Volume 1, Issue 2

When sport organizations are being pressured to change by their environment, they rarely react uniformly or appropriately. What is behind this phenomenon? Why is it apparently so irrelevant for the development of sports organizations when external experts call for structural change? Is it that sports clubs act exclusively as their officials think best? Or worse, are they not able to think about change when being forced by incidents in their surroundings? This paper deals with the learning capability of sports organizations. In this regard, sports organizations seem to have a particular learning ability in fending off any hazards (that could harm the organization as it is). The necessity of such defense strategies results from the organizational structures that are specific to sports organizations.

Sport economists suggest that European professional soccer leagues adopt the institutional design of the American professional team sports leagues because it is believed to represent the prototype of a successful team sport industry. Based on an analytical reconstruction of the development of central selling of broadcasting rights in the German soccer league, this article argues that German professional soccer will not be able to conform to this design. German soccer is committed to maintaining the European model of sports because the political stakeholders of soccer demand that it does. At the same time it is shown that the interplay of regulatory initiatives and media developments has resulted in a highly problematic design for league competition, which appears difficult to change.

Borussia Dortmund, the only German soccer club listed on the stock exchange, was publicly criticised towards the end of 2003. The following article first tries to clarify and to quantify the underlying problem using balance sheet analysis. Through econometrical analysis it can be subsequendy shown that current publications about Borussia Dortmund’s liquidity and profitability strongly influenced the club’s stock market quotation pointing to an urgent need to improve the club’s corporate governance.

The paradigm of postmodernism has not yet received much attention in sports science. Therefore its epistemological program is exemplarily described and subjected to critical reflection. Then the relevance of postmodern theorems for sports sciences is discussed. Of particular interest is the question under which preconditions postmodernism could be a serious challenge for a future-oriented theory conception in the field of sports science. In the long term, sports science will not be able to avoid the controversial discourse presently taking place in the basic sciences concerning the postmodern revision of modernism.