Team Owners Research Articles

Subsidizing a sports arena in a bankrupt city: Detroit's Little Caesars Arena

AbstractObjectivesThe potential for ancillary real estate transformation and downtown revitalization has moved to the forefront of sports venue subsidy arguments. Despite the City of Detroit being in the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history at the time, $324 million in public funding was directly provided to Little Caesars Arena, a new home for the Detroit Red Wings hockey team. Using the Detroit context, this article examines how a major arena subsidy deal arose in a severely financially distressed city.MethodsUsing a snowball technique, documents were collected from government, media, industry, community, legal, and academic sources to inform a retrospective, single case study. Over 300 documents covering a period from 1992 to 2021 were then reviewed for prospective relevance. A review of secondary media sources was conducted in lieu of traditional interviews.ResultsThe arena funding outcome is best explained by three interrelated aspects: local growth coalitions, real estate development promises, and lacking procedural and financial transparency exacerbated by both the chosen funding mechanism of tax increment financing (TIF) and the bankruptcy.ConclusionsWhere flexible financial subsidies and arena deal making are concerned, procedural transparency matters. Growth coalitions and rent‐seeking team owners can use the earmarked nature of TIF to circumvent traditional budgetary processes and mute prospective opposition through promises of self‐financing subsidies that will not result in new tax rate hikes. For venue deals where the substance is in the details of contractual obligations, transparency and adequate time for scrutiny are especially important.

The Model of The Sport Agent in Thailand: How to Be the Finest Athlete Representative?

Purpose: This research aims to study the basketball sport agent management model in Thailand. Theoretical Framework: This study employs the concepts and theories of the sport agent’s management factor affecting the professional Basketball player achievement in Thailand. Methodology: The study was qualitative research used in-depth interviews. The purposive sampling 24 key informants which were comprised of three trainers, three media people, three financial managers, nine people consist of the representative from the basketball league, professional basketball team owners, and basketball association administrators, three lawyers, three people from the sport cloth and equipment business, three professional basketball team owners, and three Basketball association administrators. The qualifications are the experienced person, and have been related in the sport industry more than 3 years. The researchers gathered data from in-depth interviews by using the management process (planning, organizing, leading, and controlling) approach. Findings: The result found the management model in 4 aspects, firstly, the planning is the goals and route, provoke and increase the plans and strategies for each step of the way. Secondly, the organizing establishes the system to coordinate and allocate a firm`s assets in an effort to perform its plans. Thirdly, leading by synchronization of the efforts of people and organizations for the cause of reaching organizational efficiency. Lastly, the controlling is the manner of the use of organizational assets to comprehend organizational objectives. Research Practical and Social Implication: The research study will be employing the protection of players' rights and interests in contract negotiations. Furthermore, the basketball agent able to transfer to the professionalization of the basketball industry through standardized agent practices. Moreover, the result of the research will be guideline for the sport agent to enhanced credibility and integrity of Thai basketball on the international stage. In term of the social implications, the result of the research study will reduction of exploitative practices and unethical behavior within the industry. Moreover, it will be empowerment of athletes to make informed decisions about their careers. In addition, it able to promote fair play and sportsmanship values in the basketball community. Originality/Value: The introduction of a structured basketball sport agent management model in Thailand offers a unique opportunity to enhance transparency and accountability in player representation, addressing existing gaps in regulation. By prioritizing the welfare and interests of athletes, this model has the potential to elevate the integrity and professionalism of the Thai basketball industry, ultimately fostering growth and sustainability. Its implementation serves as a pioneering step towards aligning with global standards while nurturing a more ethical and equitable environment for players, agents, and stakeholders alike.

Are NBA Players Equally Valued by Team Owners and Trading Card Collectors?

Are NBA Players Equally Valued by Team Owners and Trading Card Collectors?

Optimal Timeout Choices in Clutch Situations in the NBA

When down by a possession in fourth quarter with the shot clock off and possessing the ball, National Basketball Association (NBA) coaches face a decision: take a timeout and draw up a play or let play continue. Utilizing play-by-play data for 16,839 NBA games, we find taking a timeout lowers a team's chances of a successful possession by 5.7 percentage points. Coaches might view taking a timeout as the safe decision, since blame for the loss would fall on the players for not executing the play, not on the coach for failing to call one. This suboptimal behavior suggests there is a principal–agent problem between team owners and coaches.

No crowd, no roar, no home advantage: evidence from ice hockey

ABSTRACT Research question The COVID-19 pandemic entailed a period where no spectators were allowed to attend arena events. This provided a unique opportunity to study how the non-presence of supportive home crowds affects home advantage in sports. In this paper, we examine if there is such a home advantage for ice hockey. Research methods Using data from four consecutive seasons of Norwegian ice hockey, we apply team-fixed and referee-fixed effects regression analysis to identify how the non-presence of home crowds affects two aspects of home advantage in ice hockey: goal scoring and number of suspensions. Results When matches are played in front of no home crowd, away teams score more goals to reduce the initial goal scoring difference in favor of home teams. When playing in front of no home crowd, home teams also get more suspensions causing more power plays for away teams to reduce the initial difference in number of suspensions favoring home teams. Finally, more suspensions for home teams are positively correlated with goal scoring for away teams. This suggests that the absence of home crowds also influences goal scoring indirectly for away teams, i.e. through more suspensions for home teams. Implications When two teams of equal performance-ability meet up, hockey team owners, coaches, people betting on hockey matches, and fans/spectators could all benefit from knowing that a roaring home crowd might be the critical issue that tips the scale in the home team’s favor.

How Major League Baseball Parks Reveal the White Middle-Class's Views on Cities

Abstract Since the 1950s, municipalities across the country have built stadiums to attract or retain Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. Because those teams were city-based and team owners have consistently aimed to attract middle- and upper-class white fans to their ballparks, changes in ballparks highlight how the white middle- and upper-classes thought about cities. When ballparks were popular, they provided something middle- and upper-class white fans were looking for; when they were not, something was missing. Using Houston's Astrodome, Baltimore's Camden Yards, and suburban Atlanta's Truist Park, this article traces a cyclical process in the locations of MLB ballparks and how those locations made most white fans feel safe. It shows that cities repelled middle- and upper-class whites in the 1960s and 1970s, that predictable facsimiles of urban life drew them in the 1990s, and that they again found cities unappealing in the 2010s.

Research on the Influencing Factors of NBA Players’ Salaries

Currently, most of the studies are discussing the imbalance of NBA salaries, and only a few will actually take a closer look at what aspects of a player's capability can significantly affect their salary, which is what would be mainly discussed in this report. For NBA this mature business league, earning high salaries is the common goal of all players. However, due to the limitations such as the NBA salary cap, each team is limited in the total amount of salary they can allocate to their players. For team owners, determining a player’s value through scoring, defenses, and shooting percentage is vital. Players, need to learn what they can do to earn more, such as improving their defensive efficiency or grabbing more rebounds. Each team needs different types of players, such as three-point shooters, organizers, or players who own leadership. Next season, the salary cap for NBA teams will be around $123 million and each team will have around 13 players. Team management will need to evaluate the value of every individual. For example, they will evaluate a three-point shooter in terms of three-point percentage, percentage of shots taken, number of threes per game, etc. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the potential reasons for the income distribution of the league, which is conducive to enhancing the understanding of the pattern for the player side, and help the owners to take advantage of it, and better allocate their resources.

The well-being outcomes of multi-actor inter-organisational value co-creation and co-destruction within a service ecosystem

Purpose Emerging transformative service research (TSR) studies adopt a service system lens to conceptualise well-being across the micro, meso and macro levels of aggregation, typically within an organisation. No TSR has yet examined well-being across multiple interconnected organisations at the highest level of aggregation, the meta or service ecosystem level. This study aims to explore how value co-creation and, critically, co-destruction among different actors across interacting organisations enhances or destroys multiple levels of well-being. Design/methodology/approach This study uses semi-structured, in-depth interviews to collect data from five types of key actors (n = 35): players, team owners, tournament operations managers, casters and viewers, across 29 interconnected organisations in the oceanic esports industry. The interviews were coded using NVivo 12 and thematically analysed. Findings Resource integration on each level of aggregation within a service ecosystem (micro, meso, macro and meta) can co-create and co-destroy value, which leads to the enhancement and destruction of multiple levels of well-being (individual, collective, service system and service ecosystem). Value co-creation and co-destruction, as well as the resultant well-being outcomes, were interconnected across the different levels within the service ecosystem. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to incorporate a multi-actor perspective on the well-being consequences of value co-creation and value co-destruction within a service ecosystem as opposed to service system. Thus, this research also contributes to the minimal research which examines the outcomes of value co-destruction, rather than value co-creation, at multiple levels of aggregation.

Selected Issues of (Good) Governance in North American Professional Sports Leagues

In recent years, sport governing bodies (SGB) have been the subject of serious questions regarding their governance structures and decision-making processes. SGB that fail to implement regulatory mechanisms and to improve their governance structures and processes risk being confronted with severe ethically sensitive issues outside and inside the fields, which may eventually result in negative publicity and reduced demand (e.g., fans, sponsors) or financial support (e.g., from governments). This study examines selected regulations and practices of North American professional sports leagues in light of good governance principles. By adopting a qualitative research design, we investigate if there is a need for reforms to be employed by the leagues to comply with core dimensions of governance and thus reduce the risk of not being prepared to deal with ethically sensitive issues that may come up. Our critical analysis suggests that essential reforms need to be employed by the leagues to comply with core principles of good governance. In terms of democracy, professional leagues need to recognise stakeholder interests, implement innovative participation mechanisms, and apply diversity and inclusion policies for board composition. On transparency, it is required to publish internal regulations and financial information despite lax regulations on disclosure policies in the United States. Concerning accountability, professional leagues should separate their disciplinary and executive branches to avoid the concentration of power and potential conflict of interest in the relationship between the commissioner and team owners.

“Nothing More Divisive than Politics”: Colorblindness and Antiblackness in NFL Protest Discourse

ABSTRACT In 2016, Colin Kaepernick began demonstrating during the national anthem to protest racial injustice, kicking off the NFL protests. This paper examines a turning point in protest discourse: statements by President Donald Trump in September 2017 that NFL owners should say to (primarily Black) protesting players, “Get that son of a bitch off the field.” In the wake of these remarks, team owner responses that came to their players’ defense emphasized the need for “unity” over “divisiveness,” using tropes of liberal colorblindness to privilege the status quo over directly addressing anti-Black racism in the league and in American life. These responses represent a rhetorical strategy of containment, more effective at suppressing the radical potential of the protests than previous “All lives matter” counterarguments. By framing all political discourse in the NFL as anti-unity, team statements contributed to the containment of Black activism and the perpetuation of racism inside and outside of the league.

A comprehensive approach to predict auction prices and economic value creation of cricketers in the Indian Premier League (IPL)

The Indian Premier League (IPL), the most successful cricket tournament in India, has immensely grown in popularity. Unlike similar tournaments like Major League Baseball and the UEFA Champions League, their models cannot be replicated due to the dynamic pricing nature of player auctions. The research intends to generate a predictive model that predicts the auction price of a player using key quantitative variables. The players were categorised by batsmen, bowlers, and all-rounders. Due to the holistic hedonic nature of the model, equations were formed to predict a player’s future performance, in terms of measurable points, and to extrapolate economic value creation given a budget constraint. This study provides insights on the player’s economic value by comparing the auction price paid vs. the player’s actual performance. This new approach to modelling in cricket games not only aims to produce more accurate results using the hedonic pricing method, but also enlightens an introduction to a more holistic modelling process to intricately understand the profiting avenues for team owners to reverse-engineer value additions of players at each level and position. Finally, this model, which considers the factors an IPL franchise would, is being designed to be utilised in future IPL auctions.

A Players’ League: Short- and Long-Term Solutions to Contract Holdouts in the NBA

The business of basketball can be cruel at times. Teams often trade players against the players’ wishes, using them like chess pieces to help the team, not the player, reach its goal. However, in recent years, the NBA has become a “players’ league” as the balance of power in contract negotiations has shifted from teams to players. More than ever before, players are dictating the terms of their contracts because team owners understand that the public pays top dollar to watch the best players perform, many of whom are considered cultural icons with massive marketability. However, this change in bargaining power has also created incentives for players to participate in opportunistic and strategic behavior. With limited earning-power years and a rare, sought-after skillset, players have increasingly engaged in contractual holdouts with the goal of either being traded to a new team or renegotiating their existing contracts for more money.
 This Note offers a short- and long-term legal framework to deal with the holdout scenario where players refuse to play pursuant to their original agreements until their contractual demands are accepted. Part I examines the key components of the NBA’s structural framework, including the Collective Bargaining Agreement, the Salary Cap, the Uniform Player Contract, Compensation, and Free Agency. Part II defines the player holdout problem, explains the significance of the problem for the NBA and its teams, and clarifies why traditional remedies set by the courts are inadequate to deal with this concern. Part III presents the optimal short-term legal solutions available to teams to address the holdout problem, namely self-help specific performance and liquidated damages, and certain limitations and challenges in enforcing these solutions. Finally, Part IV introduces a long-term, league-wide strategy to prevent holdouts in the future: Player Escrow Accounts.

Changing Understandings of the Dodgers’ Move to Los Angeles and the Value of Archival Sources

Changing Understandings of the Dodgers’ Move to Los Angeles and the Value of Archival Sources Seth S. Tannenbaum (bio) Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner who in 1957 moved his franchise from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, is one of the most influential figures in all of American sport. His reputation, however, is varied. Some authors, particularly in the decades after the move, cast him as one of the sport’s most greedy villains because, in their eyes, he stole a profitable team away from Brooklyn to make even more money in Los Angeles. More recently others argued O’Malley wanted to stay in New York but was stymied by government officials like Robert Moses who refused to help him acquire his choice site for a new ballpark.1 There was not a single moment in which the understanding of the move shifted; as early as the 1970s, some writers blamed Moses, and as recently as 2017, others blamed O’Malley.2 That said, fans’ emotions and sportswriters’ frustrations at losing their beat covering one of the best teams in the National League colored many of the early narratives that blamed O’Malley. Authors who looked to fans and sportswriters to understand the move faulted O’Malley, as did many writers who grew up in Brooklyn. When scholars gained access to archival material documenting the move and especially to O’Malley’s private papers, however, they tended to discuss the move with far greater complexity. Although access to professional baseball team papers is rare, as analysis of the Dodgers’ move demonstrates, such access allows for nuanced scholarship that highlights some of the ways baseball can be used to understand themes in broader American history.3 Blaming O’Malley was essentially the norm until some of his papers were made public because it was hard to understand the actions of the somewhat reticent owner without that material, especially for fans and journalists who felt personally wounded by his decision. When some of his communication with Moses became available in the 1980s, understanding O’Malley got easier, and more writers highlighted Moses’s role in the team’s relocation. This trend continued in the 2000s when O’Malley’s family donated some of [End Page 34] his papers to the Brooklyn Historical Society and posted others to the web-site www.walteromalley.com. His family also let a select few authors access the bulk of his private papers that were not online, allowing scholars to better comprehend his intentions and make connections beyond the game. The changing understandings of the Dodgers’ move show that although archival work is often painstaking, difficult, and expensive, looking beyond the sports pages, fan memoirs, and popular perceptions of pivotal moments in baseball history allows scholars to display more complexity. Before this kind of archival research was possible, the story of the Dodgers’ move was a simple narrative blaming one man, but with those sources, baseball historians used the move to understand a host of other aspects of American history. Other sport historians have made related arguments about the general value of archival documents, but the Dodgers’ move is an oft-discussed event whose broad narrative arc is well known, making it a powerful example when coupled with detailed analysis.4 Moreover, the Dodgers’ move is an informative and important case study because O’Malley’s papers are some of the very few professional baseball team records explaining off-field decisions that are available to scholars. A few team papers are held at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, and others are scattered throughout a variety of archives, but the vast majority are not available. As the Dodgers’ move also demonstrates, however, it is not impossible to display complexity and highlight baseball’s larger implications without team papers, but that access is a boon to crafting nuanced narratives that connect to themes in broader American history. background of the move The Dodgers moved into their famous home park in Brooklyn, Ebbets Field, in 1913. Over the following two decades, a mass transit–accessible, middle-class, residential neighborhood grew up around it. However, in part because team owner Charles Ebbets had to take...

Team Ownership and Philanthropy in Professional Sport: A Perspective on Organizational Generosity.

Corporate philanthropy (CP) is a vehicle for businesses to create a social impact in communities where their operations are located. An overlooked aspect of this phenomenon is the role and function played by CP influencers within firms—particularly organizational principals/owners. Using an upper echelons perspective, this study explores the relationship between team ownership and the level of CP in the professional sport context. To this end, longitudinal data of philanthropic giving of 94 U.S. professional sport teams in the NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL were collected. We also collected team owner characteristics such as individual/family ownership, age, tenure as team owner, other charitable work, educational background, and connection to community from a variety of publicly available sources. The findings revealed that team owner age, ownership tenure, and previous philanthropic involvement contributed to increased charitable giving in professional sport team corporate foundations. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the paper.

Association membership, election cycles, and political donation patterns

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.

Izazovi savremenog sportskog menadžmenta

The two centuries long course and development of modern sport has faced a number of challenges and changes, casing significant changes in sports management globally. Changes in the sports industry are affecting athletes, team owners, fans and society as a whole. In developed market economies, an increasing number of people are professionally involved in the field of sports, not only as athletes, but also in management of various processes, activities, events, human resources and finished products related to sports. The development of technology also has a constant impact on the development of sports in training technology, from the use of modern information technologies in the process of training, competition, to monitoring sports events, communication with fans, etc. The challenges of modern sports management are numerous and require relevant skills for the wide range of jobs it encompasses. The need for systematic management of all elements of sport emphasizes the importance of sports management that is oriented towards long-term success and well-being, both for the sports industry and for athletes and sports organizations.

Who Should Own the League? Transaction Costs and the Structure of NBA Ownership

Like many professional sports leagues worldwide, the National Basketball Association is organized as a cooperative of team owners. We argue that league ownership structures must balance two types of transaction costs: the costs to league owners of collective decision-making and the costs of contracting with stakeholders of the league, importantly players, owners, and potential investors. We compare the transaction costs of the current team owned league with the alternatives of investor and player owned leagues, finding that each ownership structure reduces some transaction costs while raising others.

Time to Say Goodbye: A Duration Analysis of the Determinants of Coach Dismissals and Quits in Major League Soccer

This study investigates the determinants of voluntary and involuntary head coach turnovers using a large dataset of some 6,500 coach-game observations from Major League Soccer over 2004–2019. The duration analysis results show that team performance related to expected playoff qualification and performance expectations matter for both types of separations. Moreover, the findings reveal that coach reputation decreases dismissal probabilities, while coach age increases quit rates. The results of this study will be of particular interest to Major League Soccer team owners and managers as well as for business management outside the sports industry.

NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime

The National Football League (NFL) seems nearly omnipresent today in the United States. Even people who are not football fans know the team names and recognize the star players. That was certainly not the case one hundred years ago when the league was founded at a car dealership in Canton, Ohio. How this change occurred is the story that Richard C. Crepeau tells in NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime. Originally published in 2014, the University of Illinois Press issued this revised edition in 2020 to coincide with the NFL's centennial. The author has expanded a couple of chapters from the previous edition and added a new chapter.The book is divided into three sections: “The Formative Years,” “The Rozelle Era,” and “The New NFL.” Within each section, chapters are often thematic, which occasionally means there is some repetitiveness. The first section examines the birth of professional American football in the 1890s and its slow growth through the early decades of the twentieth century. Initially centered in the factory and mill towns of the Ohio Valley, professional football developed as a game to entertain the working class on Sundays. By 1920, team owners decided to create an organization, the American Professional Football Association, the forerunner of the NFL. The league's first decade was rocky; few teams survived into the 1930s. (An excellent appendix lists all NFL franchises by the year they were founded, including those that folded.) Crepeau moves through the NFL's formative years quickly. The league's founding and first decade are covered in about thirteen pages. The author then summarizes the next decade and a half (1930‒45) in twelve pages. This is mostly a work of synthesis, so Crepeau cannot be blamed if the literature on early professional football and the first several decades of the NFL is thin. But readers hoping for more on the formative years will be disappointed.Crepeau begins to hit his stride by the third chapter, which examines the late 1940s and 1950s. In this chapter, some important themes emerge—the NFL as a business enterprise, the reoccurrence of labor disputes, race and racism in the league, and the role of television in shaping the sport. These themes are continued into Part 2, which looks at what Crepeau calls “The Rozelle Era.” This is the book's longest section, and it forms the core of the book. In this middle section, chapters follow a general chronology but are also organized thematically. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the rise of professional football as a major cultural phenomenon in the 1960s, as well as the NFL's dispute and eventual merger with the American Football League (AFL). Television, of course, played a major role in propelling professional football to the forefront of American culture. As Crepeau notes, “The landscape of the NFL changed permanently with the coming of television, the AFL, and the commodification of nearly everything” (61). Thanks to the game's seemingly made-for-television controlled violence and drama, Crepeau argues, by the end of the 1960s, “football was clearly the national pastime” (90). In Chapter 6, the author takes a deep dive into television contracts and the ever-increasing amounts of money that they brought to the league. After discussing expansion, battles over team moves, and the league's handling of various publicity problems (Commissioner Pete Rozelle's specialty) in Chapters 7 and 8, Crepeau turns to labor disputes in Chapter 9. His coverage of the formation and growth of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), as well as the three major strikes of the 1970s and 1980s, is excellent and probably makes Chapter 9 the strongest one in the book.Section 3 begins with the rise of Paul Tagliabue as the new commissioner following Rozelle's retirement, and the subsequent chapters focus on Roger Goodell's tenure as commissioner. Although Crepeau does not ignore social and cultural issues in the book's concluding section, at times, it comes across as largely an institutional history of the league from 1990 to the present, with the commissioners—Tagliabue and then Goodell—as the central actors. The author devotes two pages, for instance, to Goodell's handling of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice's assault of his fiancée in 2014; the emphasis is on Goodell, not on domestic violence. The final chapter examines the Super Bowl as America's gaudy new national holiday.Creapeau's book examines the NFL as a business and a cultural phenomenon. It succeeds on both accounts. Anyone looking for a short overview of the NFL's meteoric rise to America's national pastime should begin with Crepeau's book.

What Explains Labor’s Declining Share of Revenue in Major League Baseball?

Abstract: This study explores reasons for the declining share of revenue going to Major League Baseball players. Though the players’ union and team owners have proposed competing explanations, the phenomenon has not received any rigorous academic study. Economic theories for the similar decline of labor share in the macroeconomy provide possible explanations. The ability to estimate baseball players’ marginal revenue products through their performance offers a unique opportunity to examine the role of worker productivity in determining labor’s share of income in general. The analysis indicates that the returns to player performance have declined and that collective bargaining agreement terms that promote revenue sharing among teams appear to play a significant role. In addition, increased returns from new non-player revenue sources have lowered the share of league revenue going to players. Competition from substitute labor inputs and changes in returns to physical capital do not appear to be important factors.