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The Commercial Monopoly in Sports

These are challenging times for those who roam the corridors of power in the highest echelons of international sport, with some international sports federations (notably the two biggest players, the International Olympic Committee and FIFA) having experienced crises of governance and well-publicised allegations of corruption and mismanagement in the past decade or so. The Salt Lake City Olympic Games, of course, comes to mind.

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The Commercial Monopoly in Sports Mega-Events

2.1 Introduction

These are challenging times for those who roam the corridors of power in the highest echelons of international sport, with some international sports federations (notably the two biggest players, the International Olympic Committee and FIFA) having experienced crises of governance and well-publicised allegations of corruption and mismanagement in the past decade or so. The Salt Lake City Olympic Games, of course, comes to mind. More recently we saw a widespread furore over bribes in the bidding for ‘Fair Play’-loving FIFA’s 2022 World Cup, which, after some FIFA officials were suspended clearly did not bother President Sepp Blatter too much. He subsequently responded to criticism of the organisation by saying that all FIFA’s ‘successes’ have created ‘a lot of envy and jealousy in our world because you cannot satisfy everybody’; ‘the success story of FIFA can continue because we are in a comfortable situation’ and ‘we have the power and the instruments to go against any attacks that are made’

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Multiple Claims and Insufficient Limits

A single occurrence causes multiple bodily injuries, multiple instances of property damage, or both. Numerous claims are made, liability is reasonably clear, and the fair value of these claims far exceeds the available insurance limits of liability. What’s an insurer to do? Given the wide recognition of an action for bad faith failure to settle (e.g., Voccio v. Reliance Ins. Cos., 703 F.2d 1, 2 (1st Cir. 1983) (“Most ‘bad faith’ cases involve an insurance company’s refusal to accept an offer of settlement within the available policy limits.”), insurers are likely to be confronted with a damned if you don’t, damned if you do dichotomy. See 2-5A The Law of Liability Insurance §5A.13 (Matthew Bender & Co. 2009) (describing it as a “perplexing dilemma” and discussing various approaches to the problem). Many states’ unfair claims settlement practices laws prohibit insurers from “[n]ot attempting in good faith to effectuate prompt, fair and equitable settlements of claims in which liability has become reasonably clear.”

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Pre-Event Waivers And Releases A Comparative Review Of Current State Laws

Facts - Health club member sued health club for personal injuries while on the club=s premises, but was not using the club=s exercise equipment. The member signed a waiver of liability as part of a membership agreement at the club. The waiver released the club from liability for all personal injuries sustained by a member on the premises whether using exercise equipment or not.

Rationale - A written release may exculpate a tortfeasor from future negligence or misconduct. To be effective, the release must be clear, unambiguous, and explicit in expressing the intent of the subscribing parties. The release need not achieve perfection. Exculpatory agreements in the recreational sports context do not implicate the public interest and therefore are not void as against public policy. In determining the purpose for which the release was signed, an appellate Court looks at the language of the release and the agreement in which it is included, and not the inherent risks of the underlying recreational or sports

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Spectator Injuries: Examining Owner Negligence and the Assumption of Risk Defense

INTRODUCTION

People attend sporting events for various reasons. A person may attend for the love of the game, because friends or family persuaded the person to go, or to impress that special someone. However, injuries to spectators can affect anyone at or near the game. Spectators who lawfully purchase tickets to attend sporting events are business invitees and are be able to recover damages from stadium owners who “knew or should have known that a condition existed which posed an unreasonable risk to the spectators, the spectators could not have discovered and protected themselves against this risk, and he owners failed to exercise reasonable care for the spectator’s protection.”

The purpose of this article is to: (1) analyze the current duty of care owed by stadium owners to spectators in baseball and hockey; (2) identify when any assumption of risk defenses...

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Multiple Claimants And Insufficient Limits – Can Insurers Lessen Their Exposure To Bad Faith Claims?

I. INTRODUCTION

When multiple claimants are vying for insufficient policy limits, an insurer’s bad faith exposure is magnified. If a settlement of some, but not all, claims exhausts the available policy limits, the insured is exposed to ongoing litigation without defense coverage. If the insurer conditions settlement on resolving all existing and potential claims, the insurer may face bad faith failure-to-settle claims from the plaintiff(s) unwilling to await a global resolution or dissatisfied with their share of the policy proceeds. This paper discusses and analyzes an insurer’s obligations to its insureds in multiple claimant/excess exposure scenario...

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A Three Dimentional Model of Stadium Owner Liability in Spectator Injury Cases

Stadium and event-site owners are under a duty to provide reason-ably safe premises for spectators at sporting events. In turn, spectators may find that in certain jurisdictions, they are limited to, or outright barred from, recovering damages resulting from injuries which occur at the event. This article analyzes the duties placed on the stadium and event-site owners to prevent such injuries, as well as the defenses avail-able to stadium and event-site owners.

Spectator injuries constitute a large area of negligence law and there is a commonality among the various spectator sports. This article analyzes stadium/event-site owner liability in a three dimensional model.The purpose of a three dimensional model is to unweave the complex fabric which constitutes liability for spectator injuries.

Various sports are independently analyzed in the first section, which represents one dimension. Analyzing specific spectator sports is some-what traditional. That is, law review articles typically analyze the risks inherent to spectators in the more popular sports by breaking these sports into separate categories.

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Financing Modern Sport In The Face Of A Sporting Ethic

Introduction

Relationships between sport and money are longstanding and necessary: this cannot be concealed in the light of a Coubertanian ideal that is often poorly understood. From the very first ancient Olympic Games, sporting events have required human, material and financial resources to be mobilised. When sporting practice has a competitive purpose, it offers a spectacle, the organizing of which necessitates finance, and the promotion of which can bring in substantial income. Sporting practice itself has become an act of consumption, bringing in its train expenses for sports clothing goods, hiring equipment, entry tickets, and the price of transport - especially for staffed, maintained, secured, and priced sites, and particularly for outdoor and country sports (Andreff, 1992; Andreff and Nys, 1997; Andreff and Weber, 1995).

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Sport Tourism: Factors Of Influence On Sport Event Visit Motivation

Abstract

Tourism and sport are key elements of today’s culture and have a specific influence on the behaviour of society. Especially since the 1960’s sport has become a huge international matter with large amount of media attention, money and also political interest. On the other hand tourism remains the world’s largest industry as well as very developing and growing.

Within sport tourism the distinction between active participation and passive spectatorship is an essential difference. In this research a behavioural approach is taken towards the principal of sport event tourism. There has been a significant growth of sport event tourism over the years which provide certain tourists a lot of opportunities for whom watching sport has become a primary reason to travel. This development has encouraged the writer to examine the sport event tourist behaviour.

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Understanding Loyalty and Motivation of Professional Sports Fans

Introduction

The common culture of the United States is characterized by the want for entertainment (Russell, 2009). The entertainment industry as a whole is typically broken down into segments of music, television and movies. While this constitutes a large portion of the annual revenue generated by leisure activities, it overlooks the billion dollar empire that is professional sports. It is estimated that the sports industry in its entirety is worth over $420 billion with roughly $20 billion of that coming from a combination of Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) (Plunkett Research, Ltd., 2011). In addition to the revenue garnered by the teams, fans bring millions of dollars a year into cities hosting a game. The city of Indianapolis, for example, draws 250,000 fans for the three week celebration leading up to the Indianapolis 500 and sees an economic impact of approximately $40 million each time it hosts the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s...

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Cultural Differences in Fan Ritualization: A Cross-Cultural Perspective of the Ritualization of American and Japanese Baseball Fans

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the fan ritualization process through which an individual acquires ritualized sports fandom, as characterized by symbolized, role-assimilated, and selfenacted sports-related consumption experiences. Sports fans employ several fan ritualization strategies including formalism, symbolic performance, traditionalism, and socializing in order to secure ritualized sports fandom. However, these strategies of fanritualization are culture-specific because sports fans authorize and legitimize ritualized sports fandom according to their cultural values. This paper offers several propositions regarding cultural differences in fan ritualization between American and Japanese baseball fans.

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