The study of co-hosted FIBA Women's Eurobasket 2021 alliance: the effect of event delivery model on the organizational learning outcomes

The objective of this paper was to analyze factors affecting collaboration outcomes such as organizational learning of Joint Hosting Alliances (JHAs) of major sports events. The research questions are: 1.What are the drivers and motives of JHAs are (formation phase)? 2.What is the event delivery model that manages JHAs (management phase)? 3.What are the organizational learning outcomes and the factors affecting these outcomes (outcomes phase)? This study analysed the collaboration of multiple hosts in co-hosting sporting event which had been a recent one-off monosport event hosting trend in the last 20 years. We referred to their partnership as Joint Hosting Alliances (JHAs) as we relied on strategic alliance, Interorganizational relationships (IOR) and interorganizational learning theoretical frameworks (Babiak & Willem, 2017; Byun et al., 2019; Malo & Elkouzi, 2001). The research employed a single case study of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA)'s Eurobasket Women 2021 event co-hosted by Spain and France. The data were collected from two sources: semi-structured interviews (n=12) and event governance documents (i.e. bid regulations, workshop meetings minutes). The data analysis included a mix of deductive and inductive coding approaches through MAXQDA software. We also performed an analysis of the frequency of ties to measure the intensity of collaboration. We learned that inter- and extra-organizational learning are not the areas that are financed and therefore controlled by either JHA members or event owners which explains the lack of strategic planning for such organizational learning outcomes. Future studies should focus on understanding the role of the public sector in being involved in planning and managing such organizational learning outcomes as they turned out to be incremental in supporting such outcomes. Practitioners will also benefit from this study's findings: a) event organizers should focus on building the match based on alliance formation and the national factor recommendations that could facilitate learning opportunities; b) event owners should be more aware of how their formalization tools affect the frequency and quality of interactions that can be conducive to learning. To conclude, this work was a small and modest contribution to understanding how sporting events can be harnessed for international dialogue, understanding, and peace. The main takeaway message of this research lies in highlighting that JHAs are not necessarily strategic partnerships, but rather transactional. Due to the high event velocity and differences in legal, administrative, and financial background, this study proved that such events could not be platforms of intense collaboration that can lead to specific strategic social legacy outcomes or planned interorganizational and extraorganizational learning outcomes. Although social impacts, unfortunately, remain an area that is not yet regarded as important in such alliances, the contribution of this study is that we identified the start. As more and more International Federation of Basketball's (FIBA) sporting events and other monosport events are co-hosted (e. g. FIBA World Cup in 2023 by Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines or most of the latest FIBA Eurobasket events) and the Olympics Games are allowed to go beyond one host city concept as per Agenda 2020+5, these findings prove to be relevant for the Olympic world and its federations in understanding the collaborative patterns between the co-hosts, be it multiple venues, cities and/or countries.