Institute of Economic and Cultural Geography Institute News
New Publication: Does relatedness drive the diversification of countries’ success in sports?, European Sport Management Quarterly

New Publication: Does relatedness drive the diversification of countries’ success in sports?, European Sport Management Quarterly

Successful participation at the Olympic Games is main concern for many countries’ sport policy. Promotion of young athletes and investments at the elite level are often justified with greater societal sporting activity and changes in lifestyle. By contrast, scientific research about success at the Olympics is rather superficial. Population size, GDP per capita, host advantage and positive effects of being a (former) socialist state have been highlighted as the main drivers of medal counts. However, these factors do not explain sport-specific success.

Recent research shows that national positioning strategies for sport funding are largely based on the entry barriers to a sport (the number of medals available and the competitive balance) as well as physical, cultural, and institutional characteristics of a sport. In this new publication in European Sport Management Quarterly, Louis Knuepling and Tom Broekel could show that both, the relatedness of sports and the competitive balance positively influence the diversification of countries in Olympic sports. Thereby, they combined insights from the sport management literature with the theory of related diversification, which became popular in evolutionary economics and economic geography in the past decade. They made use of a publicly available dataset containing information on all Olympic summer medalists from 1896.

Knuepling, L. & Broekel. T. (2020): Does relatedness drive the diversification of countries’ success in sports?, European Sport Management Quarterly. DOI: 10.1080/16184742.2020.1770830