Managing the Digital Transformation – The Case of Professional European Sport Clubs

This paper addresses the question: How do professional team sport clubs perceive the sport-specific efforts and challenges of the digital transformation? Based on qualitative insights from professional football, basketball, and handball clubs in the German-speaking region, we give insights into how professional sports clubs engage, cope and struggle with digital transformation. We show, that from eight interrelated fields of action, which collectively shape digital transformation processes, professional sports clubs address fundamentals of digital transformation and advanced transformers. Our findings highlight that the way clubs interpret and organize the relationship between the two domains on-field and off-field plays a central role in shaping their digital strategies. Rather than following a uniform pathway, clubs exhibit distinct patterns in how they integrate or separate on-field and off-field initiatives, pointing to the need for context-sensitive approaches. The work offers a sport-specific lens through which the complexity of digital transformation in team sport clubs can be better understood and systematized.