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Stakeholder frameworks document the nature of sport franchise owners’ interactions with local residents, but there has been little attention on understanding why interactions develop a contentious or collaborative tenor. There has also been little emphasis on understanding whether and how interactions affect revenue-side outcomes. This paper uses the team identification literature to buttress the idea that owners are meaningful points of attachment for fans. It also uses consumer political ideology scholarship to explain that owners’ ideologies—never more visible than today—are important predictors of consumption. The paper proposes and tests a series of hypotheses about the effect of owners’ and residents’ ideological divergence on attendance and spending. Similar ideologies between residents and long-tenured owners were associated with about $8–$10 more spending per fan per game, as well as 2,400–3,950 more fans per game. Implications for academics and practitioners are provided.

Business intelligence (BI) technologies can help firms optimize revenue and expenses if acquired and deployed proficiently. In parallel, the sport industry’s shift toward digitization is being driven by an influx of new, technology-savvy owners and managers. It follows that owners who are business intelligence experts could make their sport organizations more profitable. This paper models 14 years of Major League Baseball data to explore the degree to which owners with business intelligence career experience affect their organization’s operating margin through (a) optimizing revenue and (b) enhancing cost efficiency. It further explores owners’ knowledge accrual as a moderator in this process. Results suggest the effect of business intelligence expertise on margins is positive, but small. Margin increases were attained by spending more efficiently on labor, not by generating more revenue. These mediating effects were moderated by knowledge accrual, such that a longer tenure increased the early-tenure advantages of BI career experience.

Human-resource management is a unique challenge for professional sport franchises (PSFs). A lack of research on full-time employees in sport means we know little about the perceptions of those most connected to PSFs despite the unique nature of the sport industry. This paper investigates whether communicating socially responsible behavior (SRB) in sport job postings generates more prospective person–organization fit (POFit) and greater application intention. Uncovering these relationships will help sport practitioners optimize their hiring process by targeting recruitment messages. The analysis does not support the idea that communicating SRB in a sport job posting enhances prospective POFit or application intentions, even for socially conscious applicants. These findings contradict similar exercises carried out in other industries, highlighting the distinctiveness of professional sport.

The efficacy of partitioned pricing (PP) has been investigated in a range of industries. This work showed that the usefulness of PP is situational, with numerous contextual factors playing important roles. Ticket pricing scholarship has yet to devote adequate attention to PP as a focal variable, which is problematic given the industry’s reliance on ticket revenue and the “service” fees ubiquitous in the ticketing industry. In addition, there is a need to investigate the moderating factors unique to sport consumption, such as team identification and the entertainment value of live sport. Using a sample of 403 sport consumers, this study found that PP is associated with lower perceptions of fairness but not lower enduring attitudes about the platform. Thus, sport consumers are displeased by PP, but not enough to dissuade them from future purchases. The analysis found that team identification—the entertainment value of live sports entertainment value—can further offset negative perceptions of PP.