The most exciting topic a while ago is baseball. The next international event is the World Baseball Classic (WBC) starting on March 5, 2025. In the WBC, which opponent do Taiwanese teams need to worry about most? This time, the Japanese team went all the way and lost honorably in the end. Is Taiwan the most worrying opponent in the WBC competition?
In fact, judging from the changes in the Japanese sports industry, the biggest rivals of Taiwan and Japanese baseball may not be each other, but themselves!
Chieh-Hsien Chen, the star of the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions of the Chinese Professional Baseball League, stole the show in this WBSC Premier 12 competition and even led the Taiwan team to win the championship.
Change 1: Impact of declining birth rate! The number of young players has dropped by 50,000 in the past 14 years
Although it is easy to think that the entire sports industry is thriving when seeing a stadium full of fans, in fact, the number of people participating in the sports industry is changing dramatically.
Take the Japan National High School Baseball Championship (Summer Koshien), which has produced countless professional baseball players, as an example. There were still 4,163 participating schools in 2003, but by 2023 there were only 3,715 schools left, a decrease of more than 400 schools. Since 2000, the number of participating schools has been declining year by year, and it may be difficult to regain its previous prosperity.
While this is true for high school baseball, the situation is even more alarming for elementary school baseball. According to statistics from the Japan Rubber Baseball Association, the number of registered elementary school teams reached a peak of 14,968 teams in 2007, but fell below 10,000 teams for the first time in 2022, leaving only 9,842 teams, a full third less . If calculated based on 10 players per team, it is equivalent to a loss of 50,000 young players.
There are many reasons for this phenomenon, but the main one is the declining birth rate. With fewer children, there will naturally be fewer people playing golf, which will indirectly affect the foundation of the sports industry and may even cause the overall sports industry output value to shrink in a few years.
Change 2: The era of "big capitalization" for the team is coming, and business complexization has become a trend
In addition to the WBC, another hot topic in the Japanese sports industry recently is the Hokkaido Sapporo Dome. The Sapporo Dome is in the spotlight because it reported a loss of 650 million yen in its 2023 financial report.
One of the main reasons for the loss is that the Nippon-Ham Fighters, which originally used the Sapporo Dome as their home stadium, moved to the self-built new stadium "ES CON FIELD HOKKAIDO". This move has caused the Hokkaido Dome to lose 1.3 billion yen in related revenue paid by Nippon Ham every year.
The reason why this gap is difficult to fill is that the Sapporo Dome is a very large stadium that can accommodate 53,000 people. After losing the professional baseball team that attracts 2 million spectators every year, it is difficult to find activities or performances that can continue to attract such a large number of spectators. As a result, Sales reached a new low of 1.2 billion yen since the opening.
ES CON FIELD HOKKAIDO, the home stadium of Nippon-Ham
In fact, the Nippon-Ham Fighters began looking for a new stadium as early as 2017, around the time Shohei Ohtani announced his challenge to the major leagues. The "Otani Cyclone" that began in 2014 pushed the team's profits to a peak of 2.1 billion yen in 2017. However, the team may have considered that after losing Ohtani, profits may fall back to 180 million yen in 2014, so they decided Build your own stadium and increase profits through a complex business model such as stadiums, exhibition venues, and shopping malls.
This is not the first time that a team has integrated its operations. The Orix Buffaloes first bought the Osaka Dome, the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks bought the Fukuoka Dome in 2012, and the Yokohama DeNA BayStars also spent nearly 10 billion yen in 2015 to buy a stake in Yokohama Stadium. It can be seen that the complex business model of big capital has the potential to succeed in the eyes of team operators in this era.
Change 3: Sports events are combined with entertainment to renovate the original business model
In the face of trends such as population decline, the decline in the number of young players, and the integration of team stadiums, although there are many challenges, new opportunities have also emerged. Some companies are beginning to think about how to integrate resources and create new added value.
The number of Nippon Professional Baseball fans (including attending games and watching games through television and other channels) was still 29.98 million in 2015, but by 2024 it has shrunk to 22.1 million. This reflects the diversification of modern people's hobbies and the popularity of mobile media, which has divided fans' attention with entertainment content such as basketball, football, and concerts. Professional baseball is no longer the only leisure and entertainment option.
Such changes have also given large shopping mall operators a sense of business opportunities. Mitsui Fudosan, famous for its LaLaport, will open the group's first medium-sized dome arena "LaLa arena TOKYO-BAY" in 2024 and recruit the professional basketball team Chiba Jets to move in, hoping to attract More crowds.
Mitsui Fudosan, which in the past regarded itself as a real estate developer, has also begun to adjust its positioning as an "industrial developer". It is no longer limited to the traditional shopping mall business model, but is actively expanding the sports and entertainment industry, hoping to attract customers through diverse entertainment experiences. , Create new revenue sources. Mitsui Fudosan hopes to turn "watching football games" into a richer entertainment experience. It is no longer just about entering the stadium to watch the game, but integrating it with surrounding shopping, dining, and entertainment facilities so that consumers can enjoy a complete experience before and after watching the game. Leisure time.
The thinking of "industrial developers" like Mitsui Fudosan breaks away from the past framework of attracting customers with physical products and instead uses intangible added value to create customer experiences. This can be said to be a major innovation in the business model.
In the past, we may not have expected that the declining birthrate would affect the development of the sports industry, but new types of entertainment businesses that combine sports elements have also emerged. From Mitsui Fudosan's move to change the organizational name from "Commercial Facilities Headquarters" to "Commercial Facilities, Sports and Entertainment Headquarters" in 2024, it is foreseeable that shopping malls incorporating sports elements will become a future trend, and sports and life will be more closely integrated.
