Sports serve as powerful developmental contexts where athletes learn, grow, and carry valuable life lessons well beyond their playing days. While sport psychology literature extensively documents positive youth development outcomes, how athletes perceive and communicate those lessons remains a largely unmeasured phenomenon in sport communication research. This study addresses this gap by developing and validating the Learned Lessons in Sport scale, a communication-based measure assessing athletes’ perceptions and discourse about lessons learned through sport participation. Results of an exploratory factor analysis (Study 1, N = 207) and confirmatory factor analysis (Study 2, N = 206) successfully developed and validated a 10-item unidimensional scale. The Learned Lessons in Sport scale demonstrates that athletes not only perceive they learned lessons through sport, but actively communicate these lessons to others, signaling a unified pattern of communicative behavior rather than through separable cognitive or affective dimensions. This study advances sport communication scholarship by providing an empirically validated measure of how athletes discursively construct and share their sport experiences.
This study employs a biopolitical framework to analyze visual representations of 486 cover athletes in China’s Xin Tiyu [New Sports] and Tiyu Bolan [Sports Vision] magazines. Through systematic examination of body depictions, cross-gender interactions, and national symbols, this study suggests that persistent gender stereotypes intertwined with nationalistic imagery in Chinese sports media. The analysis exposes the underrepresentation of female athletes and their strategic deployment as national symbols to advance state objectives. Male athletes are predominantly portrayed through traditional masculine ideals, whereas female athletes’ bodies are commodified within nationalist discourse, reflecting broader biopolitical mechanisms that regulate gender identity in Chinese society. These findings illuminate how deeply embedded cultural ideologies shape visual narratives in sports media, revealing the intersection of gender representation and state power. The study contributes to understanding how sports media perpetuates gendered hierarchies while serving nationalist agendas in contemporary China.
This article examines the transformation of Real Madrid through the redevelopment of the Santiago Bernab & eacute;u Stadium, framing the club as a paradigmatic case of a postsport organization. Drawing on a mixed-methods design, the study combines an interpretive qualitative synthesis of secondary sources with a quantitative economic assessment to explore how infrastructural investment, commercial diversification, and media-oriented strategies have reshaped organizational identity, communication practices, and stakeholder relations. Rather than treating economic performance as an end in itself, the analysis situates financial indicators within a broader communicative and cultural framework. The qualitative component identifies recurring patterns related to sportainment, financialization, and symbolic differentiation, while the quantitative analysis provides indicative estimates of the economic magnitude associated with the stadium's transformation. Together, these dimensions illuminate how the Bernab & eacute;u has evolved from a site of episodic competition into a permanent platform for entertainment, tourism, and brand communication. The findings suggest that Real Madrid's postsport configuration reinforces global visibility and economic sustainability while simultaneously generating tensions around access, collective identity, and cultural legitimacy, particularly for locally rooted supporters. By conceptualizing postsport not as the decline of athletic competition, but as a reordering of organizational priorities and communicative logics the article contributes to debates on sportainment, elite football governance, and the changing meaning of sport in contemporary society.
TikTok has rapidly become a central platform for sport consumption among younger audiences, yet scholarly understanding of football fandom on TikTok remains limited. Affective publics, which are networked collectives that assemble around shared emotions, rather than formal structures provide a productive theoretical lens for understanding how fan creators construct and sustain collective identity through emotionally charged content. A fan creator is operationalized here as a noninstitutional individual who produces football commentary, analysis, or reaction content with demonstrable intent to build audience engagement through regular content production. Addressing a significant gap in the literature, this study examines how football fan creators construct affective publics through platform-specific storytelling practices. Using a content analysis of 50 TikTok videos posted during the 2025 European football season, the study systematically codes multimodal and affective features, including emotional hooks such as dramatic or curiosity-driven opening statements designed to prevent viewer scrolling. Examples of such hooks are narration strategies, editing pace, audio use, and on-screen text. Intercoder reliability was high (Cohen's kappa= 0.81-0.92). Findings reveal a striking convergence of affective conventions, with near-universal use of dramatic hooks (94%) and universal emotional expression (100%) and narration (100%). Contrary to assumptions about TikTok's rapid editing pace, many videos adopt slow, talk-to-camera formats, indicating genre-specific temporal norms particular to football commentary. The study extends the Affective Publics framework by documenting how affective expression has converged into a consistent set of platform literacies within football fan creator communities on TikTok.
This study examined how sports media framed women's athletics and athletes during coverage of the House v. NCAA case and settlement. Drawing from 679 resources published between April 2024 and June 2025 from the D1 Ticker, a qualitative content analysis guided by Entman's framing theory and MacKinnon's dominance approach to feminism revealed four dominant frames: (a) the superficiality of Title IX, (b) women's basketball commercialism, (c) roster limits, and (d) women's objection letters as resistance. Findings indicate women athletes and sports were largely invisible-minimally selected, excluded, and rarely emphasized or elaborated upon-reflecting patriarchal and commercial hierarchies embedded in college sport media. The study highlights how gender equity is framed within curated sport media coverage, urging managers and leaders to critically reflect on how framing narratives influence the post-House era.
Following an outstanding 2020 Olympic trials performance, the United States Anti-Doping Agency suspended likely medal favorite Sha'Carri Richardson for marijuana use, placing her in an athlete reputational crisis that would, in many ways, shape her career. Grounded in situational crisis communication theory and the social-mediated crisis communication model, this manuscript utilizes three studies to examine Richardson's attempt at reputation repair and outline how crisis information was disseminated. Using a mix of natural language processing and qualitative review, we employ a thematic analysis, a social network analysis, and a textual analysis to reveal insight into (a) Richardson's effort to engage in reputation repair, (b) the voices and social media accounts that influenced the flow of information, and (c) the amplification of certain reputation repair strategies. Together, Richardson's case highlights how crises can, at times, be co-opted into larger policy discussions. Finally, this case underscores how a crisis can sway how the media discusses an athlete years later.
This study examines how perceived brand journalism value on professional baseball YouTube channels influences game attendance intention through the mediation of continuance watching intention. Drawing on uses and gratifications and social identity theories, the model analyzes these structural pathways and the athlete image's moderating role. Data from 300 Korea Baseball Organization fans were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Results reveal that, although perceived brand journalism value enhances continuance watching intention, which in turn boosts game attendance intention, it also exerts a direct negative influence on attendance. This indicates that brand journalism serves as both a facilitator for offline engagement and a potential substitute for in-person attendance via high-quality vicarious experiences. Furthermore, the positive impact of watching intention on attendance is significantly stronger when athlete image is low. These findings identify a nonlinear, competitive mediation pathway in digital storytelling, offering strategic insights for identity-sensitive sport communication that balances digital consumption with stadium attendance.
Parents must make decisions to guide children's sport participation, development, and enjoyment, with particular importance toward communication characteristics of their coach. The current study examines parent attitudes toward youth sport coach communication characteristics, provides a ranking of parents stated desires, and examines how parent desires for youth sport coaches have adapted to changes in the youth sports ecosystem. A representative sample of youth sport parents (N= 606) completed an online survey designed to measure parent priorities, goals, and expectations for youth sport coach communication. Data were analyzed through a series of Mann-Whitney U tests and linear regressions. Informed by achievement goal theory, results indicated that parents prioritize coaches that they consider strong teachers who exhibit advanced knowledge of sportspecific skills, relative to coaches who emphasize performance-related outcomes such as winning. Reflecting the intensity of feebased youth sports, parent goals for coach characteristics suggest a shift in priorities toward skill development and away from player enjoyment.
Mainstream media plays a pivotal role in agenda-setting dynamics during crises; however, measuring the prominence of sports news is challenging due to broad terminology and cross-sectional reporting. To address this issue, the current study employs a two-stage latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling approach to analyze sports news (N= 55,669) from The New York Times and The Washington Post during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stage 1 results revealed that sports articles (n =1,500) ranked ninth, with a relative salience of 2.69% within the total pandemic crisis agenda, which comprised 14 broad themes. Stage 2 results suggest eight key themes representing the thematic composition of sports-related news, dominated by athlete health plans (23.27%), sports stars and playoffs (15.07%), COVID-19 testing (14.53%), and college sports and student-athletes (13.67%). The results provide new insights into how crises shape sports discourse, issue salience, and attribute agenda setting in mainstream media. Theoretically, this research extends agenda-setting theory by identifying salient sport issues and the agendas prioritized during a major global crisis. Methodologically, the study offers an alternative approach for investigating sports communication during major global events, capturing intersectional narratives. Practically, the results suggest that sports organizations should align their message content with dominant public health attributes and navigate media gatekeeping effectively.
This project develops a comprehensive multidimensional motivation scale for sport highlight viewing and provides evidence for the validity of the developed scale. In Study 1, we generated survey items through a literature review of relevant domains, conducted a pilot study with an open-ended questionnaire (N=114), and provided evidence for construct reliability and validity of the initial measurement scale. In Study 2, we developed the final measurement scale and reassessed the construct validity of the second-order reflective-reflective measurement model and nomological validity with sport highlight viewers (N= 468). Our systematic approach resulted in a theoretically grounded scale with 3 second-order dimensions (utilitarian, hedonic, and social motivations) and 12 subfactors. This scale enables further theoretical investigations on sport highlight viewing as a foundational tool, and the findings provide valuable insights for sport professionals involved in content creation and distribution.
This article analyzes how 19 states around the United States have developed laws that make name, image, and likeness agreements immune from public scrutiny and open records requests. Many of these public universities collect information and data or actively help broker deals between collegiate athletes and collectives or other entities, but they want to keep the contents of those deals private. By conducting a discourse analysis of state bills and laws, public commentary in media, and relevant legal cases, the article found two key claims that institutions use to justify shielding name, image, and likeness deals from public records requests: (a) claims to athletes' privacy and (b) the desire for a competitive advantage. The article concludes that statelevel government transparency in name, image, and likeness agreements is in the best interest of all involved and advocates for employee status of collegiate athletes.
In community sport contexts, those with influence engage young people with social media video content, but little is known about how that content is received. The aim of the current study was to explore female basketball players' receptivity to Instagram reels posted by basketball ambassadors. Data were collected via free thought listings and focus groups. A dual-layer, moderation framework is presented to capture the way in which girls receive and interpret video content from community basketball ambassadors. Relatability, understandability, and relevance are components within the first layer of the framework and characterized as foundational pillars for video content to be received favorably. The girls indicated that if a theme of encouragement is present within a video, the content will be more likely to resonate. Referred to as an amplifier, this is the second layer of the emergent framework and plays a moderating role between the pillars and girls' receptivity. With uses and gratifications theory as a guiding framework, this study is the first to explore girls' receptivity to ambassadorial online content in the context of community sport. Managers of community girls' sport can use the framework presented in this study to inform the creation of online content designed to engage girls in basketball.
Youth sport reforms can provoke perceptions of illegitimacy. This study examines how media framing constructed the legitimacy of two major Canadian reforms: Ontario Soccer's 2014 programming changes and Hockey Canada's 2017 under-9 modifications. Using 70 unique print media articles and a comparative case study design, we analyzed how journalists and quoted stakeholders framed the reforms across key dimensions of legitimacy. Findings show that problem framing (i.e., whether reforms were depicted as ideological contests or technical adjustments) shaped subsequent legitimacy narratives. Ontario Soccer's changes were framed as a moral debate over competition and resilience, fueling contestation, whereas Hockey Canada's reforms were framed as technical adjustments aligned with child development, generating broader acceptance. Conceptualizing media as institutional actors, this study contributes to sport communication by identifying problem framing as a mechanism shaping legitimacy outcomes, highlighting youth sport as a distinctive communicative environment and extending media's institutional role to grassroots reform.
Esports has rapidly evolved from a niche subculture to a global industry, attracting billions in revenue and millions of viewers worldwide. Its growth has prompted increasing scholarly attention within sport management, yet research remains fragmented across topics and outlets. This study applies topic modeling to systematically examine esports literature published between 2010 and 2025 in 45 sport management journals. Using a Structural Topic Model with bigram analysis, we identify six dominant research topics: (a) comparisons between esports and traditional sport, (b) consumer engagement and sponsorship, (c) legal and ethical considerations, (d) policy and development, (e) consumer behavior and psychology, and (f) technology adoption and gameplay intention. Findings highlight a shifting scholarly focus from legitimacy debates toward commercialization, fan engagement, and technological integration after 2021. Results provide insights into how esports scholarship mirrors industry developments, revealing critical implications for governance, education, and sustainable growth while informing a future interdisciplinary research agenda.
This study explored how artificial intelligence (AI) -enhanced analytics encompassing predictive data analysis, automated content generation, and message personalization can advance environmental sustainability communication in sport. Using a quantitative design, data were collected from 324 sport stakeholders in China, including athletes, coaches, administrators, fans, and media professionals. Structural equation modeling was used to examine relationships among stakeholder perceptions, adoption barriers, and the effectiveness of AI-driven sustainability messaging. Results indicate increasing acceptance of AI for sustainability promotion, particularly among digitally literate groups, whereas organizational inertia and limited technical expertise remain key constraints. Integrating the diffusion of innovations, stakeholder, and sustainability communication theories, the study developed and empirically tested a comprehensive model explaining how AI acts both as a technological amplifier and a strategic enabler of sustainability engagement. The findings provide theoretical insights for understanding AI-mediated communication and offer a conceptual basis for future comparative studies beyond the Chinese sport context.
The Canadian amateur and community sport system, along with several national sport organizations, has come under intense scrutiny following documented cases of misconduct, abuse, and organizational cover-ups. These events have prompted urgent calls for cultural change, especially within youth and community contexts where parents, coaches, and club administrators play central roles. This study contributes to the field of strategic sport communication by evaluating a social media campaign launched by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport to promote values-based sport in Nova Scotia. The campaign featured amateur athletes as nano-influencers who shared personalized messages aligned with the True Sport principles on Instagram. Using a mixed-methods approach involving interviews with athlete ambassadors (n = 9) and a stakeholder survey (n = 133), the study examines how message framing and platform fit affect message persuasiveness. Leximancer and thematic analysis revealed three key themes: objective misconceptions, platform-fit incongruence, and the need for a bottom-up approach to knowledge transfer. Findings offer theoretical insight into message platform source alignment and provide practical guidance for sport organizations designing digital campaigns that foster ethical and inclusive sport culture.
As American football continues to expand globally, the National Football League (NFL) has found remarkable success in Germany, a country with deeply rooted soccer traditions. This study investigates how German fans form team identification in a transnational context. Grounded in the Psychological Continuum Model, the Fan Attitude Network model, and the Sport Team Identification Model, the study analyzes interest, team identity, and brand attitude among 349 German NFL fans through a quantitative online survey. Findings reveal that, although interest in American football correlates strongly with interest in the NFL, team identity is the stronger predictor of purchasing behavior. In addition, team characteristics and popularity outweigh traditional socialization in explaining fans' identification with specific NFL teams. To explore motivations behind NFL fandom among Germans, a thematic analysis of open-ended responses revealed six key motivators: (1) first exposure, (2) player attachment, (3) media/pop culture, (4) city/personal connection, (5) team culture/underdog, and (6) visual identity. This study offers theoretical and practical contributions to the understanding of transnational fandom in regions where cultural pathways to fandom differ from domestic contexts.
The rise in podcast creation and consumption has created a congested landscape that necessitates intentional consideration from podcasters to connect with their audience. Through the collaborative production of content, known as produsage, podcasters are motivated by and take value from engagement with their listeners. Currently, a gap exists specific to the fantasy sport genre in examining how the audience impacts the podcasting environment. Thus, the purpose of this qualitative study was to analyze the role of listeners on the experiences of fantasy sport podcasters. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 11 fantasy sport podcasters, with a thematic analysis revealing four main themes (i.e., meaningful audience, motivation from audience, leveraging feedback, and audience challenges). From a theoretical and practical perspective, findings advance understanding on produsage communities that elicit meaningful relationships as fantasy sport podcasters are reliant upon their audience to ensure positive outcomes.
The purpose of this case study was to examine how Rachael Gunn and the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) employed situational crisis communication theory and image-repair strategies in their responses to the 2024 Olympics breakdancing scandal. Furthermore, we examined how social media commentary responded to these crisis communication efforts. Gunn's statement was primarily rooted in the image-repair strategies of bolstering, attack accuser, and victimization, while the AOC's statement was rooted in the situational crisis communication theory strategies of denial, attack accuser, and reminder. Four key themes were found via an inductive analysis: Olympics, support/attack, performance, and Australia. Both Gunn and the AOC appeared to abide by scholars' recommendations for leveraging both image repair and situational crisis communication theory in their reputation management efforts. However, the limited powers of persuasion are evident in the debates and discussions that emerged via social media commentary. We see this in the conflicting diatribes of support and condemnation, ridicule and empathy, joy and shame, and trust and doubt in response to Gunn's performance and subsequent statements.
