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This chapter presents a multi-criteria portfolio model with the expected return as a performance measure and the expected worst-case return as a risk measure. The problems are formulated as a single-objective linear program, as a bi-objective linear program, and as a triple-objective mixed integer program. The problem objective is to allocate the wealth on different securities to optimize the portfolio return. The portfolio approach has allowed the two popular financial engineering percentile measures of risk, value-at-risk (VaR) and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) to be applied. The decision-maker can assess the value of portfolio return, the risk level, and the number of assets, and can decide how to invest in a real-life situation comparing with ideal (optimal) portfolio solutions. The concave efficient frontiers illustrate the trade-off between the conditional value-at-risk and the expected return of the portfolio. Numerical examples based on historical daily input data from the Warsaw Stock Exchange are presented and selected computational results are provided. The computational experiments prove that both proposed linear and mixed integer programming approaches provide the decision-maker with a simple tool for evaluating the relationship between the expected and the worst-case portfolio return.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the efficacy of using a multi-paradigm perspective to examine the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and strategic decision-making processes in the context of charitable foundations.

This paper integrates and synthesizes the micro-social processes of “assessable transcendence” (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2014) with Whittington’s (2001) perspectives on strategy. “Assessable transcendence” was achieved from the constant comparison of categories developed through an early iterative process in which data collection and analysis occurred during the same period. In all, 32 interviews were conducted among a sample of key managers in the charitable foundations for the first two divisions of English football.

The present study illustrates empirically that strategic decision making in charitable foundations does not “seat” neatly in any one of Whittington’s perspectives. On the contrary, this study indicates a great deal of overlap within these perspectives, and suggests that conflicting paradigms should be celebrated rather than viewed as signs of theoretical immaturity. Multi-paradigm approaches can potentially reveal insights into the “mechanics” of managerial decision making that are not easily discernible from a mono-paradigmatic perspective.

This is the first empirical work that examines CSR in relation to strategy within the context of the English football clubs’ charitable foundations, and does so by employing a multi-paradigm perspective on strategy formulation and implementation.

In a dynamic, continuously evolving sports landscape, social media have become an indispensable tool for sports organizations to cultivate meaningful connections with fans. The rapid pace of technological advancements has elevated these digital platforms from a supplementary role to a pivotal position within strategic management frameworks. The existing literature explores how football clubs can utilize social media, but analyzing social media strategies within the context of football leagues is lacking. The absence of comparative studies benchmarking clubs across different geographical regions while simultaneously analyzing multiple social media platforms is especially noteworthy. In this study, a comprehensive analysis of social media engagement is undertaken within esteemed football leagues spanning Europe, South America and North America.

Drawing on relationship marketing and employing content analysis as a methodological tool, the study examined 10,772 posts from the official accounts of eight football leagues on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Across the leagues, the findings reveal that content quality drives engagement more than frequency. In addition, several format combinations were identified that facilitate engagement and Instagram emerged as the top social media platform for generating fan engagement.

This is one of the first empirical studies focusing on optimizing the use of social media to amplify fan engagement across various geographies and social media accounts and formats simultaneously.

Social media enables sport organizations to connect with customers in a dynamic, ubiquitous, and timely manner. Although these organizations routinely use social media, the best practices to improve customer engagement remain elusive. This paper aims to examine National Football League (NFL) teams’ Instagram posts to understand how sport teams can utilize social media to drive customer engagement.

Guided by uses and gratification theory, the author employs a machine learning algorithm to assess the content of NFL teams’ posts from the 2013–2014 season to the 2017–2018 season. The author performs regression analyses to investigate how post topic, together with confounding factors, boost customer engagement.

Results highlight the importance of informational content in eliciting engagement and reveal distinctions in topics deemed “social content” in the literature. The author further identifies variations in how post topics engage sport fans and general customers.

Results provide implications for sport organizations to craft social media content for customer engagement.

In an attempt to promote sport employees’ well-being, the purpose of this paper is to examine the more traditional constructs of psychological capital (i.e. hope, efficacy, resiliency and optimism) and to feature the inclusion of authenticity, an often overlooked construct, among sport employees.

This conceptual paper is designed to create an expanded sport employee psychological capital construct, labeled A-HERO, and a subsequent theoretical model to improve their well-being.

In detailing a conceptual model of A-HERO for well-being, the model includes and explains the relationships among sport employee antecedents (i.e. sport employee identification, pride and passion), an organizational contextual variable (person–organization fit), and an important employee and organizational outcome (i.e. employee well-being) in contemporary sport organizations.

A-HERO offers a necessary first step for future theoretical research and empirical applications to improve sport employees’ well-being.

By elucidating the role of authenticity at work with traditional psychological capital constructs in the current sport industry, this paper stimulates sport business and management scholars to validate empirically the A-HERO construct and examine proposed relationships for an improved prediction of sport employees’ well-being.

Public debates and scholarly literature on football fandom are often characterised by generalisation and lacking differentiation. The changing ethnography of fans, affected by the rapid commercialisation and internationalisation of the game, reinforces the demand for contemporary classification criteria and fan typologies that take the complexity and heterogeneity of fans into account and draw a more differentiated picture of fans and sub-groups.

Based on the grounded theory methodology and a systematic literature review on stakeholder theory, stakeholder classification criteria and football fandom, the authors conduct and analyse 14 semi-structured expert interviews with fan managers employed by German professional football clubs. Building on the analysis, the authors identify, present and discuss ten contemporary criteria and five corresponding typologies for the classification of football fans.

The grounded theory analysis suggests that football fans can be characterised according to ten classification criteria. Building on the analysis, the authors derive five fan typologies that differ in their characteristics along the continua of the identified criteria. Typologies comprise (1) active fans, (2) consuming fans, (3) event fans, (4) corporate fans and (5) passive followers.

The paper enlarges prior knowledge on the behavioural and attitudinal characteristics of fans as individuals and adds knowledge regarding relationships within fan groups, and regarding formal and non-formal relations between fans and clubs. The results provide scholars with a framework for further scientific investigation and practitioners with a concept for a more sophisticated and differentiated approach to managing fan relations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide practical and future research implications for the field of governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in sports to strengthen the depth of knowledge in this area.

This paper reviews parts of the existing international literature and draws on literature from general business, management and governance to widen the scope and open spaces of opportunities for interested researchers.

The authors find six themes that are of particular relevance and cluster them along context, content and process to map out critical and promising aspects that we believe will progress our understanding of and contribution to CSR and governance in sport: features and idiosyncrasies of sport in relation to governance and CSR; the relevance and impact of regional and cultural context; reflections on “content” of CSR in sport in difference to CSR through sport; the quest for the business case for CSR in sport and consumer reactions; the potential for interdisciplinary, multilevel and longitudinal research; and finding a critical voice and relating research (back) to industry and practice.

The paper reviews and interlinks the topic of CSR and governance in sport in new ways and with an established, wider body of knowledge, and provides new inspiration and starting points for research from both a broader management angle and a sport-specific angle.

The purpose of this paper is to bridge the micro-macro divide by trying to integrate the micro-domain's focus on individuals (i.e. managers) with the meso-domain's and macro-domain's focus (i.e. leagues/football clubs and the socio-political environment, respectively). The examination takes place within the context of English football and in relation to the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

The paper draws on data collected by 21 charitable foundation managers of the top two divisions of English football. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim from digital voice recorders and were analysed using grounded theory coding techniques.

The study found a paradoxical context in which foundation managers make strategic decisions in an endeavour to harmonise multiple environmental and institutional “recipes”. Managers are confident that they have the capability to do so, yet realise that this capability is the result of a heavy reliance on external and internal resources. These considerations come together to create the micro-context, here identified as a dysfunctional setting, in which managers are required to make the decisions that confirm their role as managers. Therefore, multiple, and often contradictory, theoretical perspectives are in play and explain the foundation managers’ role in the implementation process.

The paper moves away from mono-theoretical approaches that have been mainly used for the examination of CSR in the sporting context, and by placing its focus on the individual level of analysis illustrates the complexity of the CSR implementation process.

Despite numerous studies on the separate health consequences of economic crises and post-migration difficulties, very little is known about the processes through which the intersection of economic crisis and post-migration adversity contribute to migrants’ health vulnerabilities. The purpose of this paper is to examine existing literature about how newly arrived and long-term migrants’ health and well-being are affected by the economic crisis in Greece.

The ongoing economic recession in Greece, combined with the recent migration crisis, provided an adequate context for investigating migrants’ health and well-being. A narrative literature review was performed on whether and how migrants’ health and well-being are affected by the economic and the migration crises in the particular case of Greece. Papers published between January 2010 and December 2017 were selected based on review of titles and abstracts, followed by a full text review.

The review identified a surprisingly limited number of relevant studies. Ultimately five studies were selected and their findings summarised. There was only one study attempting to unravel the specific processes through which the crisis and the post-migration problems impact cumulatively on migrants’ health and well-being and to suggest healthcare improvements. Further research on this topic is urgently needed.

This paper explores existing research looking at how migrants’ health and well-being are affected by the economic and the migration crises in Greece. The emerging dearth of research evidence on the above topic is also critically discussed from a socio-political point of view and recommendations are made related to healthcare practice and services set up for migrants’ health and care.

The latest developments in the football industry, the commodification of sport, the excessive focus on profitability and the limited attention to social and environmental aspects have caused a legitimation crisis for football clubs. According to the legitimacy theory, the corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure represents a tool capable of allowing the construction or repair of legitimacy. This study, in line with this theory, aims to analyse the amount of CSR disclosure provided by football clubs and the determinants, related to visibility, of the level of information provided.

This study uses a manual content analysis on the corporate websites of the 80 football clubs that qualified for the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League group stages for the 2019–2020 year to measure the level of CSR disclosure and subsequently a regression analysis to examine the impact of visibility on the amount of information provided.

Results reveal that football clubs still disclose relatively little information about sustainability issues, and that sports performance visibility, human capital visibility and social media visibility positively affect the amount of information that football clubs disclose.

This study extends the horizons of CSR disclosure to the football industry which is still little explored in the academic literature. Furthermore, it extends the scope of legitimacy theory, showing how CSR disclosure can be a means for football clubs to obtain or repair legitimacy. Furthermore, this study extends the list of determinants of the level of CSR disclosure, showing that visibility can influence the amount of CSR information.