Abstract
The decline of corporate sports teams, stems from their history as a type of company employee welfare measure for boosting employee identification with the company. Although the function of corporate advertising was later added to sports and underwent redefinition from the viewpoint of corporate social responsibility, the cost benefit of corporate sports programs has always been subject to the bottom line. The decline of corporate sports is a grave problem because it has the potential to weaken Japanese professional sports, which relies on corporate sports programs to supply top athletes, and in so doing further undermine community life in the regions of Japan. Thus companies have pursued changes in the management of their sports teams, transforming them to the regionally-based club or semi-pro teams. This led to the birth of the pro soccer J-League and an independent semi-pro Japanese baseball league. J-League and the independent baseball league, however, could not use Japanese professional baseball league as a business model because of many problems at the professional level. For example, over the long term it has been unable to achieve an exciting level of game competition due to an uneven distribution of power among teams, it continues to suffer from a lack of independent corporate management and it has authoritarian labor-management relations. In addition, the legal status of professional sports athletes in Japan is vague compared with other advanced countries and the short length of an active sports career confronts many athletes with the problem of how to maintain a long-term social existence after retirement from professional sports. Thus a second career becomes important.
It should be emphasized that the rapid decision-making abilities, powers of concentration, self-control, resilience, vigorous energy and other human capabilities developed by sports athletes in the world of extreme sports competition can carry over to provide significant second-career advantages. Today, professional sports are likely to play a key role in helping Japan’s regional communities overcome the increasingly damaging effects of the global economy.
