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Abstract
Over the past decade professional sports teams around the world have used the Internet and the Web with increasing sophistication to better connect their sports and businesses to fans and the general public with the aim of providing team-related information, fostering fandom and team reputation, and expanding the commercial side of the business. Although the Web-based entry of professional sports teams has become a multi-billion-dollar business, few, if any, studies exist that attempt to analyze and evaluate the efficacy of this increasingly important portion of the professional sports business model from an information management perspective. In this study, we employ the Taylor, Eisenberg, Dirks, Scholl (TEDS) framework thus utilizing a methodology, which effectively helps compare, assess, and rank the websites of top European football (soccer) teams. However, when comparing the European team sites with select reference sites from major leagues in North America, we find much room for improvement on part of the European sites. The study also shows how information artifacts in sports can be systematically analyzed, evaluated, and compared. In more general terms, we demonstrate how the information perspective can serve as a novel theoretical lens and important dimension in sport management.
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to the 12 raters at the University of Washington who invested hundreds of hours in rating professional sports teams’ websites using the TEDS framework.
Notes
1. We distinguish between the Internet and the Worldwide Web, or, short the Web. The Internet is a network of globally interconnected computer networks that use standard protocols such as the transmission control protocol (TCP) and the Internet protocol (IP) for connecting. The Web is one of several services, which use the Internet as their carrier. Specially formated and interlinked documents, so-called hypertext documents, which adhere to the Worldwide Web (www) standard, form the Worldwide Web. However, other Internet-based services such as electronic mail or file transfer, which are based on protocols like SMTP, POP, IMAP, or FTP, are used concurrently and in an integrated fashion along with the Web. When we refer to ‘Web traffic’ as a summary term we implicitly also refer to traffic, which may use other Internet protocols, which, however, are connected and integrated with the Web traffic. All traffic, Web, email, and file transfer traffic, of course, could be equally referred to as ‘Internet traffic.’
2. The US Merriam-Webster dictionary accepts both the single-word and the two-word spelling of the term ‘website;’ we opted in favor of the single-word representation, which we see more frequently used throughout the literature and similar to the single-word term ‘webmaster.’
3. Information management is concerned with six information processes that impact an organization's capacity to learn and adapt, (1) identifying information needs, (2) acquiring information, (3) organizing and storing information, (4) developing information products and services, (5) distributing information, and (6) using information (after Choo, Citation2002, pp. 56–57).
4. The information management perspective complements other perspectives such as the marketing perspective or the finance perspective. These other analytical lenses focus, for example, on phenomena such as market evolution, market shares, communication mixes, bottom-line contributions, or business models providing important insights and results, which complement but cannot replace the information management view.
5. The Oxford Dictionary (online) defines mindshare as ‘relative public awareness of a phenomenon: the need to compete for mindshare from an audience with a short attention span,’ see http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_us1268115#m_en_us1268115 / accessed 1/16/2011
6. We are well aware of the structural differences in the business models of major leagues in North America and in Europe. While North American leagues are franchise-based with closed cartel- or corporation-like leagues, European leagues employ an open system of promotion and relegation for their clubs (Cain & Haddock, 2005). Other differences include the overall objectives, geographic allocation, the strengths of ties between teams and local communities, rookie player recruitment, and collective bargaining of players (Avgerinou, Citation2007). However, the sources and the breakdown of revenues in the two systems are similar with the lion's share of revenues generating from media contracts (Avgerinou, 2007). The difference in the two professional sports league systems and their historical paths has been explained mainly through economic and geography-related factors rather than cultural factors (Cain & Haddock, 2005).
7. Behind Major League Baseball (MLB), National Football League (NFL), and National Basketball Association (NBA) the National Hockey League (NHL) is the fourth-most popular major league in the US. The NHL franchise sites that we inspected during our pre-scan did not appear to be quantitatively and qualitatively any different or superior to any MLB, NFL, NBA, or MLS sites. So, we concluded that disregarding NHL franchise sites as reference sites would not tilt our results in one or the other direction. We rather opted to include the MLS site of Seattle Sounders FC, which is a US soccer franchise representing the sport (football/soccer), which was at the core of this study.
8. Both a major league franchise and a soccer team Seattle Sounders FC played an interesting role in our sample since it combined the particular sport (European football/soccer) with the North American professional sport system and presentation expectations. Had there been any bias significantly favoring the ML5 sites, this should have been surfaced in higher scores for this MLS site; however, Seattle Sounders FC came in with only the tenth-highest overall score.