Professional Structures
Financing Players’ Professional Careers: Does It Follow a Pecking Order?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ernest Yeboah Acheampong, Ellis Kofi Akwaa Sekyi
The purpose of this study is to analyze the financing process of professional footballers’ career path using the pecking order theory (POT). POT states that there is no target capital structure and that firms finance their activities in a certain order: first internal sources, debt and equity (that brings external ownership and claims) financing. We relate the financing of professional footballers’ career project abroad to that of the firm. Considering the poor backgrounds of most players before reaching professional status, they rely on their own meagre savings, then family and friends support and then external sources. Intermediaries (promoters) like agents and sports agencies accept the challenge to secure a professional contract for the trainees. It shows how resources are mobilised and invested into the development of professional footballers. We compare two categories of players in their professional career path: those who passed through the academy route and those who did not. We investigate into the turn-around time (speed) in acquiring these funds, convenience and costs of these sources of finance. We relied primarily on qualitative data and secondary documents to provide insights into the financing of professional career project of African players. We can conclude that the players’ internal resources are insufficient thus compelling them to fall on external sources from local managers, scouts, and the various football structures. The paper has implications for understanding and resolving conflicts between professional players and claimants emanating from moral hazards in these relationships. A grey area in sports finance is opened for further research.
Offense Plus Defense Equals Evolution: How the National Basketball Association Evolved into a Cultural and Economic Icon, from 1970-2000
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cameron Black
In the mid to late twentieth-century sport underwent drastic cultural and economic change. No sport was impacted as much as the National Basketball Association (NBA); it experienced vast economic and cultural change over the past thirty years. Though multiple lenses have been used to analyze how this change occurred, traditional perspectives do not adequately address root factors beyond race, and the influx of transcendent players such as Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson. I assert that the cultural and economic evolution of the NBA occurred via the application of symbolic capital. By leveraging cultural constructions of race, professionalism and work ethic, the NBA created a pliable, respectable product via symbolic capital. By creating positive symbolic capital, the NBA increased both its revenue, and more importantly, its cultural standing in the sporting pantheon.
Jockeying into Position: Latin American Riders and the Making of American Sports and Culture in the XX and XXI Centuries
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elisabeth Kuenzli
Horse racing, one of the oldest and most celebrated sports in America, reflects the most noticeable population change in the U.S. through the rise of Latino jockeys in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the nation’s premier horse racing event in 2015, the Kentucky Derby, 61% of the jockeys were Latino. Equibase, which track North American Thoroughbred Racing stats, revealed that in 2015 the top 10 jockeys by earnings were all Latino . A 2003 survey of 347 horse farms found that 44% of the workers were Latino, and the number has grown since then. My study moves beyond quantitative assessments of how many Latinos work in the equine industry to address what the growing number of Latinos means in terms of horse racing and in terms of broader societal issues transforming theU.S. and in terms of shaping images of Latinos in the U.S. Horse racing is a particularly useful site of analysis not only because a high number of Latinos work in the equine industry but also because it is a profession in which Latinos have experienced significant success at the highest echelons of riding and racing. I suggest that the public arena of the track serves as a platform for the Latino athlete to claim a space in American culture and to negotiate perceptions of Latinos within contemporary American society.
The Location of the Athletic Director Position: An Empirical Examination
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Timothy Harper, Neil Sinclair, Jeffrey Segrave
Based on the Collegiate Athletic Leadership Model and the Foundational, Supporting and Developmental, this paper examines the location of the athletic director (AD) position within institutions of higher education. We employ frequency analyses to identify patterns in the location of the position of the AD within the organizational structure of a sample of NCAA Division I and Division III colleges and universities. Among the issues examined, include: who the AD reports to, i.e., where the AD is positioned on the organizational chart; where the athletic department is located within the organizational structure; and, on what organizational body does the AD serve within the institutional hierarchy. We conducted frequency analyses to draw conclusions regarding within-league comparisons and across-league comparisons. The data show that ADs at major universities with acclaimed NCAA Division I intercollegiate athletic programs as well as Division 3 institutions that have at least one Division I sport tend to report to the President/Chancellor. ADs at both Division 1 and Division 3 institutions tend to report to the Dean of Faculty/Provost or Dean of Student Affairs. We conclude that the “space” the AD position occupies influences stakeholders’ perceptions regarding the relative importance of academics and athletics.
