| Summary: | 博士 === 國立體育大學 === 體育研究所 === 98 === Professional sports are not only sports but also business. Since the 21st century, sports industry has been thriving. Its economic output is continuously hoisting. Yet the core of sport industry is focused on the development of professional sports. In other words, if the development of professional sports keeps steadily growing, it will promote other sports core industry and peripheral industries. For instance, America gives priority to the four sports. The overall value in 2006 reached 425 billion US dollars. In England, soccer is the main sports whereas Japan gives the first place to baseball. Their output values are equally considerable. Baseball also holds first place in Taiwan although it is currently affected by the match fixing. However, its output value will consequentially increase if proper regulatory mechanisms are formulated. The sports type and the business model of professional sports industrial structure have specific characteristics. Professional sports industrial structure is oligopolistic type. The main feature is its few members. These members cooperate to form an organization to make a profit together. In order to gain the greatest returns, many strategies have been produced. During the process of competition, monopoly behavior often appears. Therefore, antitrust acts are drafted to maintain fair opportunities, keep free competitive mechanisms of markets, and protect consumers’ rights.
The purposes of this study were: (1) to know the abuse of common business behavior and the insufficiency of its regulations; (2) to understand the effects and restrictions of antitrust acts towards professional sports; (3) to compare the legality of monopoly behavior on professional sports in Taiwan, America and Japan; (4) to find out reasonable norms for domestic sports industry and to initiate thoughts of future sports regulation establishment for Taiwan; (5) to bring up viewpoints on monopoly characteristics of professional sports so as to be topics for further studies and reference for professional sports leagues, teams, players, sports organizations and the government. The methodologies of this study include documentary analysis, comparative method, and characteristic analysis.
This study also analyzes the causes, types, effects and issues of monopoly behavior on professional sports. There are four revenues in professional sports. They are tickets, premium of advertising broadcast, sponsor from enterprises and sale on subordinate goods. Among them, the regulations on broadcasting premium need to be further probed into and researched. The researcher hopes to understand the deficiency on competitive norms, to provide some aspects for improvement and to offer some suggestion for the applicability of fair trade law on professional baseball.
There are five findings in the course of the study. They are: (1) the development of sports industry is a core industry expanding to the peripheral industry and derives other industries with commercial values; (2) professional sports are the engine core, which continuously boosts the sports industry even more upward; (3) though the formation of professional sports league is not the socalled “natural monopoly” formation, the workplace environment still naturally shows the operation pattern of “Cartel's organization.” That is, professional sports dominate the sports by way of monopoly or joint behavior in order to obtain the overall interests and re-allocate the interests to each team. (4) joint behavior within professional sports league has very intensive partnership. Their action is like the internal operation of a single enterprise rather than as a "joint," that is, the so-called "cooperation action of separate individual." However, the league is not a single group, which may be exempted from the Antitrust Acts; (5) the four professional sports revenues (tickets, broadcasting, sponsorship, subordinate goods income) often shows different states of monopoly behavior, such as the restriction of regulations on competition and unfair competition, which is worthy of further studies.
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