Rapid technological progress and digital have considerably changed the role of technology in sports in the past two decades. As the human limits of performance have been reached in many disciplines, reaching future limits will increasingly depend on technology. While this represents progress in how athletes train and compete, similar developments await sports managers in the way they lead sports organizations and sports consumers in the way they consume and engage with sports. Using the SportsTech Matrix (i.e., a framework to capture how different types of technologies provide solutions to different user groups in sports), we examine how technology will impact sports in the future. We present a Delphi-based prospective study with quantitative and qualitative assessments from 92 subject matter experts for six future projections and 35 non-Delphi prospective survey items. We find that, by 2030, technology will significantly impact all three user groups in sports: athletes, consumers, and managers. For athletes, experts anticipate technology to play a major role for sporting performance improvements. For consumers, the consumption of sports content will continue to change significantly. For management, new types of manager profiles in terms of backgrounds and skill sets would be desirable. We discuss two possible future scenarios: (1) a probable future and (2) a game changer. Our findings should provide relevant insights for decision-makers and other stakeholders in sports and raise promising directions for future research.
Sports technology refers to technologies developed to enhance the sports viewing experience and athletic performance.
Sport technology represents a certain type of means. to realize human interests and goals in sport. Such technology ranges from body. techniques, via traditional sport equipment used by athletes within competition, to. performance-enhancing machines, substances, and methods used outside of the competitive.
The positives of technology for performers include: Equipment and footwear research has altered sporting equipment to make performances faster and aid recovery. Often the materials are lighter and create more speed or power. Players recovering from injury can be put in oxygen tents.
The impact of technology on sports – A prospective study
The role of technology in sports has drastically changed since the turn of the century in lockstep with technological advancements and digitalization across industries. Driven by the emergence of the Internet and mobile technologies, technology has become indispensable in many sports (Ratten, 2019). By playing “a vital role in becoming the best – on and off the pitch” (Schmidt, 2020, p. ix), technology has contributed to making sport potentially more exciting and challenging than ever before. While sports was considered a leisure time activity for most of its history, the technology-driven internationalization and professionalization have led to enormous changes: fans and consumers can follow sports events and their favourite teams and athletes across the globe live or on-demand through digital technology or social media basically at any time (Ratten, 2011). Athletes have more sports than ever to choose from and are much less dependent on other players or restrictions. In their quest for better performance, they have also benefitted from technology. Human limits seem to be reached in many sports (Berthelot et al., 2008, Berthelot et al., 2010; Nevill et al., 2007; Nevill and Whyte, 2005), and “future limits to athletic performance will be determined less and less by innate physiology of the athlete, and more and more by scientific and technological advances” (Lippi et al., 2008, p. 14). In most professional sports, it is assumed that any significant gains in the future will depend on technology to some degree (Balmer et al., 2012). Of course, such developments and prospects raise a variety of ethical questions that have been addressed in the literature as well (Dyer, 2015; Evans et al., 2017; Karkazis and Fishman, 2017; Loland, 2005; Miah, 2005).
Technologization in sports affects not only athletes and consumers but also sport managers who face an increasingly complex industry to manage and compete in. Historically, sports had been governed and managed through a variety of primarily public or voluntary organizations with a limited number of professional or commercial institutions. Given the rapid advancements and growth in the sports industry over the past decades, the pressure to adopt market mechanisms has constantly increased (Misener and Misener, 2017). Earlier non-profit organizations now have to be managed like profit organizations and establish professional organizational structures and processes (Kikulis et al., 1995; Skirstad and Chelladurai, 2011). In this complex development process, a variety of additional difficulties and limitations associated with non-profit organizations have to be addressed, such as resource insufficiencies, paternalism (i.e., decisions and resource allocation follow the interests of those responsible or most influential), or amateurism (i.e., managerial roles and tasks are taken over by well-meaning amateurs instead of qualified professionals) (Salamon, 1987). In addition, the globalization of sports poses challenges to sports managers ranging from a global flow of athletes to environmental impact and an increasing influence of international media corporates (Thibault, 2009). To manage this progress effectively, sports managers will continue to increasingly rely on technology (cf. Schmidt, 2020), and their work will need to be guided by innovation and entrepreneurship (González-Serrano et al., 2017).
In sum, almost all aspects of sports and all its stakeholders have been affected by technology in the recent past. Despite the high relevance in both social and economic terms, there are significant gaps in academic literature for sports technology (Ratten, 2017, Ratten, 2018) as well as sports management (Gammelsæter, 2020; Peachey et al., 2015). Regarding the latter, there is a clear lack of research about sports managers; that is, while a lot of research and knowledge has been produced for sports managers, there is comparably little knowledge about sports managers, an issue that had been raised in the literature before (Andrews and Silk, 2018; Klikauer, 2018), and which is addressed in this research. Overall, the objective of this study is to understand better the possible role of technology in sports going forward, thereby contributing to the body of literature that currently discusses the expansion and integration of disparate research topics to provide more comprehensive perspectives (Ratten, 2020). In summary, the research question can be expressed quite simply: How will technology impact sports in the short, medium, and long term? Looking at this in detail, we are trying to answer several questions: Will the influence of technology decrease, remain constant, or increase? Will all players in the industry be affected in the same way? Will certain categories of technology play a more significant role than others? What opportunities are emerging and how can they be realized? What are the risks and how can they be mitigated?
Given this rather broad research question, we use the SportsTech Matrix developed by Frevel et al. (2020) to structure our thinking and research. The SportsTech Matrix provides an all-encompassing framework that captures the combination of technology and sports. For this purpose, all technologies relevant in sports are divided into three categories and all possible users of technologies in the sports context are divided into three groups. When put together, this allows to “capture how different types of technologies provide solutions to different user groups in the realm of sports” (Frevel et al., 2020, p. 25).
In this research, we conducted a real-time Delphi study among 92 subject matter experts from 30 different countries and heterogeneous backgrounds. Given the prospective nature of our study, Delphi represents an ideal research method as it allows examining a rather broad and complex issue both quantitatively and qualitatively. The latter is essential as it allows to tap relevant but tacit knowledge that is difficult to achieve in other research methods (Grisham, 2009). Delphi is a proven method in examining prospective developments of entire industries (Förster, 2015; Kluge et al., 2020; Merkel et al., 2016; Schuckmann et al., 2012; von Briel, 2018). To facilitate an effective group discussion among the experts (Belton et al., 2019; Linstone and Turoff, 2011), we decided to use the real-time variant of the Delphi method (Gnatzy et al., 2011; Gordon and Pease, 2006). To ensure a rigorous application of the research method with the highest standards, we have followed state-of-the-art methodological and technical papers from Beiderbeck et al. (2021b) and Schmalz et al. (2021), who suggest clear quality criteria for a three-step Delphi-procedure including study preparation, study conduction, and study analysis.
Background
To examine how the intersection of sports and technology may evolve and how technology will impact sports in the future, it is initially important to understand the general relevance of technology in sports and the relevance of technology for different user groups in sports, as these provide the basis for the formulation of our future-oriented projections.
Research methodology
For this study, we used a mixed methods approach, including a Delphi study and 35 additional prospective survey items. For the Delphi study, we used a real-time format following approaches from Roßmann et al. (2018) and Beiderbeck et al. (2021b). To apply the Delphi method rigorously, we have been guided by numerous best practice papers in terms of methodical advice, including Beiderbeck et al. (2021a), Hasson and Keeney (2011), Markmann et al. (2020), and Schmalz et al. (2021).
Descriptive statistics
In a first step, data was cleaned and checked for errors (Häder, 2009). A test for non-response bias following Roßmann et al. (2018) was performed to ensure the generalizability of results. To do so, we assumed late respondents and non-respondents to be similar (Armstrong and Overton, 1977) and applied Mann-Whitney U tests for comparisons between the first 20 (early) and last 20 (late) respondents across all dimensions of our six projections.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Nicolas Frevel: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – Original Draft, Visualization, Project administration, Supervision. Prof. Dr. Sascha L. Schmidt: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Writing – Original Draft, Supervision. Daniel Beiderbeck: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Investigation.
