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The purpose of this paper is to encourage scholarly inquiries to critically examine broad perspectives of marketing and business operations in the sport industry of growing economies.

A comprehensive review of literature was the primary research method to introduce the following critical questions, “what are the major challenges in the sport industry of developing economies in a globalized market environment and what to do?”.

Seven articles are selected based on their theoretical and practical contributions.

This special issue is committed to trigger more investigations into sport businesses in developing countries and ultimately advancing theories and seeking solutions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships among athlete star power, enjoyment and revisit intention of sport event tourists in a sport mega-event (SME).

This study was conducted in the context of 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games. A total of 419 respondents completed a survey. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

This study proved the final structure model fit well by having the values and scores higher than the minimum cutoff in all categories. Path coefficients indicate that H1a, H1c and H2 were supported while H1b was not supported by the analysis. In addition, enjoyment partially mediated the relationship between athlete star power and revisit intentions. In particular, two mediating effects were found: enjoyment mediated trustworthiness and revisit intention and expertise and revisit intention. However, enjoyment did not mediate the relationship between attractiveness and revisit intentions.

The limitation of this study lies within two perspectives. Since the data have been collected in one country, the results may be viewed and interpreted for a specific location and time. Thus, it is strongly recommended to conduct the similar studies in the future Olympic Games. In the other perspective, the results could be different from one to another sport game because of the popularity by star power and game itself.

This study adds the literature on sport event research. Although there were a few studies on the effect of athlete star power, a dearth of research examined the relationships among athlete star power (trustworthiness, attractiveness and expertise), enjoyment and revisit intention. These results are valuable to SME managers to increase the propensity of tourists’ revisit intention at sport mega-event by understanding the factors that lead to increased tourist enjoyment.