PhD
The Center for Sports and Business supports doctoral research at the intersection of sports, business, and society. Below are the current PhD researchers affiliated with the center, as well as previous doctoral research connected to CSB.
Current researchers
Fanny Almersson
Fanny Almersson has been affiliated with the Center for Sports and Business since 2018, when she began working as a research assistant during her BSc studies at the Stockholm School of Economics. After completing an MSc in accounting, including a thesis on budgeting during uncertainty using the Stockholm Marathon as a case study, she began her doctoral studies in 2021.
Her research combines her academic training with long-standing experience in football, where she has been involved both as a player and a coach.
Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of Hammarby Football that examines how management accounting practices interact with barriers to gender equality. Focusing on the club’s women’s strategy “Ett Hammarby”, the research explores how tools such as KPIs, budgeting models, and allocation mechanisms shape organizational interpretations of equality, for example whether equality should mean equal resources or equal performance outcomes.
The project also investigates how leadership structures influence the development of women’s football and how internal comparisons between men’s and women’s teams shape decision-making within the organization.
Almersson aims to contribute both to academic research and to practical progress toward gender equity in sport organizations.
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Previous researchers
Kai DeMott
In 2021, the Center for Sports and Business reached an important milestone when Kai Krauss, researcher and teacher at the Department of Accounting at the Stockholm School of Economics, defended his doctoral thesis Coping with Financial Stigma: A Study of Budgetary Identity Work in a Candidature for the Olympic Winter Games.
Based on an ethnographic study of Sweden’s campaign to host the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, the dissertation examines how project managers presented and justified the budget for a large-scale sporting event in a context shaped by public debate about cost overruns and financial risks.
The research introduces the concept of organizational stigma to the study of budgeting. It shows how financial controversies surrounding large sporting events can create identity threats for organizations and how budgeting practices become central tools for responding to these challenges.
The study demonstrates how budgets can serve not only as financial instruments but also as symbolic resources in organizational identity work, particularly in contexts where projects such as the Olympic Games are associated with financial stigma.
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