Henk Erik Meier

• Ph.D.
• Professor at University of Münster

Digital disruption heavily impacts production, distribution and consumption of sport entertainment. The once symbiotic relationship between sport and linear TV faces far-reaching challenges. This applies also to the specific cooperation between niche sports and public service broadcasters (PSBs), which has evolved in Europe. In exchange for far-rea...

Abstract The idea of sport as an apolitical or neutral sphere seems to be no longer resonate within the polarized societies of of our times. Recent surveys have indicated that Germans have been particular supportive of political advocacy in sport for values they deem important as well as of campaigns to boycott the controversial World Cup in Qatar...

When the German Football Association established the ‘3. Liga’ as third tier national football league, skeptics doubted that there was sufficient consumer interest and claimed that lower tier football was only of regional interest. Analyzing a unique dataset of 3. Liga free-to-air live telecasts, the current study provides evidence that the 3. Liga...

The chapter explores how the hyper-commercialisation of European football has created a winner-takes-all environment in which only those clubs that are willing and able to fund enormous and largely unsustainable payrolls can compete. Only two types of clubs seem to be capable of doing so: either clubs that have evolved into major global brands or c...

oining the Olympic Movement provides smaller countries with material and symbolic benefits. The Olympic Games represent a unique symbolic stage for national recognition and identity construction. Resource-poor countries can also access sport development funding programmes. However, participation in the international sport system comes at the price...

The menstrual cycle is one of the most fundamental differences between men and women and is capable of influencing the performance, well-being and health of female athletes. Despite increasing research, the influence of the menstrual cycle on athletic performance is still largely a mystery and highly individual. This in turn increases the importanc...

Professional athletes increasingly use their popularity to speak out about political topics off and on the field. However, only few studies explore how audiences react to political speech in elite sports. Existing research has tended to focus on very few high-profile cases, usually in the United States, such as Colin Kaepernick's anthem protest. Go...

Introduction: Mega sporting events, such as the Olympic Games, provide niche sports with unique opportunities to attract public attention. However, scandals during these events can pose serious threats to these sports. In particular, if a sport scandal enables hostile stakeholders to achieve a scale shift, it becomes almost impossible for a niche s...

Athletes have again started to take a visible stance on various political and social issues, which has stirred fierce controversies. Existing research has a strong US bias, and, to extend the range of research, we conducted a German survey on the perceived legitimacy of athletes’ political activism. The evidence suggests that the US debate cannot s...

Iran’s football has been plagued by substantial safety and security problems. This paper argues that these problems represent to some extent the adverse effects of the repressive policies the government has adopted towards football. First, football matches have become focal points for social and political protests. Second, attempts to control footb...

Research question: Digital disruption is heavily impacting incumbent sports media business models. While major sports seem to cope with digital disruption, the challenges appear much bigger for minor sports. Therefore, the contribution focuses on the efforts of smaller European football leagues to adapt their business models. Two research questions...

Jedes Wochenende treffen sich Tausende von Sporttreibenden auf Sportplätzen und in Sporthallen. Während der Woche bereiten sie sich mittels systematischen Trainings darauf vor, sich gegen andere in einen Wettbewerb einzutreten. Das Ziel des Wettbewerbs ist, Sieger zu werden und viele nehmen teil, wohl wissend, dass pro Wettkampf nur einer der Betei...

Von November bis März werden tagsüber die öffentlich-rechtlichen TV-Wochenenden durch lange Wintersportstrecken geprägt. Das ist heutzutage eine mediale Besonderheit, nicht nur für den Fernsehsport. Der mediale Wandels führt seit Jahren zu einer Multiplizierung des Angebots an elektronischen Medien und ist durch eine Fragmentierung des Publikums ge...

The commercialization of European football has been heavily criticized by supporters and academic scholars alike. Such criticism ignores, however, the flaws and problems that non-commercialized or state-controlled football systems face. Therefore, the current paper examines how restrictive government policies impede the development of professional...

Introduction The International Olympic Committee (IOC) imposes very specific ideas on sports governance, more precisely on sports autonomy, on countries joining the Olympic Movement. Given that the idea of sports autonomy originated in the Global North, this article introduces the concept of governance transplants to evaluate the impact that being...

The COVID-19 pandemic has heavily affected a wide range of stakeholders in the sport sector. Yet, some professional sports managed to gain exceptions from the restrictive anti-COVID-19 policies. The current paper assumes that the effects could have been ambiguous. On the one hand, professional sports could have benefitted from its position as provi...

Rationale The paper examines whether the concept of the soft budget constraint (SBC) helps understanding how lower tier football coped with the revenue drop during the COVID19. Design A qualitative research design relying on expert interviews and document analyses was employed. A sample of five clubs was examined using process-tracing methods. Fi...

The current paper conceptualizes international sport governing bodies (ISGBs) as “agents of diffusion,” whose key strategic interest is in the broadest participation in their sports. Our research examines the impact of a specific diffusion strategy, adopted by World Athletics in 2008, which was essentially the decentralization of decision-making po...

The article traces how European football regulation has been ‘captured’ by the football governing bodies. The European Commission re‐aligned with the European football governing body Union des Associations Européennes de Football (UEFA), which enabled the latter to solidify its role as industry regulator. Four factors seem to account for the succes...

Sportpolitik stellt ein institutionell komplexes und dynamisches Politikfeld dar. Ein adäquates Verständnis der aktuellen Sportentwicklung setzt die Integration politikwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse voraus, da sich der Sport durch die Wiedervereinigung im Jahr 1990 deutlich politisiert hat. Staatliche Akteure und demokratische Öffentlichkeit zeige...

RATIONALE The paper examines which themes drove the collective action of football fans against the project of a European SuperLeague in 2021. DESIGN Two unique datasets on the Twitter discourse about the Super League project were retrieved. Themes were analyzed using methods of inductive content analyses. Legitimacy gains and losses were measured u...

Research question The paper asks to what extent team tactics qualify as internal sources of competitive advantage in team sport industries. Team tactics are complex routines for situated action, which require highly skilled actors to perform them. However, in an industry structure facilitating a highly unequal allocation of athletic talent, the pot...

Previous research has shown that consuming media broadcasts of national athletes participating in international sporting competitions can inspire national pride and heighten identification with the nation. Extending these accounts, this paper asks whether major sporting events can also shape meanings attached to the nation; specifically how strongl...

Gender discrimination has been strongly related to the suppression of women's participation in sport. Accordingly, gender (in)equality has proven to be an important determinant for the participation and the success of countries in international women's elite sport. Hence, differences in gender (in)equalitity, such as women's participation in the la...

Background Scholars have long emphasised the complexities and difficulties of educational policy transfer as educational systems develop path dependent. Purpose The case study of the Quality Physical Education (QPE) pilot project in South Africa aims to show that besides a lock-in effects in national educational policies, decoloniality, that is, a...

This article critically reviews the concept of sports autonomy. It argues that sports autonomy is of limited use for analysing and explaining the relationships between sports organisations and public authorities in diverse political and cultural contexts. Hence, the article proposes an alternative, advocating the use of collaborative governance the...

As Hutchins and Rowe have emphasized, digital plenitude will fundamentally affect sports broadcasting. In particular, niche sports will be confronted with a more difficult media environment in which the chances of being telecast may increase, while the chances of finding an audience are likely to decrease. Therefore, niche sports face the need to f...

This study contributes to our understanding of competitive dynamics in international sports by investigating national participation in athletics. Recent scholarship has suggested that national elite sport policies follow strategic rationales when dedicating scarce resources to participation in international sport. Therefore, the study builds on the...

During the German divide, the two Germanys developed quite different elite sport systems. After reunification, the expensive and compromised East German state sport system was dismantled and the West German neo-corporatist policy approach to elite sport prevailed. The neo-corporatist approach is characterised by a large number of veto players which...

Research question: In an increasingly segmented TV market, niche sports rights owners competing with giants such as professional football often face the question of whether it ultimately pays for them to move from a free to a pay TV distribution strategy – that is, behind a paywall. Interestingly, at present, sport management research has not provi...

Although private sector involvement in physical education seems to increase, academics and practitioners have been highly critical of its impact. This paper examines the evolution of Quality Physical Education Guidelines of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as an example of a public-private partnership in...

Prior research has provided evidence that attractiveness is associated with work-related advantages. It is less clear, however, whether attractiveness is an antecedent or a consequence of professional success. To answer this question, associational football in Germany is used as an exemplifying case. Portrait pictures of German football players wer...

Previous research has shown that governments have often used mega sport events to convey a positive image of their nation to a global audience, whereas Western-based non-governmental organizations use these events to criticize social ills in the host countries. Research presented here asks to what extent attempts at politicization have prevailed wi...

Der mediale Wandel stellt viele Sportarten vor die Herausforderung, wie sich künftig mediale Präsenz erreichen lässt. Umso erstaunlicher ist der mediale Erfolg der Wintersportarten im öffentlich-rechtlichen Fernsehen. Daher fragt die vorliegende Untersuchung, wie die Wintersportarten die öffentlich-rechtlichen Fernsehtage erobert haben. Um die lang...

Research presented here explores the relationship between (changing) gender role attitudes and identification with the national women’s soccer team in a German context. In contrast to U.S. American results, street survey data conducted in Germany during the women’s soccer World Cup suggest that people holding more conservative gender role orientati...

The article aims to contribute to the understanding of competitive dynamics and specialization in international sport by analyzing superior sporting performance (SSP) in international athletics in the period from 1999 to 2018. By applying iterative Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests to annual bests, the study examines national SSPs. Contrary to theoretical c...

Neo-institutionalist scholars of comparative education have claimed that international organizations (IOs) promote educational scripts that result in a harmonization of school curricula. However, this neo-institutional model seems to be inadequate for the field of physical education (PE), as it neglects the contested and politicized space of global...

Athletic success in women’s sports, in particular in women’s soccer, is strongly linked to macrolevel gender equality within societies. There is also evidence that macrolevel gender equality matters for sport consumption. This study explored the role of mesolevel institutions for the popularity of women’s soccer. The example of reunified Germany il...

It is commonly assumed that sport plays an important role for national identity. However, empirical research has primarily focused on sport’s role for emotional-affectice rather than cognitive aspects of national identity. Therefore, research presented here explores whether identification with the German national soccer team serves to reinforce eth...

Although the heavily expanded technocratic doping test system has failed to detect the most spectacular cases of performance enhancement and to eradicate doping as social problem, it enjoys social fact quality. Research presented here argues that the taken-for-granted character of the technocratic test system represents a prime example of instituti...

Previous research has supported the idea that achievements in international sports might contribute to national pride. However, the potential role of political regimes has been widely neglected. The account presented here argues that less democratic regimes depend strongly on output legitimacy and therefore are more likely to employ sport-centred i...

Given the fact that the governing body of world football, FIFA, has managed to survive major failures in sports governance, this paper addresses the role of football consumers as potential principals. By characterizing FIFA as a ‘political machine’ and using ‘digital trace data’ from Twitter to analyze responses to the most recent FIFA corruption s...

Spectator violence is an issue that affects many football matches in Sweden and other countries. Different models have tried to explain why individuals participate in sports fandom and associated behaviors. However, often these models ignore social and individual factors that may impact if and why individuals participate in spectator violence. Outg...

Research presented here aims to contribute to the literature on demand for individual sports and its implications for industry structure. It is argued that “provincial” preferences, that is, a dominant interest in national identification or local stars, might account for the persistence of fragmented governance of boxing. The analyses of a unique d...

Following Catherine Hakim’s notion of the increasing significance of ‘erotic capital’ in contemporary society, this paper addresses the effects of erotic capital in the realm of professional sports. Erotic capital may be closely related to popularity and thus represents a key marketing asset, in particular for female athletes facing a predominantly...

Nachdem Korruption innerhalb des Weltfußballverbands (FIFA) bereits seit geraumer Zeit in Wissenschaft und Publizistik diskutiert wird, markierte der 27. Mai 2015 einen neuen Höhepunkt der unrühmlichen Korruptionsgeschichte der FIFA. Die New Yorker Staatsanwaltschaft erhob an diesem Tag Anklage gegen eine Gruppe amerikanischer Fußballfunktionäre, d...

The paper explores the impact of the long-term demographic and economic changes Germany faces in competitive tennis. It is argued that demographic changes, rural restructuring, and urbanization serve to shrink the sociodemographic niche for middle- and upper-class sports in particular in rural regions. The idea is tested by analyzing data on compet...

The effectiveness of the European Union (EU) as global regulator is controversial. Some scholars characterize the EU as one of the most important shapers of global regulations; others argue that the EU's effectiveness critically depends on its regulatory cohesion, the political opportunity structure and regulatory capacity of its interlocutors. Sin...

Abstract Not only in street surveys (e.g., due to be in the hurry, self-presentation reasons) response biases (e.g., tendency to the middle, favoring of the extremes) can often occur. These response patterns can damage a successful testing of hypotheses and it is appropriate to exclude these response patterns (resp. persons) from further content-r...

It is commonly assumed that international sport reinforces feelings of national pride and national identity. Using large-scale survey data from Germany, covering the period between 1992 and 2008, some unresolved key questions surrounding sportive nationalism are addressed. We examine the relative importance of sport as a source of national pride, a...

This contribution reviews existing research on media coverage of doping in Germany. Based on a keyword search, 22 works were identified. The review aims to provide a survey of the state of the art in terms of questions addressed, methods and results as well as blind spots and methodological deficits. Moreover, directions for future research are out...

Fußball scheint eines der letzten großen „Lagerfeuer“ einer zunehmend pluralisierten Gesellschaft zu sein. Verschiedentlich ist daher eine „Fußballisierung“ des Mediensports diagnostiziert worden. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht diese These auf der Basis der von der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Fernsehen erhobenen Fernsehdaten. Die Analyse macht deutlich...

Research question: Given growing skepticism regarding the future of women’s soccer in Germany, research presented here aims to fill a gap in research and explores demand functions for the German women’s top division, the Frauen-Bundesliga (FBL). Research methods: FBL attendance data for 1848 matches from the seasons 1998/1999 to 2011/2012 are analy...

Sport and sport consumption represent highly gendered spheres. Accordingly, sport spectatorship and fandom have been predominantly male. Recently, however, a trend towards a ‘feminization of sport crowds’ within European soccer has been detected. The piece of research presented here focuses on the concept’s quantitative dimension and aims to provid...

Based on the idea that the political success of the anti-doping movement might be reflected in an increasing moralization of media discourses, the article traces long-term trends in the German doping discourse. Thus, a unique text corpus covering the period between 1950 and 2009 is analyzed using a corpus linguistic (CL) approach. It is shown that...

Scholars have engaged in discussions over whether the rise of transnational private authority is beneficial or undermines public legitimate authority. While the recent focus on civil regulation has emphasized the key role of public authorities and civil societies in such arrangements, the case of the International Federation of Association Football...

The research presented here aims to fill the existing gap in empirical research on demand for individual sports. A unique data set on audiences for live broadcast tennis matches from Germany, as Europe’s biggest and most competitive TV market, is analyzed. The results indicate that canonical approaches of empirical sport economics can be fruitfully...

Conventional wisdom about sport stardom claims that the physical attractiveness of athletes is of some importance for sports’ consumers. Therefore, research presented here asks whether there is a “premium on beauty” in the sports telecasting market. The relevance of athletes’ physical attractiveness for consumption is framed as pure Beckertype cons...

This study examines to what extent the public attention directed at individual male and female players of various national soccer teams is influenced by (a) their athletic performance and (b) their physical attractiveness. The results prove that public interest in athletes depends significantly on performance and attractiveness. However, those athl...

Persistent immigration towards industrialized countries has challenged traditional conceptions of citizenship. In Germany, immigration has visibly changed the ethic fabric of the national football team, which is one of the few national post-war icons. Although some commentators consider the team to be a role model for successful integration of immi...

Since the Second World War, policy-making in German sport has strongly relied on neo-corporatist arrangements where the sport associations possess negotiation capacities as well as co-regulatory skills and enjoy routine access to the government. Recently, however, a number of neo-corporatist arrangements in Germany have been eroding or have been co...

While the politicisation of high-performance sport is perceived to represent one of the driving forces behind doping, we know not much how exactly the cold war in sports has affected sporting misconduct in western societies. Therefore, we propose here to distinguish between ideological and institutional politicisation and explicit and implicit acce...

Dieser Beitrag thematisiert ausgewählte sozialwissenschaftliche Aspekte des Sports, die für ein tiefgehendes Verständnis des Sports in der modernen Gesellschaft grundlegend sind. Der erste Abschnitt liefert einen Überblick über die Geschichte der Leibesübungen und des Sports. Verf. greifen hier unter anderem die Entwicklung des Turnens in Deutschla...

Doping und Antidoping sind sozial konstruierte, prozessuale und historisch kontingente Phänomene, die auf Verständigungen von Akteuren über Verbotenes und Erlaubtes beruhen. Daher ist der öffentliche Diskurs über Doping und Antidoping ein wichtiges Element der Dopinggeschichte. Die Inhaltsanalyse des Dopingdiskurses in den meinungsbildenden Publika...

Research conducted here aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about gender differences in sport spectatorship. While media coverage of sports represents a "gendered experience", recent research has questioned the explanatory value of anatomical sex for understanding differences in sport consumption. Analyses of TV ratings for German national tea...

The European Union (EU) represents an emerging opportunity structure refining societal actors’ chances to get access to and influence over policymaking. While research has mainly focused on lobbying within the legislative arena, we provide evidence that competition policy can also be understood as a venue of interest group politics by taking the ca...

It is commonly assumed that European integration empowers prime ministers at the expense of cabinet ministers and parliamentary actors. This article follows the suggestion that an increase in cabinet reshuffles indicates power shifts in favour of the PM, and studies reshuffles in two countries that have been involved very differently in the process...

For a long time, sport governing bodies have put high hopes in a consideration of sport in the European Union (EU) Treaties. Ideally, such a sport consideration should not only entitle the sport bodies to get access to the EU budget but, more importantly, also attach more weight to political considerations of sport specificity in proceedings before...

The paper emphasizes the idea that in order to avoid present-minded moralizing research on doping history we should consider doping as a socially constructed phenomenon. By examining the most spectacular West German doping scandal of the 1950s, the so-called Brustmann affair, the paper illustrates the difficulties sport physicians as well as sport...

The paper addresses the question whether the cooperative relationship between organized sport and state actors has left an impact on the legislative organization of sport policy-making. The idea of whether the Sport Committee of the Bundestag can be categorized as a constituency committee staffed mainly with lobbyists from the sport associations an...

In this article, we address recent claims that executive— legislative relations in parliamentary democracies are undergoing important changes owing to either a `presidentialization' or a `Europeanization' of domestic political systems. Therefore, we test empirically whether parliamentary democracies are indeed experiencing changes in executive—legi...

Over 30 years ago, Eric Browne and Mark Franklin demonstrated that parties in a coalition tend to receive portfolio payoffs in almost perfect proportionality to their seat share. Even though this result has been confirmed in several studies, few researchers have asked what the underlying mechanism is that explains why parties receive a proportional...

The article takes on the recent criticism about excessive determinism in institutionalist research in comparative political economy. It is argued that institutionalist reasoning holds too strong assumptions about the existence of self-reinforcing features of institutional configurations. In particular, such features are unlikely to be found in inst...