How professional sports clubs exploit a heterogeneous local potential: the case of Swiss professional ice hockey

Abstract

Switzerland’s National League is the world’s third most high-paying ice hockey championship after the NHL and the KHL, even though Switzerland is a small country with a population of 8.5 million and the league’s professional clubs are based in areas that vary enormously in terms of their local potential (demographic and economic). How do these clubs exploit such different local potentials? In this paper, we examine the relationship between a club’s local potential and its commercial, financial and sporting results. Based on our data, we outline the specific characteristics of the different models adopted by Switzerland’s first division ice hockey clubs and draw up an empirical typology of four types of club. Our study’s contribution is both methodological and empirical. We describe an operational model that can be used to characterize local potential and three types of club expertise: marketing, managerial and sporting expertise.

Keywords:

• Professional sports
• location
• regulation
• ice hockey
• Switzerland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Note that the Bosman ruling does not apply because Switzerland is not part of the European Union.

2 The National League (formerly National League A) is Swiss ice hockey’s first division.

3 North America’s National Hockey League (NHL) is the world’s most prestigious ice hockey league with the highest standard of play.

4 The Kontinental Hockey League (KHL), mostly based in Russia, is the world’s second league in terms of standard of play.

5 It is important to mention that scholars in sports economics refers to clubs operating in regions with high (low) local economic potential as club with a large (small) market size, cf., Quirk and Fort (1992), Marburger (1997) and Szymanski (2003).

6 The Swiss League (formerly National League B) is Swiss ice hockey’s second division.

7 We converted and rounded all currencies given in Swiss francs (CHF) into Euro (€) by using the average annual exchange rate of 1.16 €/CHF from 2018.

8 This kind of labor dispute entails strikes and lookouts, potentially resulting in the loss of part of or an entire season, as occurred several times in the NHL (cf., Staudohar 1997, 2005).