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Introduction
Sports have always attracted vast numbers of people throughout the world, who practice sports, attend sports events and purchase sports equipment (AT Kearney Global Consulting Company, 2011). In this context, professional sports events have been a constantly growing market – the international consulting company PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that the sports industry in North America will grow at an annual rate of 3.2% across ticketing revenues, media rights, sponsorship and merchandising, rising from $71.1 billion in 2018 to $83.1 billion in 2023 (PwC, 2018).
This explains the attention paid by scholars in recent decades to developing models for sports event management (e.g., Sorrentini, 2010), assessing their impacts (e.g., Kesenne, 2005) and investigating their potential for place-branding strategies (e.g., Richelieu, 2018) and for promoting a tourist destination (e.g., Clarke, 2018). The increasing number of professional sports events raises another serious issue, i.e., how do they compete with each other to attract spectators and revenues from media coverage and sponsorships? Despite the relevance of sports events for place branding (Richelieu, 2018) and their socio-economic legacy (Scheu and Preuss, 2018), scholars have overstated the value of understanding competitive dynamics in the sports event industry. In order to fill this gap in the literature, we refer to one of the most influential theories in strategic management research, i.e., the resource-based view (hereafter, RBV), to identify the “value-creating resources” that enable professional sports events to succeed in the long run. RBV interprets firms as bundles of idiosyncratic tangible and intangible resources (Kraaijenbrinket et al., 2010). Corporate strategies should be based on the exploitation of resources that meet the criteria of being valuable, rare, inimitable and not substitutable, and are thus a source of sustainable competitive advantage, i.e., they allow a firm to outperform its competitors (Barney, 1991, 2001).
Several scholars have referred to RBV to investigate competitive dynamics in the sports industry. Specifically, they have identified the resources of sports teams (e.g., Smart and Wolfe, 2000), sports leagues (e.g., Berman et al., 2002) and sports organisations (e.g., Robinson and Minikin, 2012). Some scholars have applied RBV to sports events and shed light, for example, on the relevance of partnerships established by organising committees with stakeholders for the success of some international events (Dollinger et al., 2010; Gherra and...