Abstract
This study examines the potential importance of what we call "local community strategy" in the realm of management for professional sports clubs. In particular, we focus on J League (soccer) clubs since the year 2000. Activities corresponding to the "local community strategy " are supposed to consist of the following five components.(1) Providing services to a local community through sports(2) Participating in festivals and other similar events of a local community and visits to local shopping malls and other places(3) Creating a system for receiving community volunteers(4) Creating a system for obtaining goods and services form community businesses(5) Establishing rules for obtaining funds from the community This study analyzes data acquired from a questionnaire survey sent to all J League clubs belonging to division 1 (J1) and division 2 (J2), and from interviews with several key clubs. We show that the local community strategy is becoming, explicitly and/or potentially, one of the more important elements of J League club management. For the analysis, we classify J League clubs into three groups, roughly speaking, in accordance with the size of the annual sales of the club. We first show, based on our survey and interviews, the level of activities of each club targeted to a local community. We find that each of the three groups has good reasons for taking local community strategy seriously, and that the reasons, ranging from urgent needs for survival to a risk hedge to deal with uncertainty, differ depending on the group.
