Strategic Choice of a For- or Non-Profit Organization : A Comparative Survey on Local Football and Baseball Sports Clubs

Abstract

The market of social human service has been consisted of both commercial companies and non-profit organizations. Much the same is true on the sports club management. As with the factors that determine either for-profit or non-profit type of organization, Tanimoto (2005) pointed the following four requirements when a specific organizational form selected: (1) market constraints, (2) financial constraints, (3) legal constraints and (4) social constraints. He also suggested the organizational portfolio strategy by which they capitalize on both advantages of for-profit and non-profit organizations. To verify his assumption we have conducted some case studies of local sports clubs as follows, (a) Vegalta Sendai Co., Ltd., a member team of J League (the Japan Professional Football League), shared mainly by the local government, (b) Montedio Yamagata Inc., (c) Shonan Bellmare consisted of bilateral types of organizations and (d) Tohoku Rakuten Eagles, a professional baseball team, owned by a private IT company. Tanimoto's theory has been conclusively found to be almost true through these case studies. In addition his theory has been found to be applicable to a highly commercial professional league team. One local team such as Tsukuba FC, currently not participating to a professional league, seemed to utilize more efficiently their fewer resources by operating both profit and non-profit organizations as the organizational portfolio strategy presumed. In contrast another local team such as Shiogama FC Inc., actively selected nonprofit organization so as they had priority on management by power of their local network. The conclusion is that community-based club management tends to be short of funds, so that utilizing a citizenship network around the organization should be most effective for organization management.