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1. Introduction
In the beginning, sports was a social expression clearly focused on enjoyment and recreation, which allowed to satisfy a personal need. Over the years, sports has become a social phenomenon characterized by its enormous capacity for mobilization and mass appeal, becoming “a good, whose production, consumption, financing and management respond to economic rationality criteria” (Castellanos, 2001, p. 181). This is how the so-called “Sports Economy,” that refers to the relationship between “the economy and sports” arises. In this sense, Heinemann (1998) states that sports becomes an economic activity that is integrated into the market economy of modern societies. This integration is made through accessory products that it supplies and that are considered sporting opportunities (sports facilities, infrastructures, sports environments and organization), sports equipment, provision of services (learning the sports discipline, training, promotion of talents, etc.) and complementary products such as sports entertainment shows, advertising and sponsorship, lottery and betting, etc. (see table in Heinemann, 1998, pp. 30-31). The monetary flows of sports usually come from three different sources: first, the spectators: income from tickets, merchandising purchases, payments to televisions, etc. (Mullin et al., 2007); second, from the sponsors, that finance diverse activities; third, from sport inputs such as clubs, federations, referees, players, elite sportspeople, etc. (Aragonés, 2013).
Sports sponsorship as a marketing communication tool for organizations is found as one of the complementary products (O’Reilly and Harrison, 2005) and as an extra-sports area of business. Sports sponsorship was first defined by Abratt and Grobler (1989) as a trade agreement between the sponsor (company) and the sponsored party (event or sports entity) to achieve explicitly defined objectives, and the agreement is by all means mutually beneficial. In that same year, Hermanns (1989) proposes one of the definitions that are most taken into account in research on this area of study. For this author, it is a lucrative bidirectional transaction between the sponsor and sponsored parties, in which the contractual conditions between the two are well defined. Sponsorship is one of the most used marketing strategies (Lamont et al., 2011).
Taking into account the definitions seen, the sponsoring organization of a sporting event assumes total or partial costs with a triple objective (Chadwick and Thwaites, 2005, pp. 328-338; Schlesinger et al., 2012,...