Nicholas M. Watanabe

While much of the focus on professional sport is divided between North America and Europe, there is a growing need to analyze sport leagues and organizations outside of these two regions. In this paper, the J-League, Japan’s top flight professional soccer league, is the focus of examination through a seasonal attendance model which seeks to test the importance of region and competitive balance in determining demand for attendance. The results of this model indicate that fans are sensitive to competitive balance, confirming the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis. Furthermore, this paper...Read more

Jung-uk Won
Kaoru Kitamura

This study aimed to refine and further develop existing motivation scales (i.e., MSSC by Trail and James, 2001; SII by Funk, Mahony, Nakazawa, & Hirakawa, 2001) in a cross-national context, and to examine differences of descriptive variables (e.g., demographics, attendance frequency) and spectator motives between South Korean and Japanese professional soccer spectators. We confirmed that the refined motivation scales we developed were valid and that they reliably measured Korean and Japanese soccer spectators’ motives. We also found that there were several differences in demographics,...Read more