Current COVID-19 realities impose additional challenges to sporting event organisers who now have to consider and include new protective measures for the safety and security of both active and passive participants. This study focuses on event consumers and issues related to their intention to attend future sporting events and their perception of how important they find some of the safety-related protective measures when attending sporting events following the COVID-19 crisis. Based on the empirical study of residents from one Middle East and two European countries, the results suggest that, once all restrictions on movement and sporting event attendance is allowed to resume, most of the respondents will attend events in their home country within few weeks. In addition, the respondents from a country that experienced more severe consequences of the pandemic perceive all protective measures as more important than respondents from countries that were less affected.

Background. The concept of sport tourism has become very popular in recent years as a field of study and a tourism product and has attracted the attention of many researchers. Objectives. This study aimed at future scenario planning of the Mashhad metropolitan sports tourism industry. Methods. It was an applied future analytical exploratory research. The information was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 13 management, marketing and sports tourism experts including 7 sections and 50 key indicators. A 50 * 50 cross-over matrix was used to analyze the data collected by Mic Mac Software. Results. Based on the findings of the study, seven general categories of factors (influencers to being influenced) were identified: natural drivers, social-cultural drivers, managerial and programmatic drivers, economic drivers, advertising drivers, service drivers, and infrastructure drivers. Conclusion. Mashhad has great potential for attracting sports tourism in the near future with great human, natural and religious potentials and talents. It is hoped to take steps to improve tourism in the city.

The aim of this study is to identify the effective institutional factors on the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities of the sports tourism industry in developing countries. This research is a qualitative study, the systematic method of Strauss and Corbin (1990) has been used to analyze the data. Interviewing is the main method of collecting data in this research, which semi-structured interviews were done with 45 members of the research community. According to Shane and Venkataraman individual-opportunity nexus framework (2000), interview questions were drafted and simultaneously with data collection from interviews, data analysis was performed. Based on the research results, 75 indicators affecting the exploitation of entrepreneurship opportunities in sports tourism were identified. Our research findings show that the necessary institutional arrangements in regulatory/legal/administrative dimensions (rule of law, government policies), normative/cultural (social norms, values and beliefs), cognitive/educational (promotion of elite knowledge, promotion of social knowledge) and guidance measures/supporter (public sector support, private sector support, complementary attraction and information technology) can improve the rate of entrepreneurial behavior in this area by increasing the ability and willingness of entrepreneurs to take advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities in the field of sports tourism. Finally, according to the research results, it can be suggested that for the growth of the sports tourism industry in developing countries, The existence of a legal, normative, supportive and educational environment will affect the ability and desire of market participants to identify and exploit the entrepreneurial opportunities of this emerging industry.

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The spread of coronavirus in the world has had various effects on industries, especially the sports industry. The purpose of this study was to explain and classify the effects of coronavirus outbreak on the dimensions of the sports industry. The present study was applied in nature, mixed in terms of data retrieval and descriptive-exploratory in terms of data analysis method that data collection was done in the field. The statistical population in the qualitative section included sports experts, 18 people were purposefully selected, and the statistical population in the quantitative section included all activists in the field of sports and sports industry, of which 600 samples were selected by simple random sampling. Data collection in the qualitative part was done by the systematic method of data theory and in the quantitative part, using a researcher-made questionnaire obtained from the qualitative part of the present study with 55 items in 5-point Likert scale. Research data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical methods with the help of SPSS24 and Amos statistical software. The results showed that the outbreak of coronavirus had a role in the production and distribution sectors, private and public sectors, sports education and research, trade, events and competitions, technology, services and economics of the sports industry. This finding can help the country's sports managers and officials to improve the situation of the sports industry in the post-Corona era.