FiT Publishing

The number of foreign owners in football clubs has recently increased in Europe and especially in England. This study aims to analyze whether clubs owned by foreign investors show different parameters of sporting and managerial efficiency. We use data on expected performance (from betting odds), wage costs, and the results of football clubs in the English Premier League (EPL) and English Football League Championship (EFL) over 13 seasons. We estimate different measures of efficiency using three alternative methods: expected vs. actual performance index, nonparametric conditional data...Read more

The “sophomore slump” is a widely accepted phenomenon in modern sport culture, commonly conceptualized as a decline in performance during a player’s second year of competition following an outstanding first season. This study empirically verified the absence of sophomore slump through a two-stage network data envelopment analysis and Malmquist productivity index analysis of 616 English Premier League players from the 2014–2015 to 2018–2019 seasons. The relative rankings of individual second-year players were compared with their rankings in the previous season, and second-year and non-...Read more

Despite the importance of positioning in marketing, we have little empirical evidence about the characteristics of positioning strategy that influence effectiveness and the relationship between position-congruity and positioning efficiency. By applying multiple methodologies, we examined six golf brands to discover the effectiveness of brand positioning strategies and the relationship between position-congruity and efficiency. We found that (1) feature positioning strategy was as effective as benefit positioning strategy; (2) surrogate positioning strategy was most effective; and (3) a...Read more

While assessment of team-level marketing performance for a professional sport franchise is important for both the team marketer and the researcher to develop a marketing strategy and understand marketing performance, no evidence using a full set of teams for a long period of time currently exists. We propose that marketing performance can be estimated with a stochastic frontier model. Using twenty seasons of Major League Baseball (MLB) attendance data, we estimate the frontier attendance (i.e., the maximal Which Professional Sport Team Has the Best Marketing Performance in Driving...Read more

Studying the performance and efficiency of countries participating in the Olympic Games is a topic of interest in the area of economics and operations research. Com­monly, efficiency in this area has been analyzed using outputs like number of medals, the number of medals weighted by category, and the number of diplomas, while the most common inputs are gross domestic product (GDP) and population. This paper contributes to the literature by analyzing the countries’ efficiencies in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics with stochastic frontier models. Moreover, this study aims to fill three research...Read more

After the lockout season in 2004, the 2005 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) introduced salary regulations, as well as revenue sharing, to the teams of the National Hockey League (NHL) with the aim to restore financial competitiveness. Given these objectives, the question arises if efficiencies improved under the new CBA. Using team values as the dependent variable, we performed a stochastic frontier analysis. Our paper suggests that efficiencies immediately improved after the agreement, in particular for low performing teams.Read more