Sport organizations: An investigation of digital technologies and their impact on performance in the Italian context

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the Italian football clubs outlining their orientation in adopting digital technologies at any level, primarily for improving their overall performance. In the last decades, we observe the increasing implementation and spread of digital technologies worldwide in any economic settings, including the sport industry, where especially in the football business, the digital technologies have been playing a crucial role in supporting managerial, work out and training processes and making them much more competitive and high performing. This study, through a comparative analysis of the Italian football clubs in the Serie A for the year 2021/2022, aims to provide a portrait of these sport organizations and their way to be much more technologically advanced adopting the digital technologies (accessible website; learning and training applications; match analysis tools, etc.). After a brief review of the literature on the topic, we investigate the Italian football clubs mapping them considering some specific main features (i.e. the degree of innovativeness of website, the adoption of e-training or match analysis solutions, etc.). Our qualitative research, through a multiple case study, should provide some possible stimulating and interesting insights for the future, analysing one specific country, where football industry represents the most relevant sport setting with high relevance in terms of volume of affairs, also significantly affected from the digital technologies making them “smart”.