Esports is a rapidly growing industry. However, the unidentifiable governance structure of the industry has contributed to a number of integrity-eroding activities. By exploring esports stakeholder dynamics, this paper answers the question, “Is the esports governance model sustainable?” Data were sourced from documentation, focus groups (N = 3) and semi-structured interviews (N = 6). Thematic analysis was conducted using Nvivo. The findings suggest that (1) the current esports governance framework features some attributes of the “lead organisation-governed network”, with the power residing mainly in game publishers; (2) the rising power of other stakeholders in the network seeking to address integrity issues has caused fragmentation of the esports governance framework; (3) esports governance is evolving towards a network administration organisation (NAO) model. Such evolution has a few challenges—most notably, the compliance of game publishers. Given the social impact of the integrity issues, governments should play a main role in facilitating a NAO model.

In March 2015, the Chinese government issued the Overall Plan for Chinese Football Reform and Development, which aimed to develop football in China from the grassroots level to the elite level. The salient element of the plan was to separate the Chinese Football Association (CFA) from direct government control. Considering the previous failed attempts to reform the CFA, this paper asks the question ‘why the reform occurred in 2015 and not earlier?’ and aims to: 1) identify the potential sources of the policy change through the lens of the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) and 2) examine the timing and conditions under which the Chinese government initiated the football reform. Public policy documents and media reports from 1993 to 2017 were collected and analysed; 17 interviews were conducted with key policy actors within the CFA and professional football clubs in varying tiers of Chinese football leagues. The findings suggest that the failure of previous policy attempts at improving Chinese football (policy stream), match-fixing scandals and the continuing under-performance of the national men’s team (problem stream), the increasingly critical national mood towards football and the turnover of Presidency (political stream) combined in the mid-2010s opened a ‘policy window’ which facilitated this significant change. This research is the first paper to apply the MSF theory to explain the Chinese football reform that occurred in 2015. It extends the application of MSF to a different political and cultural environment and has implications for the policy-making in China.

Despite an increasing interest from media and fans, one of the challenges women’s football currently faces is the lack of resources to sustain its growth at both grassroots and elite levels. To cope with this issue, National Associations (NAs) of various countries have recently formulated a policy demanding men’s football clubs to integrate a women’s team within their structure. Using the Multiple Streams Framework, this article examines the context, timing and conditions leading to the implementation of the policy of integration in three different countries: Brazil, China and Italy. The authors collected and analysed policy documents and media reports to identify factors influencing the policy formulation. Results indicate declining performances of senior women’s national team, low participation rates, external pressures from supranational football institutions and increased societal need to reduce gender disparities contribute to influence NAs’ engagement with policies for the development of women’s football. While potentially helping women’s football enhance its visibility and commercialisation, the policy of integration risks the women’s game continuing to be seen as subaltern to its men’s counterpart. Implications of the policy of integration for the long-term development of women’s football and its possible future scenarios are discussed.

The present research aims to identify the main peculiar economics of professional team sports, reflect on whether they apply to esports, and derive some implications. To achieve this aim, two sequential snowballing literature reviews were conducted. First, the literature on the peculiar economics of professional team sports was reviewed and assessed by the authors, based on their degree of distinctiveness and how core they are for the sector. Second, based on the main peculiar economics identified, a similar process considering economic aspects in the esports literature was conducted. The first review enabled the identification of 50 peculiar economics of professional team sports, of which 12 were assessed as the most distinctive and core to the sector. These 12 main peculiar economics were then considered in relation to the esports literature. This second review enabled the identification of some economic similarities and differences between sports and esports, before deriving some implications.

This research focuses on the implementation of youth football policies in China following the 2015 national football reform. It asks the question ‘To what extent have contextual and organisational ...

The notion of sport policy is a relatively recent subject of study, but it has been frequently used over the last 20 years, particularly referring to governmental sport policies. However, less research has been conducted in the field of national sport federations (NSFs), which are key non-governmental structures in governing, organising and sustaining the development of sports. The objective of this article is to propose a conceptualisation of the notion of sport policy adapted to NSFs. The proposed approach consists of two steps: first, we conducted an extensive integrative literature review around the notion of sport policy. Second, based on the literature review, we developed a model that conceptualises what an NSF sport policy is. This conceptual model is intended to be a useful analytical tool to design, implement and assess the success of a sport policy for both researchers and practitioners working in the field of NSFs.