Team Sports Leagues Research Articles

Professionalisation and its consequences for the governance of sports clubs in semi-professional team sports

Sports clubs in semi-professional team sports professionalise their management particularly often due to expectations from internal and external stakeholders. Likely, they separate their elite section from other sections at some point during their professionalisation process. Promoting factors are the entrepreneurial risks and the high use of resources of the elite section. However, there are different approaches regarding the legal form of the separated elite section. While some sports clubs organise the elite section as a separated club, others choose a profit oriented legal form, like a limited liability company (LLC) or a stock company. Here, the following question arises: What are the consequences of the varying approaches for the governance of the sports clubs?
 Nagel et al. (2015) use a multi-level framework for the analysis of professionalisation in sports federations, which can be similarly used to analyse professionalisation processes in sports clubs. The framework shows, that professionalisation forms can lead to positive and negative consequences, such as changes in the governance structures. However, the chosen legal form and its (non) profit orientation leaves room for club-specific governance structures (Lang et al., 2019).
 This study is part of an international project on professionalisation processes of sports clubs. The research design is a case study design. It analyses two Swiss sports clubs that engage in a men’s semi-professional team sports league. Both sport clubs separated their elite and amateur sections. The volleyball club organised the elite section as a member association, just like the amateur section. The handball club chose a LLC for their elite section. Data collection consisted of three parts: documentary analysis, expert interviews with decision-makers and focus groups with club members. The data was analysed using causation coding and visualisation strategies.
 The results show, that the elite section of the volleyball club employed a full-time paid CEO, while the management of the handball club’s LLC relied exclusively on voluntary work. This might be explained by more financial resources of and higher demands on the international playing volleyball club. For both sports clubs, a decreasing identification of the amateur section with the elite section was a challenge at the beginning of the separation. Although both clubs believe that they have overcome this challenge thanks to joint events, the recruitment of volunteers for the elite sports is still a challenge.
 In conclusion, the professionalisation processes and the separation of elite and amateur sports led to changes in the governance of the sports clubs. However, the assumption that profit oriented legal forms tend to employ more paid staff could not be confirmed. Future research is needed to challenge these findings and to discover further approaches of governance structures.
 References
 Lang, G., Ströbel, T., & Nagel, S. (2019). Professionalization forms in mixed sport industries: is it time to rethink the stereotypes of non-profit and for-profit sport organizations? Managing Sport and Leisure, 24(4), 208-225. https://doi.org/10.1080/23750472.2019.1611470
 Nagel, S., Schlesinger, T., Bayle, E., & Giauque, D. (2015). Professionalisation of sport federations: A multi-level framework for analysing forms, causes and consequences. European Sport Management Quarterly, 15(4), 407-433. https://doi.org/10.1080/16184742.2015.1062990

The Silence of the Fans: The Impact of Restricted Crowds on the Margin of Victory in the NBA

Abstract: This study investigates the impact of restricted crowds caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on the margin of victory of games in the NBA. Using 12,500 game-level observations from 11 NBA seasons from 2010/11 to 2020/21, the study first shows that during the COVID-19 season of 2020/21, games had a greater average margin of victory than any of the prior seasons. Regression results reveal that games played in front of restricted crowds were more likely to be won by a margin of 15, 20, or 25 points than games played in front of non-restricted crowds. The results indicate similar effects for games played in an empty arena or in front of a small crowd. Implications for the NBA and other major team sports leagues are discussed.

Transformational leadership and team performance in sports teams: A conditional indirect model

AbstractThis study tests how transformational leadership fosters team performance through team cohesion and how that relationship is moderated by previous team performance and leadership consensus. We computed a moderated‐mediation model based on a sample of 690 professional players in 59 top professional teams in interactive team sports leagues (basketball, handball, roller hockey, and indoor football/soccer) in Spain. Our findings suggest that transformational leadership indirectly influences objective team performance through the mediation role of team cohesion and that this indirect effect is more prominent when the level of previous performance is higher. We also found that the indirect effect of transformational leadership on team performance via cohesion is stronger in teams with higher consensus regarding their coaches' leadership. Overall, our results demonstrate the importance of integrating dispersion and contextual variables into research models, in particular, previous performance and leadership consensus.

Global hierarchy of team-sport leagues based on internet searches and revenues: Europe vs. America

Global hierarchy of team-sport leagues based on internet searches and revenues: Europe vs. America

Global hierarchy of team-sport leagues based on internet searches and revenues: Europe versus America

This paper contributes to the understanding of the modern sports industry in an international context. Two alternative approaches are adopted for establishing the hierarchy of team-sport leagues globally and for researching to what extent professional European football might have gained dominance relative to the major North American sports leagues. We first study the evolving economic situation of the main European and American sport leagues, in terms of both total revenues and broadcasting revenues. Then, we adopt an approach based on 'Google Trends' records to rank team-sport leagues according to the relative interest shown by the fans. We interpret the evolution over time as changes in the degree of support given to the Top-10 professional sports leagues worldwide. Finally, we estimate pooled OLS and GLS random effects models to examine the empirical relationship between leagues' revenues and internet searches to understand the prospects of the leagues concerning their popularity and potential revenues.

Casual bettors and sentiment bias in NBA and NFL betting

ABSTRACT Sentiment bias, defined as investment decisions made for reasons unrelated to fundamentals and related to popularity, represents a common research topic in finance and economics. Empirical research on sentiment bias frequently uses data from sports betting markets. While research generally finds evidence of sentiment bias, in particular, due to team popularity, the prevalence of this bias among fans and bettors in many sports remains unclear and identification of markets with relatively larger numbers of bettors with sentiment bias poses empirical challenges. We analyse outcomes in betting markets for games played in two North American team sports leagues, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Football League (NFL) from the 2012–13 to 2016–17 seasons and investigate how game timing, in terms of games played on weekdays and weekends, may affect the presence of bettors with popularity-based sentiment bias. Probit model estimates explaining the probability that a bet on a team wins indicate patterns consistent with the presence of bettors with sentiment bias in the markets for betting on games in the NFL but not in the NBA, and the presence of more such bettors for NFL games played on weekends.

Contestation, disruption and legitimization in women’s rugby league

Women’s professional team sport leagues have experienced a dramatic increase, yet research exploring the employment conditions and the perspectives the players involved is relatively sparse. The commencement of an inaugural rugby league competition for women in Australia and New Zealand provided a unique research opportunity to explore physical, sociocultural and organizational conditions and requirements of women athletes, and to identify inclusive management strategies and policies. Forty-nine perspective players for the professional competition were interviewed about their views on the transition of the women’s game from amateur to professional status and the associated management considerations. Two aggregate themes emerged from the interview data analysis: Gender identity and Institutional practice. The interview findings, together with an analysis of other women’s professional team sport enterprise agreements, informed decision making about the league’s size, duration and individual contract inclusions. Further implications for practice and future research are discussed.

Global brands in sports: identifying low-risk business opportunities

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to accomplish several goals. First, it studies the relevance of the sports sector as part of the entertainment industry. Second, it identifies promising markets within the sports industry, paying special attention to the relative importance of soccer in the context of team-sport leagues. Finally, the paper helps entrepreneurs to recognized market opportunities in the sports industry by identifying the soccer clubs that were found to be low-risk global brands. Design/methodology/approach To evaluate the relevance of the entertainment and sports industries, both in the USA and EU-28, the authors rely on their respective contribution to the domestic product and to employment. Two procedures are proposed for establishing the status of global sport leagues: one is based on the annual revenues and the other on the degree of interest that the public shows for each professional sport league. (The latter is performed by comparing the intensity with which internet users search for contents related to each of the Top-10 sports leagues worldwide.) Finally, by estimating the fixed effects of a model in which sport performance is filtered out, we calculate the expected low-risk revenues that clubs generate due to their heterogeneous brand value. Findings This paper reaches some few relevant results. First, we find that the greater employment opportunities in the European sport industry are concentrated in the UK, Spain, France and Germany, which may orientate entrepreneurs to start projects in promising sport markets. Then, data on annual revenues is used to rank the main team-sport leagues worldwide: NFL, MLB, NBA, Premier League and NHL. Another rank is based on the degree of interest of fans (as captured by Google Trends) yields a different result, where the NFL, NBA and the UEFA Champions League are, respectively, at command. Besides, the paper also ranks clubs as valuable assets by identifying which of them are low-risk soccer brands. The empirical study provides insights to select business opportunities by targeting the less-risky clubs or leagues, by calculating the expected annual revenues of clubs regardless of their recent sports performances. Originality/value This paper is innovative in two ways. First, it develops an analysis based on Google Trends to establish the comparative status of team-sport leagues worldwide. Second, by adopting an original empirical approach, it identifies markets and brands to carry out low-risk entrepreneurial projects. The expected potential revenues derived from this procedure are not contingent to the risk due to poor sport achievements in a particular season. To our knowledge, researchers have not computed in the past such calculations as that we name here low-risk revenues.

Measuring Competitive Balance in Formula One Racing

The Formula One Championship (F1) is one of the biggest sports businesses in the world. But, however, it seems to astonish that only very few scholarly articles analyze the F1 business. The aim of this study is to contribute to closing two gaps in the existing literature: it contributes (1) to the (sports) economic analysis of the F1 business and (2) to the literature on competitive balance in non-team sports. Like competitive balance in team sport leagues, also for F1 racing three dimensions can be distinguished: (a) race-specific competitive balance, (b) within-season competitive balance, and (c) between-season competitive balance. In addition to classical tools and data, some new and F1 specific indicators, like average lead changes or leading distance, are employed. Also, pitfalls induced especially by the used data source or calculation method are highlighted.

Regulation by taxes or strict limits

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus an empirical investigation on the financial ramifications of regulatory policies on American professional team sport leagues, while at once including the inseparable effects on the outcomes of contests. The authors conduct a comparative analysis of the impact of alternative regulatory mechanisms adopted by American professional team sport leagues, and their implications for the league performance.Design/methodology/approachThe paper conducts a comparative analysis of ten years of financial and contest data from Major League Baseball (MLB) and National Hockey League (NHL). Using relative measures of payroll and profits for the two leagues, the authors test hypotheses on the impact of the market-based payroll taxes of the MLB with the strict payroll limits imposed by the NHL and their relationship to both financial and contest outcomes of the two leagues.FindingsThe comparison of MLB and NHL shows that market-based tax incentives are more consistent with the league financial objectives than strict, enforced mandates, suggesting that comparatively higher profits are associated with the MLB’s approach when compared to the strict bounds imposed by the NHL. Conversely, the comparison of player costs in the NHL and MLB reveal no distinguishable features based on the alternative regulatory methods.Originality/valueThis paper provides an initial, valuable assessment of different regulatory mechanisms on the on- and off-field (-ice) performance of MLB and NHL. Given that MLB has adopted market-based tax incentives to regulate payroll (the competitive balance tax), and the NHL has imposed strict payroll limits (hard salary cap), the authors at once consider MLB’s innovative revenue-sharing system alongside the NHL’s more conventional and restrained method of revenue redistribution, and their implications for performance.

How to Make Sense of Team Sport Data: From Acquisition to Data Modeling and Research Aspects

Automatic and interactive data analysis is instrumental in making use of increasing amounts of complex data. Owing to novel sensor modalities, analysis of data generated in professional team sport leagues such as soccer, baseball, and basketball has recently become of concern, with potentially high commercial and research interest. The analysis of team ball games can serve many goals, e.g., in coaching to understand effects of strategies and tactics, or to derive insights improving performance. Also, it is often decisive to trainers and analysts to understand why a certain movement of a player or groups of players happened, and what the respective influencing factors are. We consider team sport as group movement including collaboration and competition of individuals following specific rule sets. Analyzing team sports is a challenging problem as it involves joint understanding of heterogeneous data perspectives, including high-dimensional, video, and movement data, as well as considering team behavior and rules (constraints) given in the particular team sport. We identify important components of team sport data, exemplified by the soccer case, and explain how to analyze team sport data in general. We identify challenges arising when facing these data sets and we propose a multi-facet view and analysis including pattern detection, context-aware analysis, and visual explanation. We also present applicable methods and technologies covering the heterogeneous aspects in team sport data.

Wladimir Andreff (Ed.), Disequilibrium Sports Economics: Competitive Imbalance and Budget Constraints

Abstract. The economics of professional team sport leagues has been built on three main pillars in the US literature: economic equilibrium for the product market and labour market for talent; profit maximisation; and competitive balance between teams (sporting equilibrium). The European literature has brought a fourth pillar: win maximisation with a hard budget constraint (break-even accounting rule). These four pillars have remained little questioned until recently. This emerging literature is one of the motivations for launching a book dealing with disequilibrium. Another is the editor’s conviction that the reality in team sport leagues does not fit with general equilibrium solutions. The first chapter introduces the previous elements and more generally the book while the seven following chapters develop a specific aspect related to disequilibrium: an attempt at modelling; a dynamic non-equilibrium simulation; the metrics of competitive imbalance; gender imbalance on the sports programme market; and the last three chapters on soft budget constraints with three different focuses (comparison between European and US leagues; governance and agency problem; regulation regarding the new UEFA club licensing and Financial Fair Play). As a whole, the book provides an original and realistic view that can and perhaps even must shape the future of sports economics. Keywords. Disequilibrium Sports Economics; Competitive Imbalance; Budget Constraints. JEL. Z20, L83, D50, L50, P20.

Business or Cause? Gendered Institutional Logics in Women’s Professional Soccer

Despite women’s increased participation in sport, women’s team sport leagues have yet to find a lasting toehold at the professional level. Using ethnographic data collected with U.S. women’s professional soccer in 2011-2012, I situate the work of selling women’s soccer in the complex institutional environment of contemporary women’s sports organizations. League owners and employees were dually influenced by the hypercommercialized model of success presented by men’s professional sports and an institutionalized, depoliticized feminist model of sport promoting empowerment and role modeling for girls and women. As a result, “business” and “cause” institutional logics presented different organizational goals. These logics contained divergent assumptions about the extent of gender (in)equality facing women’s professional sports. They were also understood somewhat differently along gender lines, with men perceiving empowerment and profit to be compatible goals more often than women. Implications for the viability of women’s professional sports leagues are discussed.

‘I am happy to start the conversation’: Examining sport media framing of Jason Collins’ coming out and playing in the NBA

A textual analysis examined US media framing of National Basketball Association (NBA) player Jason Collins’ coming out as the first ‘active’ gay athlete in one of the four most popular US professional men’s team sport leagues. We analyzed all articles on Collins published over a four-day period in the five most circulated US newspapers and five most trafficked USA-based sport websites after he came out publicly, and then analyzed those same publications over a three-day period following his signing with and playing for the Brooklyn Nets as an openly gay player. Journalists framed Collins’ self-outing as a landmark for US sport, noting that both sport and the USA are now far more accepting of sexual minorities. The few media members and athletes who criticized Collins or homosexuality were framed as antiquated outliers. Sports journalists continued to frame Collins as a hero after he signed with the Brooklyn Nets. Upon his return to the NBA nearly 10 months after coming out, prominent African-American basketball players and Collins’ teammates with Brooklyn were quoted as equating homophobia with racism in offering their support for Collins. Overall, media framed sport as an inclusive, accepting institution for gays, countering most previous research on homosexuality in sport media.

Chinese Desires? Olympism and Dominance, Guangzhou and Missed Opportunity, Major Leagues and Isolation on the Pacific Rim

Understanding the situation of China's self-promotion via Olympism requires us to connect two patterns. China is successful at Guangzhou and in Beijing Games at sponsoring and competing in Olympic-style sports festivals, but also surrounded by highly popular professional team sport leagues in baseball, rugby and cricket from Japan to India. China is successful in the promotion of its new capitalist economy but is critically short of energy sources and its aggressive diplomacy in pursuit of energy by land and sea has led to confrontations from Japan to Burma and even to the US ‘pivot’ to Asia. Review of theories of situation demonstrates that while a Debord-style spectacle theory might seem to explain the sporting spectacles and a realism in the tradition of Clausewitz might seem suited to the military situation, in fact approaches to situation combining realist and constructivist elements are stronger; a Deleuzian emphasis on will to power needs to be supplemented by Weberian attention to ends and ideas. Neither pattern explains the other; they connect. China makes history and its internal debates over state and middle class values can be tracked observing promotion of professional team sport in urban China and the scale of state sponsorship of Olympic-style games.

Forecasting in the NBA and other team sports

The multi-million sports-betting market is based on the fact that the task of predicting the outcome of a sports event is very hard. Even with the aid of an uncountable number of descriptive statistics and background information, only a few can correctly guess the outcome of a game or a league. In this work, our approach is to move away from the traditional way of predicting sports events, and instead to model sports leagues as networks of players and teams where the only information available is the work relationships among them. We propose two network-based models to predict the behavior of teams in sports leagues. These models are parameter-free, that is, they do not have a single parameter, and moreover are sport-agnostic: they can be applied directly to any team sports league. First, we view a sports league as a network in evolution, and we infer the implicit feedback behind network changes and properties over the years. Then, we use this knowledge to construct the network-based prediction models, which can, with a significantly high probability, indicate how well a team will perform over a season. We compare our proposed models with other prediction models in two of the most popular sports leagues: the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the Major League Baseball (MLB). Our model shows consistently good results in comparison with the other models and, relying upon the network properties of the teams, we achieved a ≈ 14% rank prediction accuracy improvement over our best competitor.

Infant Mortality of Professional Sports Clubs: An Organizational Ecology Perspective

Summary Due to their limited financial resources winning the national championship or qualifying for an international cup competition is not a viable option for most small market clubs in any of the European professional team sports leagues, such as soccer, ice hockey, basketball or handball. However, since a particularly poor performance is usually punished by relegation and since being relegated to the respective second division is associated with a dramatic decline in revenues, avoiding relegation is a target in itself. Using data from seven different professional team sports leagues in four different countries we estimate various parametric and semi-parametric regression models to identify the determinants of the clubs’ length of stay in their respective first division. In line with the organizational ecology literature we find that club experience, previous club performance (number of previous championship titles and number of previous relegations) and market size (average attendance) affect survival in a statistically significant and economically relevant sense. Perhaps surprisingly, founding conditions seem to be irrelevant for a club’s length of stay in its respective first division.

Game Theoretic Analysis of Basic Team Sports Leagues

The article proposes a new ‘‘strategic market game’’ (SMG) approach to modeling strategic interactions between clubs in professional team sports leagues, and generalizes a basic framework used in previous literature (two clubs, fixed talent supply and club revenues that depend only on relative team qualities), to allow variable talent supply and club revenues that depend on absolute (and relative) team qualities. The new approach incorporates club talent market power (duopsony), overlooked by existing approaches; in both the basic and the more general framework, Nash equilibrium competitive balance is analyzed, with and without revenue sharing and with comparisons to existing analyses.

THE COMBINED EFFECT OF SALARY RESTRICTIONS AND REVENUE SHARING IN SPORTS LEAGUES

Many major sports leagues are characterized by a combination of cross‐subsidization mechanisms like revenue‐sharing arrangements and payroll restrictions. Up to now, the effects of these policy tools have only been analyzed separately. This article provides a theoretical model of a team sports league and analyzes the combined effect of salary restrictions (caps and floors) and revenue sharing. It shows that the effect on club profits, player salaries, and competitive balance crucially depends on the mix of these policy tools. Moreover, the invariance proposition does not hold even under Walrasian‐conjectures if revenue sharing is combined with a salary cap or floor. (JEL L83, C72, L11)

Promotion Mechanisms on the PGA TOUR

The dynamics of screening talent and promoting an athlete to a major team sports league is not entirely different from that of a major individual sports league. While talent is assessed through mechanisms offering more or less observations, coaching decisions and team quality that can affect performance in team sports are generally not present in individual sports. Avoiding the possible distortions that can come from assessing athletic talent in team sports, this article examines the ability of two PGA TOUR promotion mechanisms—the Nationwide Tour and Qualifying School (Q‐school)—to predict success. As expected, the results suggest that more observations from the Nationwide Tour assessment mechanism provide more information about talent that can be used to better predict success on the PGA TOUR. But place of finish also matters, so promotion through the Nationwide Tour alone is not sufficient for a player to have the greatest chance for success.