Women athletes are often asked to participate in unpaid or underpaid community appearances and youth camps to generate fan interest, promote their sport, and inspire the next generation of athletes. The expectation to invest in the future of one’s sport for the benefit of others is a gendered process—requiring athletes to employ different forms of labor in addition to their athletic labor. Drawing from the literature on future-oriented labor and immaterial labor, we show how the sport industry is structured to extract value from what we refer to as women’s “inspirational labor.” Interviews with 29 women athletes and 15 managers in professional softball and soccer in the United States are used to illustrate the ideological and economic structures of inspirational labor.

Esports is often described as a growing industry ripe with financial opportunities for young professional, competitive gamers. However, these claims rarely consider how income is distributed amongst players. This study uses prize earnings data from 2005 to 2019 to examine labor market inequality and related social inequalities and social stratifications. Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients show that inequality has increased in the labor market overall and the labor markets for the five top games based on total prizes awarded (Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Fortnite, League of Legends, StarCraft II). Competitors can expect to earn more today than in 2005, but median incomes have shown sporadic and inconsistent growth compared with top incomes. Moreover, most competitors earn less than the US poverty threshold. Comparing the earnings of the top female players to the whole labor market shows that gender inequalities exist in median incomes and the likelihood of earning more than the poverty threshold. The esports labor market is an engine of inequality that provides opportunities for a few (primarily male) competitors while building a growing class of lowly paid players who support the interests of game designers and event organizers.

(1) Background: Prior research has found that large-scale sporting events may potentially impose negative consequences on the environment, thus impeding the sustainability goals of the sport industry. Along these lines, the current study extends the literature by examining the impact that National Football League (NFL) games have on local-area air pollution. (2) Methods: Air Quality Index (AQI) data measuring six major forms of air pollution were gathered from air monitors positioned close to NFL stadiums and matched with the number of attendees at games. From this, multiple regression analysis was utilized to estimate whether the number of fans was related to changes in air pollution. (3) Results: The regression models found that Ozone and Nitrogen Dioxide levels increased as more individuals attended NFL games. Additional robustness checks and falsification tests suggest that the average NFL event results in an approximately two-percent increase in Ozone levels. (4) Conclusions: The findings from this study contribute to the literature by providing evidence that highly attended sporting events increase pollution levels in the areas near stadiums. Thus, governments and sport organizations should consider low-emission methods to get fans to travel to games in order to reduce their environmental impact.

Sport stadia are political objects that carry an environmental cost. The purpose of this research is to add to previous literature by theorizing the political process of stadium construction in a way that accounts for how environmental issues are introduced into the political process and, therefore, offers a more accurate lens through which to interpret how sustainable stadia are constructed. We conducted a case study of SC Freiburg’s carbon-neutral stadium construction process to theorize the object-oriented politics of sport facility construction. SC Freiburg is a German football club, playing in the Bundesliga. To examine the case, we employed a key informant interview and document analysis using Nexis Uni searches, local newspaper articles, official city documents, and social media websites. The case study of SC Freiburg’s carbon neutral stadium construction process showed that environmental concerns were included through a political process that incorporated the interests of a diverse public of human and nonhuman actors (while excluding some actors whose interests could not be reconciled) to produce a sustainable matter of fact. Additionally, we propose a pragmatic definition of stadium sustainability and suggest that environmental activists should make sure that both human and nonhuman actors with sustainability concerns are included in the stadium’s material public.

• A doctrinal analysis reveals 13 distinct categories of sport event workers.• Categories range from well-protected workers to workers with no protections.• All but one category were observed durin... Sport organizations that host events are pulsating organizations because they gain an influx of workers for a short duration. The influx often consists of atypical workers including independent con...

The authors develop a theory of human capital ecosystems and argue that sport markets are human capital ecosystems. After analyzing the emerging U.S. rugby market, the authors demonstrate that league executives conceived of the rugby market as an ecosystem organized around investing in and capturing value from athlete human capital. League executives focused on developing aspirational value: a shared value proposition that all rugby actors benefited from. League executives saw other rugby leagues as complements rather than competitors, which contradicts current sport business theories, but is consistent with an ecosystem view. However, although league executives agreed on the need for a human capital ecosystem, they had different visions of how the ecosystem should be created. Each league pursued a different strategy and had different objectives. The authors argue that all sport markets are human capital ecosystems, and they use the theory to distinguish between emerging sport markets and established spor...