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In contemporary society, visual information is influential, not least when businesses are communicating with potential customers. It represents and influences how people understand phenomena. In sports, much attention is directed toward how media represent elite sports and sport stars. Less attention is directed toward children’s sports. The aim of this article is to explore and analyze visual representations of children on sport businesses’ websites. The sample contained 697 images of sporting children, on which an interpretative content and discourse analysis was conducted. The study shows that the ideal customer emerging on these sites is a White, physically active, able, and slim boy or girl. Consumer culture seems to reproduce and preserve existing normative frameworks rather than producing alternative norms and ideas in children’s sport. Moreover, dilemmatic images of children both as competent and as innocent develop, displaying a childhood that should be both joyful and active but also safeguarded.

Social media is endemic to the sport industry and ensures its global competitiveness. The aim of this article is to critique social media scholarship in sport studies by taking a sport entrepreneurship perspective. This approach is useful in expanding and building on the existing social media research by focusing on the innovation apparent in the sport industry. An overview of current literature on social media and sport entrepreneurship is discussed. This article concludes with a number of different research trajectories that are needed to advance the practice and scholarship of sport social media studies and sport entrepreneurship.

Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football games are presented in a hypercommercialized manner by television broadcast networks through the targeted use of in-game graphics and corporatized content. While commercialized FBS football broadcast components have been analyzed within the frameworks of a hypercommercialized National Collegiate Athletic Association and media institutional logics, an analysis of commentator language has yet to be examined within the larger institutional field of FBS football broadcasts. Utilizing agenda setting and media framing as frameworks, this case study examined the manner in which commentators frame FBS football players as professionals in a hypercommercialized institutional setting. From a sample of 18 FBS bowl games during the 2019–20 season, discourse and thematic analysis reveal that commentators frame FBS football players in the context of their future professional opportunities (i.e., National Football League). The framing of FBS football players as professionals aligns with extant literature examining the broader institutional field of broadcast media and logics pervasive in the National Collegiate Athletic Association as an organization. The commodification of FBS football players as integral components to strategic programmatic content promoting future broadcast programming is discussed.

Subjective vitality is an important, yet understudied, indicator of eudaimonic well-being. People experience subjective vitality when they engage in need-satisfying activities. We investigate two sport consumption activities (stadium attendance and sport television viewing), team identification, and subjective vitality to understand how sport consumption mediates the impact of team identification on subjective vitality. Throughout a season, data were collected from local residents (n = 618) living within the franchise area of a Japanese professional baseball team. Structural equation modeling and bootstrapping mediation analysis showed that team identification exerted both a direct and an indirect effect via attendance frequency on subjective vitality. The proposed model and the findings offer new theoretical insights into the roles of subjective vitality, team identification, and stadium attendance in spectator sport. Consequently, sport teams can leverage these insights to intensify consumer experiences when people attend games, positively contributing to their well-being.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the diffusion of one sport innovation to forecast a second. Contextualized within the diffusion of innovations theory, this study investigated cumulative business analytics diffusion as an analog for cumulative natural language processing (NLP) diffusion in professional sport. A total of 89 teams of the 123 teams in the Big Four North American men’s professional sport leagues contributed: 21 from the National Football League, 23 from the National Basketball Association, 22 from Major League Baseball, and 23 from the National Hockey League. Utilizing an analogous forecasting approach, a discrete derivation of the Bass model was applied to cumulative BA adoption data. Parameters were then extended to predict cumulative NLP adoption. Resulting BA-estimated parameters (p = .0072, q = .3644) determined a close fit to NLP diffusion (root mean square error of approximation = 3.51, mean absolute error = 2.98), thereby validating BA to predict the takeoff and full adoption of NLP. This study illuminates an ongoing and isomorphic process for diffusion of innovations in the professional sport social system and generates a novel application of diffusion of innovations theory to the sport industry.