Professional sports teams on the Web: a comparative study employing the information management perspective

Over the past decade professional sports teams around the world have used the Internet and the Web with increasing sophistication to better connect their sports and businesses to fans and the general public with the aim of providing team-related information, fostering fandom and team reputation, and expanding the commercial side of the business. Although the Web-based entry of professional sports teams has become a multi-billion-dollar business, few, if any, studies exist that attempt to analyze and evaluate the efficacy of this increasingly important portion of the professional sports business model from an information management perspective. In this study, we employ the Taylor, Eisenberg, Dirks, Scholl (TEDS) framework thus utilizing a methodology, which effectively helps compare, assess, and rank the websites of top European football (soccer) teams. However, when comparing the European team sites with select reference sites from major leagues in North America, we find much room for improvement on part of the European sites. The study also shows how information artifacts in sports can be systematically analyzed, evaluated, and compared. In more general terms, we demonstrate how the information perspective can serve as a novel theoretical lens and important dimension in sport management.