Font Size: 

Sport became an integral part of social engagement and mainstream media in the United States. However, there is no consensus on the definition of sport and the sport industry. Although the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) doesn’t clarify the sport industry, it reports some sport related segments. The authors dedicated 13-sector analysis in the NAICS and developed Sport Index (SI) to measure the sport industry performance. The SI composed sport-related firms whose stocks are listed in the U.S. stock markets. The daily returns of the equally-weighted index (EWI) were collected and analyzed in three different periods; before the financial crisis (June, 2006 – June, 2008), during the crisis (July, 2008 – April, 2010), and after the crisis (May, 2010 – December, 2012). The overall results showed that S&P and EWI were highly correlated but S&P carried much higher relatively riskiness than EWI. The correlations slightly increased to 0.7121 (during the crisis) from 0.6494 (before crisis) but decreased to 0.6228 (after the crisis). The SI will be a useful tool for future studies in measuring the performance of sport industry in relations to economic and financial market activities

Sport Industry; Sport Index;