Floorball As a New Sport

Rositsa Bliznakova Floorball as a New Sport Case Study: Bulgaria as a Floorball Destination from Insider’s Point of View University of Jyväskylä Department of Sport Sciences Social Sciences of Sport Master’s Thesis Spring 2011 2 UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ Department of Sport Sciences/Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences Master’s Degree Programme in Sport Science and Management BLIZNAKOVA, ROSITSA Floorball as a New Sport Case Study: Bulgaria as a Floorball Destination from Insider’s Point of View Master’s Thesis, 95 pages (Appendices 3 pages) Social Sciences of Sport Spring 2011 ABSTRACT Floorball is a relatively new but quickly growing sport. Together with its development and spreading its importance grows as well. However previously conducted research on floorball from its managerial point of view is rare, especially on an international scale. The present investigation makes an attempt to fill this gap in a holistic manner. It explores the research problem of finding the potentials of floorball as a sustainably successful sport – worldwide and in the case country, Bulgaria. For this purpose the study utilizes the tasks of collecting and systematizing existing relevant data, binding floorball to theoretical frameworks of contemporary science and observing its development level and current issues globally and locally. The research uses a qualitative, ethnographic approach to obtain its goals, and includes participant observation, unstructured and semi-structured interviews. Data is analysed through a combination of qualitative analysis tools – thematic analysis, discourse analysis, content analysis, visual data analysis, etc. The primary data has been gathered in Finland, as well as in Bulgaria and consists of observation of key events and interaction with key informants. The secondary data on the topic is quite limited, thus the utilized literature in the research includes not only academic, but also publicist sources. The results clearly imply the strong potential of the explored sport discipline, however they also indicate the risks on the way of fulfilling this potential – both at global and local level. The outcomes reveal the huge market and social power of floorball, but also a warning for the possible conflict between both. Extremely important for floorball in the future is the building of sustainable culture, transfer of know-how and equalizing the differences between the countries. Media and scientific attention are crucial factors for the further stages of development. The case study explores the conditions for the development of floorball in Bulgaria. Besides the global risks, the national development of the sport has to deal with some local factors like bureaucracy, difficult economic conditions, different participation and spectator culture, but, nevertheless, floorball also has some locally specific potentials like no competition of similar sports, strong place of sport in the national legislation and in the education system, as well as opportunities for sport tourism. Key Words: floorball, development, globalization, marketing, Bulgaria 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction……………………………………………………………...……… 05 2. Methodology…………………………………………………………...………... 08 2.1. Theoretical standpoints of methodology……….................………………… 08 2.2. Research question and tasks……....……………………...…………………. 13 2.3. Research design...…………………………………………..……………….. 16 2.3.1. Description of data……………………………………………………. 16 2.3.2. Research process and data collection and analysis……………………. 16 2.3.3. Conceptual model of the research........................................................... 19 3. Literature Review………………………………………………………………. 22 3.1. Floorball, sport and globalization………………...…………………………. 22 3.2. Floorball and marketing…………………………………..…………………. 25 3.2.1. Floorball and Lateral Marketing………………………………………. 25 3.2.2. Floorball and the Blue Ocean Strategy………………………………... 26 3.3. Emergence of floorball………………………………...……………………. 28 3.4. Development of floorball…………………………………………………… 29 3.5. Recognition of the sport……………………………….……………………. 30 3.6. National examples…………………………………..………………………. 31 3.6.1. Finland………………………………………………………………… 31 3.6.2. Australia……………………………………………………………….. 32 3.6.3. Germany………………………………………………………………. 34 3.6.4. Canada………………………………………………………………… 35 3.6.5. Netherlands………………………………………………………….… 37 3.6.6. “Floorball for All”………………………………………………..…… 37 3.7. Beach volleyball - an interesting development parallel………………….….. 39 4. Results…………………………………………………………………………… 41 4.1. Evidence of the connection between floorball and globalization………….... 41 4.2. Evidence of the connection between floorball and marketing……………..... 47 4.3. Contemporary development stage and issues of floorball globally…………. 57 4 4.4. Bulgaria as a floorball destination (Case study).............................................. 59 4.4.1. Sport importance and traditions…………………………..………….... 60 4.4.2. Sport governance and the place of sport in Bulgarian legislation.......... 61 4.4.3. Structure of sport………………………..…………………………….. 63 4.4.4. Sport in education………………………..……………………………. 65 4.4.5. Participation patterns……………………..…………………………… 66 4.4.6. Information and transparency……………………..…………………... 70 4.4.7. Floorball’s first steps in Bulgaria………..……………………………. 70 5. Conclusions…………………………………………….………………………... 79 5.1. SWOT analysis – evaluation of floorball development on global and local level............................................................................................................................. 79 5.2. Evaluation of floorball emergence and development from marketing innovation point of view............................................................................................. 85 6. Discussion………………………………………………….................................. 88 6.1. Challenges of the research……………………………………..……............. 88 6.2. Evaluation of the research............................................................................... 89 6.3. Possible future research issues......................................................................... 91 List of References……………………………………...………………………….... 93 Appendices…………………………………………………………………………. 100 Appendix 1. Schedule of the interviews…………………………………... 100 Appendix 2. Requested information of other kind………………………... 101 Appendix 3. Informed consent……………………………………………. 102 5 1. INTRODUCTION This paper contains a research in the field of floorball, observed from the managerial point of view, and it is driven by an interest in the socio-economic and administrative aspects of the sport. The title defines the path of the following research. Floorball is chosen as a subject because of its rapid and highly dynamic development, which creates a huge interest, and because it is relatively neglected discipline of academic research by now. During its 25 years of official existence floorball has developed from spontaneous recreational activity to one of the fastest growing sports. Nowadays it is of growing interest for sport administrators, sociologists and economists, because it carries potential benefits for each and every of these fields. That is the reason for this research to have a multidisciplinary sounding. An academic reason for floorball to be researched is that developmental analysis may contribute to adding new dimensions to some of the currently researched concepts and contemporary phenomena, like for example (but not only) those presented in this paper, namely globalization, lateral marketing and Blue Ocean Strategy. Floorball offers an interesting and fresh example for the academic research of these issues, which could show these issues in new light or confirm even more their existing concepts. However the benefit of linking floorball to academic matters does not bring one-sided benefits for the academic field. From the other side floorball benefits from being carefully observed on academic level and this makes its development controlled, rational and reasonable rather than spontaneous and chaotic. The existing gap between the lack of theoretical materials on the topic of floorball and its wide application in practice defines also the academic importance of this paper. Especially the field of marketing is widely accused to not possess the connection between academic work and practical issues and guidelines are given for the practitioners in the field to even ignore marketing academic research (November 2004). The current study aims to prove this claim wrong, at least for the case of floorball, where the theory of marketing is not only applicable in the practice, but it is needed for the sport to be developed in a rational way. 6 The study has some limitations. Thematically it focuses on the emergence and development of floorball as a globalization and a marketing phenomenon. Without a doubt floorball is of importance for many fields of sociology and economics, but not all of them are in researcher’s competence and interest, neither had they fit to the time and resource constraints of the research, so they are left out for the moment. Geographically the focus is on Bulgaria, whereby an observation on the national development is done. The paper points out to some extent also at other countries, which are however used only as potential benchmarking examples for the development of floorball. Floorball is defined as a new sport and this does not apply only to the case country, Bulgaria. However there, because the national federation has been established only in the winter of 2009 and the first team dates back to the autumn of 2008, still

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