Sports Franchises Research Articles

Towards a model of sports franchise leverage for destination marketing

This research investigates the leverage of sports franchises by destination marketing organisations for their tourism potential. Leverage in this instance is manifested by the opportunities afforded DMOs to co-opt the often global recognition of professional sports clubs to enhance the profile of a destination for the benefit of the wider stakeholder environment and not simply as a tool to attract additional sports tourists. It adds to the literature in covering a hitherto under scrutinised field of tourism enquiry focusing on the role of internationally acclaimed professional football teams as catalysts for tourism in the cities that host them. In doing so the study links theory to practice and provides policy makers with options for implementing initiatives in collaboration with sports franchises, resulting in benefits across the wider stakeholder environment.The study, focusing on the cities of Amsterdam and Manchester, identifies elements of best practice and crucially the factors that hinder optimal leverage strategies when it comes to the use of major commercially oriented sports franchises. A compelling case is made for the leverage of these entities in locations where the circumstances permit, with the research proposing a way forward under the guise of a model for sports franchise leverage. The model adds to the literature on tourism leverage and has significant implications for DMOs in providing a practical template characterised by its flexibility and applicability in wider settings. In providing insights into how stakeholder theory, destination marketing, actor network theory and cooperative marketing enjoy an almost symbiotic relationship in the tourism sphere, the study represents a first of its kind and should elicit the interest of policy makers, sports franchises and researchers.

The economic impact of a casino monopoly: Evidence from Atlantic City

Place-based policies and investments are often targeted at areas in economic decline and sometimes take the form of a granted monopoly (e.g., state flagship universities, professional sports franchises, mega events). After New Jersey voters approved legalized gambling as an economic development strategy to revive the blighted seaside resort town, Atlantic City held a regional monopoly on casinos east of the Mississippi River from 1978 through 1992. Using synthetic difference-in-differences, I find that commercial casinos had an immediate impact on the Atlantic City Metropolitan Area (Atlantic County) in the first five years through an increase in employment (26 percent), wages (9 percent), personal income (5 percent), and house prices (19 percent). The casinos’ positive impact on the metropolitan labor market was persistent and increasing through the early 1990s, but I find evidence that the city’s 1992 monopoly expiration negatively impacted the growth of local wages and personal income through 2000.

Integrating sports psychiatry in the interdisciplinary care of elite sports teams

Abstract: Introduction: Sports psychiatry is a developing field whose focus is the diagnosis, treatment, and management of mental illness in sports team members. Participation in elite sports can compromise mental health as psychiatric symptoms and disorders are often unrecognized until players experience performance failures, injury, or interpersonal concerns. Despite the growing recognition of psychiatric illness in sports, sports psychiatry is yet to be widely practiced in athlete healthcare management. Methods: We conducted a search on relevant publications on sports psychiatry and mental health in elite athletes. Results: Numerous papers detailed mental health statistics in elite athletes as well as outlined the development of sports psychiatry with respect to healthcare management. The papers describe cultural barriers to athlete mental health treatment include stigma, low mental health literacy, adverse mental health treatment experiences, busy schedules, and cultural/religious factors. Modifiable systemic factors include conflicts of interest for team clinicians caused by dual loyalty to sports franchises, and power relations encompassing intra-team hierarchies that prevent both help-seeking behaviors and the disclosure of harassment. Conclusion: The proposed model recommends that sports leagues and tournament organizations hire sports psychiatrists to monitor the standard of care provided within each sports franchise as a quality control initiative to incentivize sports franchises to offer the highest-level of healthcare, combating conflicts of interest and harassment. The conceptual model recommends each sports franchise integrate sports psychiatrists onsite with elite sports team members with the long-term goal of achieving SAMHSA’s full integration model pending available funding and sports culture shifts.

A Data-Driven Approach to Evaluate the Worthiness of Markets for Professional Sports Franchises

A Data-Driven Approach to Evaluate the Worthiness of Markets for Professional Sports Franchises

Public-Private Sector Relationships in Professional Sports

Relations between the public and private sectors are increasingly important, as service providers search for more efficient and effective ways to deliver both "public" and "private" services. This article explores the creative cooperation between public and private sectors in retaining the Pirate baseball franchise in Pittsburgh. The findings have implications for other troubled sports franchises, and potentially relate to other types of services, as well.

Owner–Resident Ideological Divergence and Firm Performance: Evidence From Major League Baseball

Stakeholder frameworks document the nature of sport franchise owners’ interactions with local residents, but there has been little attention on understanding why interactions develop a contentious or collaborative tenor. There has also been little emphasis on understanding whether and how interactions affect revenue-side outcomes. This paper uses the team identification literature to buttress the idea that owners are meaningful points of attachment for fans. It also uses consumer political ideology scholarship to explain that owners’ ideologies—never more visible than today—are important predictors of consumption. The paper proposes and tests a series of hypotheses about the effect of owners’ and residents’ ideological divergence on attendance and spending. Similar ideologies between residents and long-tenured owners were associated with about $8–$10 more spending per fan per game, as well as 2,400–3,950 more fans per game. Implications for academics and practitioners are provided.

Dead Spaces: Sport Venues and Police Stops in a Major League, Upper Midwestern City in the United States

Attention by sport management researchers and practitioners toward the societal externalities of professional sport franchises and venues has increased recently. This study asserts that while sport organizations are very active in this regard, there remain several issues that have not received much attention in the sport management literature nor by sport organizations themselves. Criminal activity, or the perception of criminal activity, at and near sport venues is one of these issues. The negative binominal regression analysis of police stops in Minneapolis revealed that police stops were greater within a quarter and half a mile of Minneapolis professional sport venues on event days. Furthermore, during nonevent days, the venues can be urban “dead spaces” and the design of venues in urban areas should address the internal and external amenities of the sport venues and the potential increase in crime and police-related activity on days with and without events.

Taxing the Business of Sports

“The rising value of American professional franchises, together with league expansions and more sale transactions, has caused the Internal Revenue Service to take interest.”Major professional sports in America, according to several estimates, is a $225 billion industry. While fan interest may wax and wane as athletes and organizations are beset by scandal and, even worse, mediocrity, the enterprise of sports continues to thrive and to occupy a disproportionate share of the public consciousness. Sports leagues today are immensely profitable businesses – more interested, perhaps, in the bottom line than the box score. Yet, somewhat anomalously, the purveyors of sport claim to be providing a public service – to the fans and to the communities in which they play. Sports leagues and franchises routinely assert that they, more so than most private enterprise, are entitled to a sizable share of the public fisc to finance their expansion. State and local governments have responded in unprecedented ways; during the 1990s alone, taxpayers shelled out approximately $11 billion to fund new sports facilities for the owners of major American sports franchises.

Antecedents and Outcomes of Social Capital: Evidence from a Professional Baseball Franchise.

PurposeThe empirical paper aimed to develop a theoretical model of social capital in professional spectating sports by investigating the antecedents and outcomes related to social capital from the spectator’s viewpoint.Participant and MethodBrothers Elephants, a professional baseball franchise in the Chinese Professional Baseball League, provided the research setting. The study’s participants consisted of 422 spectators of a Brothers Elephants game at its home field, Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Field. Around half of the participants were male; 46.4% of them aged between 30 and 39 years old. Data analysis was conducted through structural equation modeling.ResultsResults revealed that social interactions positively correlated with social capital, prosocial behavior, and spectator intention to re-attend the sporting event. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) also positively predicted intention to re-attend the sporting event, social capital, and prosocial behavior. Social capital significantly correlated with prosocial behavior and subjective well-being, and prosocial behavior significantly correlated with subjective well-being and intention to re-attend the sporting event.ConclusionThe results suggest that social capital can be developed through social interactions and perceived CSR in the context of professional spectator sporting events, with such social capital increasing, in turn, prosocial behavior, subjective well-being, and intention to re-attend the sporting event. From perspective of practical implication, professional sports franchise can develop more campaigns that boost sports spectators’ perceived social interactions and CSR, which can increase their social capital, prosocial behavior, subjective well-being, and their intention to re-attend the sporting event.

Determinants of consumption for regional sports network programming: an examination of inheritance effects, lead-in, lead-out, and game viewership

ABSTRACT The financial health of major North American professional sports franchises is closely tied to Regional Sports Networks. These networks purchase local market broadcast rights from franchises and then create sequenced pre-game and post-game show content bookending each live contest. Despite the financial importance of Regional Sports Networks, no study has empirically examined the drivers of viewership for this sequential content. We create a sample of sequenced pre-game show, game broadcast, and post-game show ratings and uncover statistically significant audience carryover from each broadcast to the next. We also demonstrate substantial variance in the viewership determinants for each live program, suggesting viewers have different consumption preferences for each program type. We further illustrate that local team performance relative to expectations significantly impacts ratings for the subsequent non-adjacent pre-game show broadcast. The results are crucial to broadcast rights valuation, advertising values, and programming strategy.

Agents in the sporting field: a law and economics perspective

While agents have been active in the sporting field since the late 1800s, sports agents and their activities have grown in prominence only in more recent times, particularly as a result of typically adverse headlines. Agents are generally considered to be necessary (or some might say a necessary evil) for the sporting industry, in the representation of sportsmen and women, the consultation of sports clubs and franchises, or the facilitation of employment contracts and transfer deals. In contrast to players and clubs (not to mention sports federations and governing bodies), however, sports agents are not engaged in sporting endeavour. Rather, the essence of their role is an economic one for the provision of services. This peripheral position of sports agents implies that their interests are likely to be quite different from those of other stakeholders in the sports industry – but it also gives rise to a significant regulatory conundrum. This conundrum has become especially apparent in the sport of football in recent years, where various attempts at regulation of access to and the performance of the profession of football agent have been made at national and international level. The field of sports and football in particular clearly has a great societal impact and a large economic value. Yet, sports law is remarkably absent so far from the economic approach to law. From a law and economics perspective and in the light of regulation theory, therefore, our main research questions are whether there is a need to regulate the profession of sports agent and, if so, what type of regulation is needed.

Sensemaking of novelty: the dynamic nature of integrating esports within a traditional sport organization

ABSTRACT Novel innovations influence the way sports organizations are managed. Sport organizations must embrace these innovations for growth opportunities yet also proactively account for the dynamics associated with their integration. Hence, we examine the investment of a professional sport franchise in an esports team and the emergent challenges and opportunities. We adopt a strategy-as-practice (SAP) perspective to examine the deliberate sensemaking strategies used by practitioners within the sport franchise to help create and give meaning to this decision. We augmented interviews with press releases and media coverage, revealing that practitioners used sensemaking strategies initially to foster a progressive culture, create a shared understanding of esports, and promote operational synergies. Subsequent managerial and operational changes required tactical shifts to address gender stigmas and brand demarcation limiting cross-promotion between the sport franchise and esports team. We contribute to the growing SAP perspective by identifying that practitioners engaging in deliberate strategy can proactively utilize sensegiving, sensebreaking, and sensehiding strategies to integrate and legitimize novel activities within an organization and position them to external stakeholders.

Comparison Between Various Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives Based on Spectators’ Attitudes and Attendance Intention for a Professional Baseball Franchise

Abstract: The effects of different corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives—child and family, community relations, health and wellness, and environment protection—were compared in this study based on spectators’ attitudes toward a sports franchise and event attendance intention. A total of 354 spectators were recruited from the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) in Taiwan. A quasi-experimental design was used as the research design, and a one-way multivariate analysis of covariance was conducted for data analysis. The results of this study indicate that spectators perceive the environment protection initiative to be more persuasive in terms of the attitude of sports spectators toward sports franchises and event attendance intention than child and family and health and wellness initiatives. Additionally, community relation initiatives are perceived to be more effective than child and family initiatives in terms of consumers’ attitudes toward sports franchises and event attendance intention. This article contributes both theoretical and practical knowledge and implications to CSR studies pertaining to sports from an Asian perspective.

Branding a Professional Sport Team that Reenters the Same Marketplace: Stakeholders’ Perspectives

Abstract: This study explored stakeholders’ perspectives in building a professional sport franchise brand that is reentering the same marketplace for a third time following the folding of two previous franchises within the same sport league. To accomplish the study’s purpose, a qualitative method was employed where semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 stakeholders of the reentering franchise. The findings uncovered five antecedents: game-extensions, owners’ credibility, community outreach, cross-promotions , and aligning with established brand . Theoretical contributions, practical recommendations, and directions for future research are provided.

스포츠 프렌차이즈 대표이사의 책임: 해외 SNS상 인종차별 사례를 중심으로

스포츠 프렌차이즈 대표이사의 책임: 해외 SNS상 인종차별 사례를 중심으로

From Save The Crew to Saved The Crew: Constitutive Rhetoric, Myth, and Fan Opposition to Sports Team Relocation

Sports franchise relocation is a hallmark of the American sports landscape. Teams relocate at their owners’ whims, leaving fans with little more to do than voice their angst. When the Columbus Crew of Major League Soccer announced in 2017 that ownership was set to move the team to Austin, a group of the Crew’s most ardent supporters initially seemed resigned to the franchise’s predetermined fate. However, over the course of months, those fans embarked on a grass roots campaign that generated attention worldwide and, ultimately, convinced a new ownership group to purchase the team and keep it in Columbus. This paper analyzes the efforts of these supporters through the lens of constitutive rhetoric, an ideologically-based concept that can galvanize disparate communities, shift their collective perspective, and set them on a course for action. In using this approach, the Save The Crew movement used myth to deploy a unique rhetorical power that successfully opposed the powerful capitalist logic of team relocation.

Analyzing the role of national culture on content creation and user engagement on Twitter: The case of Indian Premier League cricket franchises

The content generation strategy of a sports franchise determines whether the user engagement increases or decreases on social media platforms. Thus, the role of Chief Operating Officer (COO) is profound who generally decides and governs social media policies of the franchises. We show that the cultural differences between local-COO vis-à-vis foreign-COO-governed sports franchises reflect in their content generation strategy and are also associated with user engagement. We use Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory and extract relevant features from the tweets. Overall, the results show that user engagement is more when the content generation strategy is in alignment with fans’ national culture. The first contribution of our work is towards showing the incremental impact of power distance, individualism and collectivism on user engagement. The second contribution of our work is towards feature construction, feature selection and building authorship attribution classifiers to understand the content generation strategy. Prior literature shows that national culture impacts writing of online reviews. We investigate the role of national culture in social media content generation and user engagement and extend the literature. Our study is useful for organizations to understand the role of national culture in content generation and how it is related to user engagement.

Persuasion effect of corporate social responsibility initiatives in professional sport franchise: Moderating effect analysis.

This study used the elaboration likelihood model as a theoretical basis to explore the effects of various persuasion strategies on consumer perception and attitude regarding the corporate image of sports organizations that engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. The moderating effects of involvement, sports team identification, and sports fan curiosity were also examined. The multiple-study approach was employed to increase the external validity of the research. Two studies with cross-sectional between-subject pre–post experimental design were conducted with a total of 390 participants. The research setting was the Fubon Guardians baseball team of the Chinese Professional Baseball League in Study I and the Taiwan Beer Basketball Team of the Super Basketball League in Study II. Communication through the central and peripheral routes improved consumers’ CSR perception. Furthermore, under low involvement, weak sports team identification, and low sports fan curiosity conditions, communication through the central route and peripheral route improved the participants’ CSR perception. However, under high involvement, strong sports team identification, and high sports fan curiosity conditions, the different communication methods had nonsignificantly different effects. The findings of this study provide both academic contributions and practical implications.

유소년 스포츠 프랜차이즈의 선택속성, 지각된 가치, 고객만족 및 충성도의 구조적 관계 : 태권도장과 어린이 수영장을 중심으로

유소년 스포츠 프랜차이즈의 선택속성, 지각된 가치, 고객만족 및 충성도의 구조적 관계 : 태권도장과 어린이 수영장을 중심으로

Small business success: factors influencing the NBA's D-league

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to determine the effects of initially controllable market factors on franchise success within NBA's Development League (D-League).Design/methodology/approachThe open systems theory provided the foundation for analyzing characteristics contributing to small business success, as measured by attendance capacity for NBA D-League teams. Multiple regression analysis was utilized.FindingsThe results of this study indicate specific market characteristics increase franchise success in NBA's D-League. Population, income, facility size and ownership model all influenced attendance capacity.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is limited to the teams that have operated in NBA's D-League. Contextual factors related to new business survival are not unique to minor league basketball and can be applied by scholars or professionals to any new business to help understand new business survival.Practical implicationsThis research is also useful to cities looking to invest in a professional sports franchise and for all small business owners to understand market characteristics that can contribute to success.Originality/valueThe results from this study significantly contribute to small business literature by being the first empirical study on NBA's D-League.