You don’t have to manage a team or a business to use the skills you get through online sports management education. Here’s an example of how an athlete worked around his brand.

In the 1992 Olympics, the men’s basketball team, and all of Team USA, was sponsored by Reebok. So if they won a medal, there was a specific tracksuit that they were supposed to wear on the medal stand when they received their medals. With global sports like basketball, you have athletes like Michael Jordan, who was sponsored by Nike and had a really strong relationship with Nike.

So for him to be on a sports medal stand wearing Reebok would have probably, in his mind and in Nike’s mind, looked pretty bad. Taking cues from sports management, sometimes athletes can get very creative with the way that they get around this. And so Jordan draped the American flag over his shoulders to cover up that logo and make sure that there were no images of him out there with a Reebok logo on.

This is just one of the ways sports management education works itself into all of the kinds of jobs you can have in sports.

Anytime a sports organization sets a goal, it needs to be specific and measurable. For example, if we’re saying we want to increase ticket sales, we can measure whether we’ve increased them, but we also need to be specific, saying that we want to see a 2% increase this year. An important lesson in your sports management education is that when we set measurable goals, we can always assess whether we achieve them.

There are several ways that organizations can collect data now to measure whether they’ve achieved what they set out to achieve. They can also measure specific activations and sponsorships through a lot of different data. Everything that’s happening right now in the sports industry is very data-driven. For example, when you’re sitting in an arena, and you see that Coca-Cola logo all around the stadium, there are organizations and partners for organizations who are measuring how many people attended that game, how long that specific logo was shown, what type of value the team is getting from that, and what type of value the sponsor is getting from that.

Additionally, with all the customer data that we have nowadays, we can measure specific things about our sales, and we can point to things like a demographic that bought more tickets this year. Or we can look at purchasing patterns, like, “This specific segment of our fan base is buying their tickets five days before the game, on average, whereas this other group is buying them a month ahead.”

As a result of this info, we can have a better idea of when we should run certain promotions. And if we know a little bit more about different groups in terms of their media consumption, then we can decide things like which groups are likely to respond to promotions on social media and which markets we should probably target with more traditional media buys.

All these types of data are helping to reshape the sports industry. They’re making teams and organizations much smarter about the way they’re marketing to different groups to ensure that they’re hitting people when they want to buy and where they’re going to see these messages. You’ll find out more about how data is changing the world of sports, as well as many concepts surrounding sports management and global sports trends, in your online sports management education.

Nowadays, what we’re seeing a lot in social media is what we call “influencers.” Influencers are individuals who are going to influence the mass audience. So, in terms of what these people are, they’re people who have a lot of sway over what the members of the audience want. A lot of audience members follow these individuals on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and they’re likely to do what these influencers do. For example, if an athlete has a certain brand that they prefer, it’s likely that they’ll be able to influence the masses who are following them to prefer that same brand.

What’s interesting about influencers is that these individuals don’t have to come outright and say that they have a partnership with any given brand. What we’ll see with a lot of organizations is that certain partnerships will be made for an athlete to simply use the product, without coming out and saying that they have the partnership deal. So, a certain individual athlete could be filming themselves during a workout wearing a certain brand, knowing that consumers are seeing them work out while wearing it.

It’s important to note that in these situations, the athlete hasn’t come out and said that they’re promoting whatever they’re wearing. They haven’t come out and said that they’re promoting this endorsement in particular. Rather, they’re just interacting with the audience and utilizing the brand without being vocal about it. As a result, the audience has the ability to notice the brand that’s being shown in the scene, and will therefore be influenced by whoever the individual is that’s utilizing the brand.

Sports management education is an excellent avenue to learn more about how athletes and sports stars become influencers, as well as many other concepts related to global sports and sports management. With online sports management education, you can explore these ideas with nothing more than an internet connection.

It’s really exciting to see the growth and popularity of eSports. They’ve become a significant part of the whole sports ecosystem, and they should be acknowledged in sports management education. The eSports industry is structured quite differently from a lot of other sports businesses in that the publishers who own intellectual properties such as League of Legends and Overwatch are the critical forces that effectively drive the eSports business.

We’re seeing arenas all over the globe being filled with fans who are watching eSports athletes compete against one another. We’re seeing collegiate competitions and scholarships awarded to eSports athletes. It’s becoming bigger and bigger every year, and it should be acknowledged more by online sports management education.

These days, new technology has expanded the amount of data that we can get from consumers. We can do a deep dive in terms of the psychological profiles of our customers. Improving fan relationships through technology is a new idea in online sports management education.

Moving from Paper to Digital Relationship Management

CRM stands for customer relationship management. In the past, maintaining relationships with customers was a matter of sending mail back and forth. You reached out through regular mail, flyers, and surveys. With these tools, you could gain an understanding of customer needs.

Now, sports organizations have the ability to track data. This information includes not only preferences but also previous consumption and purchasing habits. Global sports organizations even have the ability to go through and understand your bank account or the websites that you have visited. All of this comes together to provide a massive data set that helps us understand who you are as a consumer.

From a consumer’s perspective, this understandably can feel a little invasive. The consumers may not like this. However, if a sports organization can truly comprehend the fan and is using this data as a way to create a relationship with the consumer, then this information can be very helpful.

Harnessing the Benefits of Big Data

Essentially, CRM allows you as an organization to get as much data as possible in terms of the psychological profiles of fans. As any sports management education student knows, the more we know about the fans, the better we are able to cater to their needs. We can more effectively satisfy what they want and deliver what they are looking for as consumers.

Some may think of big data as being too invasive, and they may have a point. However, purely from the standpoint of a trustworthy sports management organization, CRM allows us to utilize fan data so that we can give consumers what they want based on their previous consumption patterns.

In online sports management education, you’ll learn a lot about athlete endorsement deals. A small amount of these deals are given for life, and LeBron James is one of just a few athletes who have signed a lifetime deal with Nike. Nike is a very interesting example of a company that wants to be very clear about what kind of brand they are: a brand that represents elite athletes. So when they signed a lifetime deal with LeBron, it was about more than simply people seeing him wearing their shoes and wanting to emulate him.

It was more about representing the direct connection that exists between LeBron James and Nike. This also represents somewhat of an image transfer, meaning that the positive characteristics that people recognize in LeBron will, in their eyes, be extended to Nike as well. The same things can be said about Michael Jordan and his deal with the company.

So, what do LeBron James and Michael Jordan have in common? For one, they have both been great players in their time. They’re also both champions, and many consider both of them to be the greatest basketball players of all time. In that vein, those very characteristics that people associate with LeBron James and Michael Jordan, because of their endorsement association, are now projected onto Nike as well. To achieve this effect, Nike has made a point to go after elite athletes and sports stars, because they represent what their brand strives to represent: greatness.

To gain more understanding of sports management, global sports, and how companies and athletes utilize endorsement deals to improve their brand, sports management education is an excellent resource, and you can even explore it online, from the comfort of your couch.

If you take a look at the early days of analytics, you have to look at sabermetrics. Sabermetrics is defined as the objective study of baseball through analysis, and it was first started by Bill James, who is now widely known as the “father of sabermetrics”. James, who has had a longtime affiliation with the Boston Red Sox, also has several World Series rings, which perhaps proves that his philosophies and theories have quite a bit of merit and value.

Back in the 1970s, when Bill James was just getting started, he began asking questions. And these were questions that challenged the age-old myths in baseball about how the game worked, how it functioned, and the value of certain strategies—such as the stolen base, the sacrifice bunt, and many other strategies on the field of play. As time passed, Bill mined data. And additionally, a group of people who joined Bill in his quest to build out sabermetrics began to assemble data and information that wasn’t previously being captured or talked about. They did this to address some of the thorny questions and age-old myths surrounding the game, and in some cases, to refute those myths.

Because of the work that they did, over the years, baseball was known historically as the birthplace of sports analytics. It was also the one sport that really lent itself to data collection, even when data collection devices were still nonexistent and data collection overall was still very primitive.

This was also partially because baseball has a very discrete nature to it. There’s the batter-pitcher confrontation, for example. The pitch is thrown, and then something happens to that pitch. It’s either put in play or not put in play, and if it is, the rest of the play develops from there. This is very different from continuous-flow sports, which are much more difficult to create data for. So, because baseball was the first sport to really dive into data collection and analysis, it was, in many ways, the forerunner to the sports analytics of today.

If you’re interested in learning more about how sports are changing and developing, as well as many other concepts relating to sports management and global sports, then sports management education may be a good fit for you. And the most convenient way to dive in is through online sports management education.

One thing that has potential for great impacts on society and organizations in many different ways is athlete-driven media. We’ve seen recently that athletes are feeling more empowered to speak out about injustices and to speak out about things and causes that are really important to them. One great example of this in recent times is Olympic champion Simone Biles. Most people know her. She won five Olympic medals in the Rio Games, and four of them were gold.

USA Gymnastics, the national governing body of her sport, has recently had a lot of problems and turmoil because of a sexual abuse scandal with a team doctor. USA Gymnastics then hired a new CEO named Mary Bono, who was formerly a politician in California. This was viewed as somewhat of a curious choice. When the decision was made, Simone Biles actually took to social media and retweeted something that the new CEO, Mary Bono, had tweeted. Basically, she had used a black marker to black out the Nike symbol on her shoes when she was going to play golf. This was in response to Nike and their Colin Kaepernick ad.

Another part of this was that USA Gymnastics had lost quite a few of their sponsors as a result of the sexual abuse scandal. One of those was their apparel sponsor, which used to be Under Armor. Now, they don’t have one.

So, Biles retweeted in explanation that she thought the group needed a smarter CEO, particularly one who wouldn’t insult a popular apparel company when they were still in need of an apparel sponsor. It was a really interesting example of a sports star choosing to speak out.

In the past, because of the power structures, we never would have had athletes speaking out in this way. But now, the athlete-driven media really helps to give the athletes a public voice and a platform that others can get behind. Simone’s tweet was retweeted, talked about, and written about in several major news outlets. As it turned out, the new CEO ended up resigning only five days after getting the job, and Simone Biles choosing to be vocal had a major impact on that.

You can learn more about how athletes are able to use their platforms and social media to affect change, as well as many other concepts regarding sports management and global sports marketing, with online sports management education. This form of sports management education allows you to learn about these concepts and access these lessons without having to spend as much money or physically going to class.

When it comes to paid endorsements for athletes, the amount of money that each individual stands to make depends on their likeability, their talent level, and which sports league they play in. In terms of their salaries, there are certain leagues that actually have a salary cap, with the NFL being one such league. For them, it’s a hard salary cap, which means that each and every team can only pay their players up to a certain amount of money per year.

Sometimes, this kind of salary cap leads to unorthodox strategies. One interesting example of this is Tom Brady, who, with the knowledge that his team is limited by the salary cap, has voluntarily taken a pay cut so that the team would be able to pay more money to his teammates. That being said, Tom Brady also knows that due to his star power and recognizability, he has the ability to make up that lost salary with money from various endorsement deals.

It’s important to keep in mind that individual athletes aren’t bound to only having one or two endorsements; they can have as many as they want and are able to acquire. For example, Tom Brady endorses certain car brands. He also endorses certain types of beds. And if he wanted to, he could endorse whatever other products were offered to him, as well. He is a great example of how much tougher hard salary caps are on players that don’t have the appeal or acclaim to secure high-paying endorsements, as a star like Tom Brady can simply make his money elsewhere. Most players don’t have quite as many options.

You can learn more about how athletes build their brand and secure lucrative endorsements, as well as various other topics relating to sports management and global sports, with sports management education. To access online sports management education, you need little more than an internet connection.

One topic within sports management education is how sports affect social change. You’ll see sports used oftentimes in political agendas, and where this is most visible is with the Olympics. Now, the Olympics movement will say that it’s not about politics and that it’s about bringing people together to compete at the highest level and support one another in that endeavor.

However, we have seen that this isn’t the case. We’ve seen political posturing, if you will, throughout the Olympic games in many different ways. For example, in the 1960s, our country was going through quite a change socially, and we had a lot of racial injustice happening. It was much like what’s happening today, but in a different way. And the U.S. team had a lot of African American athletes who were treated poorly at home. But on the stage, they’re treated very differently, and so we had two amazing sprinters stand up against that social injustice.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos took the gold and the bronze, and when the American national anthem was played, they raised their fists in the black power salute, and it was extremely powerful at that moment. So, when we talk about sport and the challenges of social change, these two athletes quietly protested on a very big stage to demonstrate what was actually going on at home and the hypocrisy that was happening at that time.

What they did get was a lot of backlash. They were vilified for what they did, and it was seen as a political stunt. The IOC basically shamed them for what they did, and they were even stripped of their medals. This was a very unfortunate outcome for something that was really important to say quietly. Obviously, they hadn’t said anything, but what they did spoke volumes. So, when we talk about social change and how sports can play a role, we see a lot of backlash when athletes quietly do that.

We’re even seeing it right now with athletes who are becoming activists and standing up for what’s happening and what’s going wrong. They’re using their celebrity to have a stronger voice, and there’s a lot of backlash that comes along with that.

That’s where the challenge lies. We’re pushing the borders of what’s uncomfortable, and it’s very difficult to talk about these things. However, we have these athletes who are in the spotlight and who can stand up and say “you know what? Something’s going wrong here, and we need to have a conversation about it.”

But unfortunately, doing so causes backlash, and that’s where the challenge is. Yes, sports can be used as a vehicle for social change, and it can be incredibly powerful, but it can also hit a lot of barriers along the way because people tend to not agree on everything. Because global sports and the sporting world have such extraordinary platforms to communicate messages to the biggest audiences in the world, it becomes an opportunity to get a really important conversation started.

When Colin Kaepernick decided to take a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality, he started something that we are still seeing the effects of today—not just for him as a player but also for how our country views and understands things like patriotism.

Questions of things like how our police force should be conducting itself and how people of color are treated by the majority are now being asked. And they’re being asked because this one individual, who had a fair bit of power and popularity, was willing to do something controversial, and I would argue, pretty brave as well.

You might think that the forum he chose wasn’t appropriate or that the way he chose to express himself wasn’t the best way to do it. However, whether you think these things or not, he got the conversation started, and that’s a pretty powerful and important thing.

In addition to learning more about how sports and social change go hand in hand, with online sports management education you can gain a wealth of knowledge about many other concepts and topics related to sports management, and you can do it without leaving the house.