ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurship is an interesting area of research in the field of sport management since sport has been studied from various business viewpoints, such as marketing, management and leadership, whereas sport entrepreneurship has gained much less attention. Sport is a complex phenomenon; commercial aspirations growing together with non-profit goals makes it difficult to identify whether sport enterprises are profit-seeking businesses or more social enterprises. Although the sport industry is growing rapidly in both the non-profit and profit-seeking sectors, sport organizations in Europe are still mainly non-profit and often run, at least partly, by volunteers. However, during the past couple of decades, more sport organizations have been transferred to privately owned enterprises and sport has become highly commercialized business. In Finland, where the case example is from, the change has happened, especially at the highest level of sport, since the public sector pulled out from funding professional and semi-professional sport. Sport entrepreneurship is rather a new phenomenon in Finland, existing since the 1990s, while in the US, sport has been commercialized for much longer. Although sport entrepreneurship has been most noticeable at the highest level, it exists on all levels from elite sport to grassroots sport (Gilmore, Gallagher & O’Dwyer 2011; Ratten, 2011).
