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Regular version of the site

Intangibles in Sports

The research direction related to sport economics includes analysis of diverse perspectives such as team competition (leagues or Championships), individual sports (tournaments), sports events and public promotion. Special issue concerns sponsorship contacts as an important source of raising funds. Sport industry is highly related to intangibles. This relationship with intangibles is bidirectional. Intangibles like talent, support, history, and organization contribute to enhance the sport product.  On the other side, sports represent itself an intangible to promote activities or be the appropriate vehicle for CSR (corporate social responsibilities). The values of sport are under many decisions about advertising and sponsorship policies or are used to project a particular image of company, city or State. So, considering these issues we could expect:
  • To identify the intangibles involved in the production process in sport.
  • To identify how some intangibles can contribute to value creation in football. Especially we will consider the influence of “talent” on sports performance and then on economic value. This can be extended to other sports.
  • To check the influence of support and past performance (historical records) in sporting performance and then in economic value.
  • To identify if investing in this kind of intangible (organizing events) create value to the cities, regions or states.
  • To check if connecting the image of a company with a sport will contribute to value creation for the company.
Here are description of our sports projects.

Attendance teams' brand

Using data from the Russian Premier League, this line estimates brand strength of a football club as the effect that club has on attendance when it is the visiting team.  This objective measure of sports club brand contrasts with the subjective, survey based measures common in the literature.  The analysis then turns to the determinants of this measure of brand, tracking its evolution across seasons and relating it to the history of success of the club.  The results confirm that greater success raises brand strength and that brand does not depreciate quickly over time.
Another purpose is to extend such analysis to top division football leagues throughout Europe. There are several reasons for this extension.  First, and most importantly, the length of time for which data is available is as long or longer for the Western European leagues.  The method uses game by game data to estimate the impact of each team on attendance when it is the visiting team.  For Russia, Coates, Naidenova and Parshakov (2015) covered the period from 2010 through 2014.  This is problematic because during this period the Russian Premier League switched to the same season schedule as Western Europe.  Data available for Western European leagues for game by game attendance is available from as early as 2004, for Germany. More seasons of data translates into a greater ability to follow the evolution of the measure of brand strength. Moreover, Western European leagues have more experience with the highly commercial aspects of football, the need for revenue generation to compete for the best players, and consequently with the need for marketing and brand management.  
Second, for many players, especially those from Latin America, Russia poses an especially difficult challenge.  The distance to home is much larger from Russian cities than it is from Western European cities.  The language is different and speakers of their native tongue, or English, are much less common in Russia than in Western Europe.  Third, Russian winters are particularly harsh.  Until recently, the Russian league played on a different schedule than the Western European leagues further complicating attracting non-Russian players to the Russian Premier League.  Finally, the organization and governance of the leagues and the clubs are substantially different between Russia and Western Europe.  Transparency of club decision-making is much greater in Western Europe than in the Russian Premiership.  

Sponsorship effectiveness
European football, or soccer, is one of the world’s most popular sports with fans from all around the globe. Top teams attract thousands of people to the stadium, and millions more watch broadcasts. Football is a huge and rapidly developing business involving considerable amounts of money.Every football club needs money to develop, to sign new and better players, and to hire experienced coaches. Professional football clubs, playing in national premier leagues and in international competitions, generate considerable revenues from broadcasting deals, ticket sales, and merchandise, but almost all of them still require sponsorship support. Thus, most clubs sign contracts with different investors, generally companies, to gain additional funds. A large part of such contracts are sponsorship deals with local or international companies. Sponsorship deals are based, at first glance, on the prospectively mutually beneficial partnership between companies and football clubs. Such partnerships are usually based on buying a place for the company logo or advertising message on the club’s kit or stadium banners, displaying it to the thousands of fans in stadium. Companies also use star players to endorse products and increase brand awareness.Each football club usually has several sponsors: a kit sponsor, a shirt sponsor, and lower-level sponsors. Sponsorship is a form of exchange between the sponsor and the club in which it invests, with both parties seeking to achieve their own strategic goals. Simply put, the company pays for an advertising opportunity. However, this exchange is not as simple as it seems. Sponsorship is a mutually beneficial cooperation where each company has its own commercial objectives. However, whether investments in a football club help to improve company performance is an important question for company management. Previous studies show mixed results, finding both positive and negative influences of sport sponsorship on company performance. However prior research on sponsorship efficiency does not take into account the mutual influence of the willingness to become a sponsor and company performance. Sponsorship as a marketing technique can result in an increase in sponsor performance. If a company is efficient and makes large profits, it is more likely to become a sponsor. Thus methodological problems in regression analysis associated with endogeneity arise. This endogeneity can lead to a bias in regression coefficients and inaccurate conclusions. This study addresses these issues.

eSports

This line tests the implications of tournament theory using data on eSports (video game) competitions. We incorporate team production with the theory of rank order elimination tournaments since in our analysis, competitors in an elimination tournament are groups rather than individuals.  In this setting, the issue of proper incentives becomes more complicated than in the normal tournament model. Our findings demonstrate that the prize structure is convex in rank order which means that the contestants in eSports tournaments are risk averse. The results for the team games are consistent with the tournament theory and are similar for the results for individual games. From the practical point of view, we provide decision-makers in both sports and business with the insights about the compensation design with respect to importance of the competition and its type. 


 


 

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