Challenges in sport entrepreneurship: cases in team sport business

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation was to study the challenges in entrepreneurship in team sport enterprises. Sport entrepreneurship is a relatively new area of research in the sport management field and has been studied to a very limited extent earlier. The main research question in this study was: What are the challenges in entrepreneurship for small and medium sized team sport enterprises? This dissertation contains four papers addressing this question from different viewpoints.

The research method in this study was a qualitative case study approach. The analysis approach used in this study was hermeneutical, and the study represents the constructivist paradigm and interpretivist epistemology aiming at interpreting and understanding the phenomenon in greater detail. The study contains two team sport enterprise cases from Finland and one from Sweden. The research data came from multiple sources of evidence including the case companies’ representatives’ interviews. The interview data was further analyzed by using qualitative data analysis software.

The theoretical framework for this study consists of traditional entrepreneurship theories, earlier discussion of sport entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and SME’s internationalization. The findings of this research are presented in the four articles and summarized in the conclusions. The challenges in team sport companies in the studied cases can be connected to the need for entrepreneurship due to professionalization, business growth, social entrepreneurship, and internationalization.

The contributions of this study can be divided into theoretical contributions, sport entrepreneurship discussion of the challenges team sport enterprises face, and managerial contributions describing the influence on the team sport industry. The special features connected to sport entrepreneurship that give team sport business companies extra challenges in terms of entrepreneurship and business performance, are presented in a model which gives a starting point for the future research. The more practical managerial contributions can be utilized to support sport SME’s entrepreneurial development.