Value creation in sport business in the age of AI: a multidimensional framework

Sport organisations, governments, sponsors, scholars, and athletes routinely appeal to the value of sport, and they almost always mean different things. The cost of this incoherence is no longer theoretical. Artificial intelligence is now a central subject of strategic, governance, and ethical debate in sport, yet the field lacks an integrative framework to assess what AI does to the value sport creates. This paper proposes a multidimensional framework - the Sport Value Architecture - that holds value plurality, capture asymmetry, and legitimacy in a single conceptual structure, and extends it to the age of AI. Sport generates three logically distinct types of value: competitive, commercial, and social. They stand in a determinate but non-uniform order: competitive value is a strict precondition of commercial value, and it conditions, rather than founds social value, which can arise from participation alone but collapses once a claimed contest is exposed as corrupted. Each is captured asymmetrically across four stakeholder groups, anchored in an irreducible sport activity accessible through three modes (Play, Spectate, Use), conditioned by three enabling conditions (governance, environmental responsibility, equity), and located within four exogenous force fields. Legitimacy is the outcome of the model working under defensible conditions, not a fourth deliverable. AI runs through every layer simultaneously: generating value within each value type, reshaping capture across every stakeholder group, stressing every enabling condition, and pressing on the irreducible activity itself. The framework supplies the conceptual apparatus to organise the strategic, governance, and ethical decisions this moment demands.