception of the individual sports athletes is higher than the team sports athletes at staff and hygiene sub-dimensions (p<0.05). Regarding duration of stay, the mean of the ones that stay for 5 nights and above was observed to be significantly higher than the ones that stay one-two days and three-four days at sport facilities and staff sub-dimensions. Between the sport facilities, staff, hygiene and entertainment sub-dimensions of hotel classification and service quality, a significant distinction was seen in favor of the five star hotels (p<0,05).

Sensory navigation guide for visually impaired sea kayakers

AbstractAt present, a visually impaired kayaker needs the assistance of a kayaker coach in charge of guiding him/her by using loud vocal instructions or a sound device during the sea ride. However, neither the coach nor the visually impaired kayaker feel at ease with such a guiding due to the amount of noise generated by the frequent vocal interactions. This paper describes a novel concept of sensory navigation guide meant to help kayakers with visual disabilities to practice sea kayaking in an autonomous way. The innovation here consists in providing kayakers with wristbands that automatically vibrate left or right, depending on the predefined trajectory to be followed. The main contributions of this work include an original navigation algorithm based on GPS feedback to track a corridor‐shaped path on the sea and the definition of specific metrics to analyze the performance of the kayakers along the ride. Experiments carried out on a population of 10 visually impaired kayakers and 10 sighted kayakers showed convincing results. A satisfaction survey confirmed that all participants acknowledged the added value of the system in terms of increased autonomy. Most of the visually impaired participants also enjoyed a greater sports entertainment experience thanks to this guiding system, which can be extended to other kinds of water sports.

The influence of perceptions of other consumers on consumer responses and the mediation of crowding tolerance: a study on tourism, hotels and the Olympics

During service encounters, consumers perceive each other. This includes at sporting events where many human interactions occur. Large crowds of people tend to arouse negative emotions, even if the experience promotes positive emotions. This paper investigates the influence of consumer's perceptions of each other and the mediating role of crowding tolerance in consumer responses. Research is lacking to demonstrate the effect of interactions between consumers and findings are even scarcer for tourism. This study addresses the global sports entertainment industry and the hotel environment for tourists. A survey targeting the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016 was conducted with students and then we applied structural equation modelling (SEM). The results indicate that the perception that a consumer has of other consumers (in a hotel) has a strong relationship with word of mouth and satisfaction and that such a relationship is mediated by the negative perception generated by the agglomeration.

„Współcześni gladiatorzy”. Próba określenia istoty i kulturowego znaczenia zjawiska profesjonalnego wrestlingu

Professional wrestling is a polarizing phenomenon, adored for its excessive nature, yet still categorized as ‘fake’. Under the surface of a simple form of mass entertainment there are plenty of cultural contexts to be found, from the carnivalesque nature of the show itself, the stereotype issues, the subversion of standards, to its area of social transgression. This article presents sports entertainment as a multi-layered and intermedial phenomenon, especially representative of the American mass culture.

EAR: Enhanced Augmented Reality System for Sports Entertainment Applications

Augmented Reality (AR) overlays virtual information on real world data, such as displaying useful information on videos/images of a scene. This paper presents an Enhanced AR (EAR) system that displays useful statistical players’ information on captured images of a sports game. We focus on the situation where the input image is degraded by strong sunlight. Proposed EAR system consists of an image enhancement technique to improve the accuracy of subsequent player and face detection. The image enhancement is followed by player and face detection, face recognition, and players’ statistics display. First, an algorithm based on multi-scale retinex is proposed for image enhancement. Then, to detect players’ and faces’, we use adaptive boosting and Haar features for feature extraction and classification. The player face recognition algorithm uses boosted linear discriminant analysis to select features and nearest neighbor classifier for classification. The system can be adjusted to work in different types of sports where the input is an image and the desired output is display of information nearby the recognized players. Simulations are carried out on 2096 different images that contain players in diverse conditions. Proposed EAR system demonstrates the great potential of computer vision based approaches to develop AR applications.

Critical feminist hope: the encounter of neoliberalism and popular feminism in WWE 24: Women’s Evolution

Scholarship has pointed to contemporary feminism’s popularity and cultural “luminosity.” While this research has highlighted the limitations of feminist politics in a context of neoliberal individualism, this paper seeks to ask what possibilities for critiques and transformation of gender inequalities might be enabled by feminism’s visibility in neoliberalism. Using a framework of critical feminist hope, we highlight that capitalism’s embrace of feminism inarguably limits its political scope, but it may also open up opportunities for new forms of representation. To illustrate this, the paper analyses WWE 24: Women’s Evolution, a “brandcasting” documentary made to mark the rebrand of the sport entertainment promotion’s women’s division in 2016. While never naming it directly, the documentary draws heavily upon the signifiers of popular feminism. Although this mobilisation is often highly limited, a critically hopeful feminist reading allows us to move beyond dismissing this text as an example of feminism’s “co-optation” by neoliberalism. We highlight the documentary’s scathing critique of past failings in the representation and treatment of women performers, and, more importantly, the way feminism is used to make the case for corporate re-structure and change.

The integrity of the game: exploring attitudes of professional male athlete criminality

It has been argued that sports act as a social institution in the United States, encompassing many network headlines and reports. Resulting from the popularization of sports entertainment has been an enhanced insight into the criminal behavior of professional athletes. This research sought to understand how the general public perceives alleged professional athlete criminality. Utilizing household mail surveys with residents in Pennsylvania, respondents rated the seriousness, wrongness, and punitiveness of alleged athlete criminality depicted in five different vignettes. Results indicated that the strongest predictor of attitudes between professional athletes and non-athletes was offense type; more specifically gambling, which this sample rated more serious and wrong for professional athletes compared to non-athletes. This indicated that alleged offenses that may be perceived as attacking the integrity of the sport may be viewed more harshly.