Sascha L. Schmidt

WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management | WHU ·  Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group

Schmidt introduces the relationship between technology and sports in the digital age taking time to outline improvements to athletic performance, sport consumption, sports management, and governance. He also describes how technology drives the development of new sports and enhancement of traditional sport. Finally, he outlines the process by which...

In this chapter, Schmidt and Stoneham look beyond the short- and mid-term impact of technology on sport through the eyes of the athlete, consumer, and manager. Combining the predictions offered by the authors of 21st-Century Sports: How Technologies Will Change Sports in the Digital Age and their own findings, they present what sports will look lik...

Leaders like to show that they value employees. They proclaim that everyone on the team is critical to the organization’s success. As uplifting as that sentiment is, it simply isn’t true. Talent can be a source of competitive advantage only if great people are in the most critical roles. Having stars in jobs that aren’t critical is just a waste of...

Research question: There is a lack of understanding of the role of digital transformation (DT) on the management of knowledge in sport organisations. This study addresses the relationship between DT and knowledge management (KM) and looks at how digital change affects KM processes, the value creation possibilities of generating and applying digital...

Aim and Research Question The aim of this study is to identify challenges in digital KM of National Football Associations (NFA) by answering the question: What challenges NFA face when implementing digital knowledge management? Theoretical Background and Literature Review Sports organisations are facing an uncertain future due to digital disruptio...

The emergence of the metaverse, driven by advancements in transformative technologies, is expected to profoundly influence how individuals interact in the future, potentially disrupting entire business sectors and society at large. Professional football clubs (PFCs) have already initiated explorative forays into the metaverse. Therefore, we examine...

Despite the great promises and potential of quantum computing, the full range of possibilities and practical applications is not yet clear. In this contribution, we highlight the potential for quantum theories and computation to reignite the art and science of expert systems and knowledge engineering. With their grounding in uncertainty and unpredi...

Women's sports have seen a trend of diversification recently, with women's and men's teams merging to form integrated football clubs. While such integrated clubs (e.g., Paris Saint-Germain), in particular, have determined the media headlines with record attendances, governing bodies have begun drafting policies to accelerate such strategic integrat...

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR), and the associated evolving social behavior could likely catalyze a remarkable transformation in the consumption of top-tier sports. Nonetheless, existing research efforts have neglected to explore whether and how the sports management practice might nee...

Discover the exciting future of sports in the digital age with "21st Century Sports: How Technologies Will Change Sports in the Digital Age." This thought-provoking book, now in its second edition, delves into the transformative power of technology on the world of sports within the next five to ten years and beyond. Written by esteemed academics fr...

Schmidt introduces the relationship between technology and sports in the digital age taking time to outline improvements to athletic performance, sports consumption, sports management, and governance. He also describes how technology drives the development of new sports and the enhancement of traditional sports. Finally, he outlines the process by...

In this chapter, the authors provide a snapshot of the opportunities, challenges, and development of the sportstech industry and propose a sportstech taxonomy comprised of the definition of sportstech and the SportsTech Matrix. Their goal is to provide a common understanding and a useful tool for researchers and practitioners alike. In so doing, th...

In this chapter, Schmidt and Stoneham take a long-term perspective on the impact of technology on sports from the viewpoints of athletes, consumers, and managers. Drawing on predictions from experts in this second edition of 21st Century Sports: How Technologies Will Change Sports in the Digital Age and their own research, the authors paint a pictu...

Schmidt, Beiderbeck, and von der Gracht start with a pair of intriguing questions: Is it possible to predict the future of sports in this digital age? And, if so, what scientific methods can be used to forecast the impact of technology on the field? To answer, they first weigh the benefits and drawbacks of popular quantitative and qualitative forec...

The literature on dual career in sports has been developed in a fragmented manner, lacking guidance on the factors that shape dual career choices for athletes and their implications for the sports community. This integrative literature review examines the planning, shaping, progression, and promotion of dual career choices for athletes. Two categor...

Since the European Year of Education through Sport (EYES, 2004), sport has been recognised as an important cultural, social and economic phenomenon in the European Union, fully recognising the right of sportspeople (e.g. athletes, coaches, referees, sport managers and volunteers) to combine their academic/work and sport careers (e.g. dual career)....

Research question: In this study, we add to the slowly emerging literature on modeling the demand for women's sports by exploring the robustness of the determinants for women's volleyball – previously a largely neglected team sport – across three different distribution channels, i.e., online streaming, TV broadcasts, and the stadium experience. Re...

The speed of technological innovation in football has drastically increased in recent years. Therefore, we examine the impact of (digital) technologies on the future of association football up until the year 2026. In this regard, we also take into account diverging socio-economic circumstances in different parts of the world. We use a two-round seq...

Consumer identification has become a frequently researched construct in the past two decades, as its growth has become a major marketing goal of organizations. As consumer identification occurs within the contexts of brands and sports teams, both marketing and sport management literature deals with the construct. However, neither research stream ha...

Purpose: The aim of this study is to identify organisational capabilities (OC) for a successful digital transformation (DT) and associated structures of internal teams to orchestrate and support DT. Design/methodology/approach: An explorative, qualitative study, comprising semi-structured interviews with 82 executives from 43 diverse National Foot...

Despite an extensive body of research indicating multifaceted advantages for employees deemed physically attractive, factors that limit or even negate the attractiveness premium have not been sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we are interested in whether a rich set of physical appearance factors matter when performance information is transp...

New technologies and digital products are influencing day-to-day life in private and business spheres, bringing radical changes to all types of organisations (Gimpel et al., 2018), thus including national football associations (NFA). These change processes are referred to as digital transformation (DT), which Vial (2019, p. 4) defines as “a process...

Research question Despite the potential importance of awards as a possible career catalyst, research on awards is still in its infancy, specifically in sports management. Here, we address this shortcoming in the sports economics and management literature by exploring data from youth association football. Research methods Estimating different probi...

Rapid technological progress and digitalization have considerably changed the role of technology in sports in the past two decades. As the human limits of performance have been reached in many disciplines, reaching future limits will increasingly depend on technology. While this represents progress in how athletes train and compete, similar develop...

Despite a solid foundation of women’s career progression research, the role of personality and psychosocial characteristics in explaining objective career success is not yet fully understood. Today, two alternative perspectives on the role of gender and personality in career advancement prevail. On the one hand, the gender-invariant role demands pe...

Coinciding with the increasing popularity and the enormous investments that have gone into eSports over the past decade, academic literature on eSports is emerging in several fields, while an overarching perspective on strategic management in eSports is lacking to date. In this paper, we aim to reflect on the phenomenon and the extant literature of...

Despite an extensive body of research indicating multifaceted advantages for employees deemed physically attractive, factors that limit or even negate the attractiveness premium have not been sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we are particularly interested in whether a rich set of physical appearance factors matter when performance informat...

In this study, we contribute to the ongoing incremental validation efforts of the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS). Using primary personality and cognition data from 164 German athletes in vocational careers, we intend to replicate Zacher’s (2014) seminal work in an alternative Western environment while also extending it in two significant ways:...

Forecasting the number of Olympic medals for each nation is highly relevant for different stakeholders: Ex ante, sports betting companies can determine the odds while sponsors and media companies can allocate their resources to promising teams. Ex post, sports politicians and managers can benchmark the performance of their teams and evaluate the dr...

Despite the great promises and potential of quantum computing, the full range of possibilities and practical applications is not yet clear. In this contribution, we highlight the potential for quantum theories and computation to reignite the art and science of expert systems and knowledge engineering. With their grounding in uncertainty and unpredi...

Delphi is a scientific method to organize and structure an expert discussion aiming to generate insights on controversial topics with limited information. The technique has seen a rise in publication frequency in various disciplines, especially over the past decades. In April 2021, the term Delphi method yielded 28,200 search hits in Google Scholar...

Despite a solid foundation of women’s career progression research, the role of personality and psychosocial characteristics in explaining objective career success is not yet fully understood. Structural underrepresentation of female executives at board levels remains an issue in both Europe in general and Germany in particular. Today, two alternati...

COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on the world's society and economy. This also applies to European football; the continent's largest professional sports ecosystem has millions of employees in football-related jobs and even more people emotionally attached to the sport. To account for stakeholders' unprecedented level of uncertainty regarding re...

In this paper, we show that the right to determine the sequence of moves in a dynamic team tournament improves the chances of winning the contest. Because studying dynamic team tournaments-like R&D races-with interim feedback is difficult with company data, we examine decisions of highly paid professionals in soccer penalty shootouts and show that...

Research question: In this short article, we explore whether highly diversified professional football clubs, from an investor perspective, are better prepared for an unpredictable global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic than undiversified clubs. Research methods: We apply event study methodology to analyze stock market reactions at football cl...

In this contribution, we highlight the potential for quantum theories to reignite the art and science of expert systems and knowledge engineering. With their fundamental grounding in uncertainty and unpredictability, quantum concepts are able to expand theoretical and practical boundaries of research and exploration. We demonstrate the similarities...

Forecasting the number of Olympic medals for each nation is highly relevant for different stakeholders: Ex ante, sports betting companies can determine the odds while sponsors and media companies can allocate their resources to promising teams. Ex post, sports politicians and managers can benchmark the performance of their teams and evaluate the dr...

Die Sportbranche verzeichnete in den vergangenen Jahren rasante Wachs-tumszahlen und setzt dieses Tempo auch weiterhin fort. Begleitet wird diese Entwicklung von einem eindrucksvollen Reife-und Professionalisierungsprozess, wobei insbesondere Technologie eine entscheidende Rolle spielt. In der jüngeren Vergangenheit hat der Begriff Sportstech-das A...

Because no-show behavior typically leads to operational inefficiencies and thus diminishing returns for service firms, a growing number of authors have demonstrated the potential of using reminders to reduce no-show rates. In this study, by examining the behavioral responses of 13,911 season ticket holders of a professional football team in Germany...

In this chapter, the authors provide a snapshot of the opportunities, challenges, and development of the sportstech industry and propose a sportstech taxonomy comprised of the definition of sportstech and the SportsTech Matrix. Their goal is to provide a common understanding and a useful tool for researchers and practitioners alike. In so doing, th...

This book looks at the effects of technology-induced change in sport within the next five to ten years and provides food for thought for what lies further ahead. Presented as a collection of essays, the authors are leading academics from renowned institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Queensland University of Technology, and Un...

To better understand how executives impact resource allocation, we investigate the three underpinnings of dynamic managerial capabilities (DMCs) as antecedents of related business diversification (RBD) and how they interact with firm resources to influence RBD. Taking football as the research subject, we analyze the joint impact of managerial human...

When facing complex decisions, individuals often employ heuristics, relying on affective feelings rather than systematically evaluating decisional pros and cons. If this heuristic misguides the personal decisions, the consequences may be unfortunate for the individuals but not harmful to the wider society. This is not the case, however, for decisio...

Using unique assessment data for players from a German Bundesliga club’s youth academy, we tested four core hypotheses on how player ratings and rater or ratee‐related characteristics reflect the (prospective) optimism bias and (retrospective) positivity bias. The results indicate not only that the ratings of predicted and remembered performance ar...

Purpose Professional football clubs have increasingly initiated two corporate diversification strategies to enfold growth opportunities besides traditional income sources: business diversification and international diversification. Empirical findings from management and sport management literature provide inconclusive evidence on these strategies'...

This paper addresses a critical gap in talent management research, i.e., the question of what determines high performance, by highlighting the importance of personality trait for the performance of talents who are trained within the strong situation of a pivotal talent pool – the talent pool, of a German Bundesliga club. The findings illustrate the...

The efficient-market hypothesis states that asset prices fully reflect all the information that’s extant, and therefore it is impossible to consistently “beat the market.” Accordingly, market prices should only react to new information. Until the beginning of this century, professional baseball was seen as such an efficient business, because all te...

Professional football is a globalized game in which players are the most valuable assets for clubs. In this study, we explore the evolution of the football players’ transfer network among 21 European first leagues between the seasons 1996/1997 and 2015/2016. From a topological point of view, we show that this network achieved an upper limit expansi...

Evolution of the transfer market activities with EFL21 clubs (‘core nodes’) for different geographical regions (chained base). Each panel describes the evolution of the number of regional clubs involved in transfer market activities with EFL21 clubs. (TIF)

Evolution of the network measures (chained base). Different descriptive network measures. Density: density of links/transfers, CC: average (over the network nodes/clubs) Clustering Coefficient, Gsize: number of network links/transfers, Gorder: number of network nodes/clubs, Degree-in: average number of incoming links/transfers per club, Degree-out:...

Transfer spending by each league along the entire period. Transfer spending produced by each league, taking into account all bought players by all clubs in the corresponding league/season, for every season and for all leagues. (TIF)

Extended explanations on network property measures. Measures included degree (connectivity), average path length, density of links and clustering coefficient. (DOCX)

Public referenda have recently put an end to the ambitions of several cities to host the Olympic Games. The outcome of referenda depends on two major decisions: a content decision whether to support hosting the Olympics and a turnout decision whether or not to cast a vote. Unlike the content decision, the turnout decision has received little attent...

In this paper, we aim to contribute to the ever-growing economic literature on the determinants of football stadium attendance by exploring the increasingly important yet under-researched phenomenon of spectator no-show behavior. More specifically, we analyze a panel data set containing unique information on no-show behavior observed in the stadium...

In order to guide football clubs in their growth development, we introduce the Growth Strategy (GS) framework, which is rooted in diversification literature. Overall, the 3×3 matrix entails nine distinct prin-cipal strategies along the two dimensions – business proximity and regionality. The GS framework is intended to support football clubs in mak...

Literature on the ‘power of words’ has emphasized the importance of a firm's corporate communication as a source of legitimacy and reputation in the eyes of its stakeholders. We argue that it is not just the content or style of a firm's communication about its strategy, but also the alignment between this communication and its subsequent strategic...

Using comprehensive game-level performance records of 2,137 professional basketball players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) between 1985 to 2014, we examine how players respond to a profound shock in the team composition, namely, upon a high-status player (players who received performance awards) joining the team. We analyse the change...

During recent referenda on hosting the Olympic Games people have often rejected their city’s Olympic ambitions, leading various disappointed pro-Olympic stakeholders to attest the public a lack of reasoning when making their decision. In response to this allegation, our research examines the interplay between expected feelings and deliberate reason...

Season ticket holders (STHs) are an integral part of the sporting product. Interestingly, and contrary to the persistent interest in analyzing the determinants of stadium attendances, sports economists have so far largely refrained from exploring the potential determinants of STH loyalty as expressed through regular stadium attendances. In this let...

While athletes may still be cooling down from the recent Summer Olympic Games in Rio, economists remain at a boiling point when it comes to research on the Olympics. They have created bookshelves worth of publications about the economic effects of hosting the Games. So, what did they find? First and foremost cost overruns. Between 1960 and 2012, th...

This article adopts a comprehensive two-step approach to dissolve recent confusion regarding the role of game outcome uncertainty in the TV demand for international team sports. Analyzing the German TV demand for 457 international football games broadcasted during 6 FIFA World Cups and 5 UEFA European Championships and 287 international games playe...

Much of the research on how human capabilities contribute to labor market success focuses on traditional human capital predictors. However, researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the important role of personality traits in determining individual labor market outcomes, both positive and negative. Using data from young professional football p...

To explore the attitudes towards risky career choices of young people in highly competitive environments, we surveyed almost 1000 football players in the youth academies of German professional clubs (Bundesliga), who must generally decide early in their careers whether or not to risk quitting school to focus solely on a professional football career...

Despite the increasing internationalization of marketing activities by professional sporting clubs, previous research exploring the role of game outcome uncertainty (GOU) in spectator demand has been exclusively conducted within national contexts. As a consequence, very little is known about the preferences of international TV spectators watching g...

Despite its prominence in the economic literature, our knowledge regarding the role of game outcome uncertainty (GOU) in spectator decision-making is fairly limited. Even worse, studies testing the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (UOH) by exploring TV demand for European football have further intensified the original ambiguity. In this paper, we...

This study looks at careers in professional soccer to investigate the determinants of human capital (HC) specificity. Inspired by labour market research, we formulate three hypotheses on how uncertainty about the usefulness of individuals’ (more productive) specific skills affects their investment in (more flexible) general skills. The empirical an...

In this study we investigate the important but rather ambiguous role of game outcome uncertainty (GOU) in consumers’ demand for professional sports. Specifically, using a unique and strongly balanced panel data set containing information on individual physical attendance from 13,892 season ticket holders (STHs) of a German professional football clu...

In this study we investigate the important but rather ambiguous role of game outcome uncertainty (GOU) in consumers’ demand for professional sports. Specifically, using a unique and strongly balanced panel data set containing information on individual physical attendance from 13,892 season ticket holders (STHs) of a German professional football clu...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the future of professional soccer by 2025. Scientific foresight studies on this industry do not yet exist despite its current position at a crossroads: toward further exploitation of profit potential? Or clear commitment to the traditional European Model of Sport? Design/methodology/approach – The...

Public referenda have gained momentum as a democratic tool to legitimise public mega projects such as hosting the Olympic Games. Interest groups in favour of hosting the Olympics therefore try to influence voters through public campaigns that primarily focus on economic benefits. However, recent studies find no or hardly any economic impact of host...

Although identification is critical to organizational survival, knowledge on how identification changes and evolves over time is still limited. Not only can tastes and choices vary across both social context and time, but individuals can change or choose their identity, as well as their ideals, group loyalty, and/or social category. Hence, in this...

This paper examines through the lens of sport whether male and female customers as well as differently aged customers focus on different celebrity characteristics and whether they are influenced by celebrities’ facial attractiveness. Drawing on psychological and sociological theories like attachment theory, social role theory of gender, or social n...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of superstars (and other factors) on football fans’ attraction to competition (i.e. disloyal behavior). Design/methodology/approach – A proprietary data set including archival data on professional German football players and clubs as well as survey data of more than 900 football fans is...

This paper examines the effect of superstars on external stakeholders’ organizational identification through the lens of sport. Drawing on social identity theory and the concept of organizational identification, as well as on role model theories and superstar economics, several hypotheses are developed regarding the influence of soccer stars on the...

Objective Do employees care about their relative (economic) position in comparison to their co‐workers in an organization? And if so, does it raise or lower their performance? While the topic is widely discussed in the literature, behavioral evidence on these important questions is relatively rare. Methods This article explores the pay‐performance...

We explore the attitude towards risky career choices of young people in highly competitive environments. We empirically test which factors influence young elite athletes' tendency towards choosing a high-risk career option over a lower risk one; looking at the attitudes, of close to 1000 soccer players in the German "Bundesliga" professional clubs'...