ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Sport, Leisure, Tourism, and Events
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1638764
This article is part of the Research TopicRevitalizing Urban Cultural Heritage through Major Sports EventsView all articles
Strategic Ownership Configurations to Foster Intangible Cultural Heritage in Japanese Football Events
Provisionally accepted
- University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain
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This study examines how the governance and ownership configurations of sporting events impact their ability to preserve intangible cultural heritage, utilizing Japan as a case study.Drawing on the Resource-Based View and the conceptual framework of the Ownership Landscape, this paper analyzes four emblematic football events (including professional football divisions, the All Japan University Football Championship, the Shakaijin Cup, and local festival-based tournaments) through a qualitative multiple-case study approach supported by documentary analysis and Data Envelopment Analysis. The results show that events governed by hybrid or bottom-up strategies are more likely to generate valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources, which sustain both organizational efficiency and cultural relevance. Moreover, clubs and events with participatory ownership structures demonstrated stronger ties to local communities, higher resilience, and deeper cultural embedding. These findings suggest that Ownership Landscape can function as a strategic intangible resource and that developing quantitative tools to measure it may enhance future research in sports management and cultural policy.
Keywords: Ownership Landscape (OL), Resource-based view (RBV), Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), sports governance, Japanese football, Bottom-up management, sports event, Community Engagement
Received: 31 May 2025; Accepted: 24 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gúdel, Hernández-Correa, Acebes and Pajares. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Ricardo Gúdel, University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain
Emilio Hernández-Correa, University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain
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