An international comparative study on the evaluation of professional baseball teams between Japan and Korea; Based on Fan Support Index (FSI)

Baseball has been the most popular professional sports in Japan and Korea. In order to make further and sustainable marketing strategies, the professional sports leagues and teams need to be evaluated in finance and customer satisfaction by qualitative as well as quantitative ways. This research was designed to find out the validity of the Fan Support Index (FSI) by empirical comparison way between Japan and Korea. The expected results of this study were to establish the professional baseball team's value evaluation method that focused on the fan support.

The FSI formula used in this study was composed of the average number of spectators(ANS), the average number of spectators per winning game(ANSW), average number of spectators per 10,000 population(ANSP) and ratio of the seat occupancy(RSO). On the basis of the previous studies and experimental projects, the FSI formula was designed as follows; FSI = 40(ANS/max ANS) + 20(ANSW/max ANSW) + 20(ANSP/max ANSP) + 20(RSO/max RSO)

The main findings of this study were as follows. Regardless of the league and nation, all FSI factors such as ANS, ANSW, ANSP and RSO had significant relationships with each other. While all FSI factors had significant effect on the FSI value, ANS had influenced on the FSI value most regardless of the league and nation.

Due to the stadium capacity and the size of population, Japanese teams showed higher scores than Korean counterparts in all FSI factors except for RSO. Due to the lengthy popularity, Central League had the highest FSI, whereas Pacific League showed higher FSI than Korean League.