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.

When talking about both national and global sports, the players make money first by playing their sport. Whether it’s a team sport or an individual sport, the better the performance, usually, the more money they earn. But on top of playing their game, there’s also money to be made in terms of endorsements, and products, and services, and programs that they represent and that they sell to consumers.

One of the all-time great endorsement deals is for Michael Jordan, “the air man”. He and Nike came out with Air Jordans at a time when the NBA had restricted what colors players could wear on their shoes. But Jordan’s statement with those first Air Jordans was so powerful that it led the NBA to change its policy. And now, of course, we’ve got all sorts of shoe deals with players.

Stadiums, arenas, and any sports venues earn money certainly by people coming through its gates, and the money they spend once they’re inside, but owners also earn money and generate revenue in all sorts of different ways. It used to be mostly from tickets, gate receipts, and concessions that fans had purchased once they were in the stadium, the merchandise they purchased in the stadium or merchandise that they’d purchased in a local store.

However, over time, that certainly grew in a number of different ways. Revenue for owners comes in the form of television deals. It comes in the form of basically any kind of business that the club or the franchise conducts anywhere in the ecosystem. So, we also see owners investing in areas that are sometimes indirectly related to sports, or in other areas in and around the venue.

Local real estate has certainly been one of the new things, over time, that owners have gotten involved in. And really, when you think about and look at it, what are sports venues really but nice-sized real estate deals?

With an online sports management education, you can learn about all of the important concepts involving sports management strategies and trends, and you can do it with nothing more than an internet connection and the time and desire to learn. If you’re looking for an affordable and accessible way to explore sports management education, looking at the online route is a great way to start.

When it comes to endorsement deals, they usually tend to involve an individual who is highly sought after by companies. In a sports field, this individual is typically a star athlete, and these athletes are endorsers if they’re endorsing or supporting a particular product. This is different from regular advertising.

With regular advertising, it’s more about the brand speaking directly to the consumer. With endorsements, though, it’s the individual endorser interacting with whatever brand it is they’re partnered with. Granted, certain endorsements can take place within advertisements, but it’s important to differentiate the fact that endorsements are about the athlete interacting with the brand personally. And when it comes to these endorsements, athletes are quite a bit different from typical celebrities.

They come with a lot of fan passion. There are many sports organizations that will put forth certain athletes because they know these athletes have a massive following. Not only do they have a massive following in terms of numbers – that’s quantity — but the fans who follow them also really rely on what the athletes are offering. Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, endorses Nike. Once Cristiano Ronaldo shows off his Nike cleats, you will see a massive following his fans, who are heavily invested in what he does, go out and purchase those cleats for themselves.

With endorsements that particularly have to do with athletes, they’re different from collaborations or sponsorship agreements. With a sponsorship agreement, for example, you might say that the Michigan College football team is sponsored by Jumpman 23 or has a collaboration effort with them, but they aren’t necessarily going out in commercials and endorsing the brand.

With Cristiano Ronaldo and his endorsement of Nike, though, he will often be carrying Nike cleats around his neck or, perhaps, be utilizing Nike cleats and talking about the positive aspects of the brand. The difference with endorsements is that you’ll regularly see a given athlete endorse or talk up a particular brand. A collaboration or sponsorship is more of a partnership in nature. It’s not so interactive with the team and the product.

Athlete endorsement deals, sports management strategies, and global sports marketing concepts are just a few of the things you’ll learn more about with online sports management education. This type of program is by far the most convenient form of sports management education, as it simply requires an internet connection.

If we look at the two types of analytics that are used in sports today, we’ve got on-field and off-field analytics. The on-field type is often referred to as athlete performance analytics. Whereas the off-field kind is often referred to as sales and marketing analytics, which really helps us understand the revenue streams and the consumer, the sports fan, who’s driving the revenue equation. So, for the off-field analytics, we’re looking at all sorts of demographic data and information about, say, our season-ticket holders, for example.

We’re also looking at the flow of their tickets. Let’s say someone buys a full-season ticket package—41 games, to see an NBA team play. They may only attend 22 of those games. So, what happens with the other 19 games? Do they give those tickets away to friends? Do they sell them? Are they sold, and then resold, and then resold again on the secondary market? If we can follow the trail of these tickets, we get a good sense of how the fan values the sport and values the season-ticket package. And these are important things that we want to know when looking at season-ticket renewals.

We also want to look at the prospects who are buying their tickets as potential season-ticket holders themselves. You can begin to see how this is just one example of a data stream that could really add to the revenue equation for a sports team.

For athlete performance analytics in baseball, for example, there are high-speed cameras and Doppler radar installed within all 30 Major League ballparks. This allows us to capture an enormous volume of data. And we know every movement on the field of a player. But we also have 20 plus metrics on every pitch that is thrown. So we have details on the velocity of the pitch when it leaves the hand of the pitcher and when it crosses the plate.

We know the location of the pitch. We know the movement of the pitch across several axes: the vertical axis and the horizontal axis. We even know the spin of the pitch—both the spin axis and the spin rate of the pitch. All of these diagnostics go a long way toward evaluating the effectiveness of a pitcher or a hitter.

We have the same for batted balls, and we also know where fielders are positioned and how they move across the field when a batted ball is put in play. All of these things give us so much more depth and richness, especially when compared to the data that’s on the back of an old baseball card, for example. These analytics really have changed the way we look at every aspect of these sports, and that’s the world that we’re playing in today.

You can learn much more about how the way we view athletics is changing, as well as concepts relating to global sports and sports management, with online sports management education. There’s no reason you should have to wait any longer for your sports management education, and you can get started exploring the online method of learning right away.

My career in food first started when I attended the Restaurant School of Philadelphia. From there, I went to work in sports for the Cleveland Indians baseball team. Then I worked for Delaware North. At that time, Delaware North tasked me with continuing education to get my Pro-chef Certification and my Certified Chef de Cuisine Certification.

Options for Chefs as Students of Online Sports Management Education

Once I passed those tests at the Culinary Institute of America, I transferred to the San Diego Padre baseball team. At that point, I realized that I wanted to stay in sports, and there was so much opportunity in global sports stadiums and arenas. There are so many options for chefs in sports management. I thought it was much better action than just being a restaurant chef or a hotel chef, where they never close and stuff like that.

Grabbed by a Hands-on Sports Management Education

At that point, the sports industry grabbed me. From there, I went to the Philadelphia Eagles football team and came to work here at MetLife Stadium. It’s been six great years of working in food.

Another area I’d like to talk about is the emergence of 5G networks. When wireless signals are transmitted over the 5G network, speed and reliability will be greatly increased. 5G network uses higher radio frequencies, which gives it a much larger capacity to move data quickly, and the high frequencies will also be able to support more than 1,000 more devices per meter than what 4G supports today.

5G can beam large volumes of data to a large number of devices with really high precision. Sports management education expounds on how this differs from 4G. It allows for the internet of things, or IoT, to be used in a way that is not possible under 4G. For example, a coach on the sidelines can have every one of his players and sports management staff connected to wearable devices and monitor them all in real-time. Whether it’s heart rate or hydration levels, or other important data that will translate into fatigue factors.

When you look at all the devices that can be wired, 5G is an enormous asset to connect all these devices. In fact, for us personally, it can connect our thermostat, door locks, our car, and any other devices. This is what 5G can do for us off the field. Online sports management education explains that the capacity for 5G is about 20 times greater than that of 4G, which has huge implications for streaming high def video.

You won’t need to worry about experiencing buffering on the 5G network or latency, which is the time between when an event is transmitted to when it actually reaches the consumer. This is a big deal for sports betting in-game bets where things happen like, is the player going to make or miss his free throw. This type of bettor requires very low latency in the broadcast, meaning a quick response, so 5G is going to be a boon to global sports betting and opens up many more possibilities for bets like this.

Sports generate more passion and interest than probably any other hobby or activity in the world. It is a safe space to play out the kinds of challenges and goals that a person might pursue in life but without the same consequences.

Life Lessons in Sports Management

When life gets you down – you’re going through a bad breakup, you lose your job – it’s hard to know how to bounce back. In sports, you can put a lot on the line, and if something doesn’t go your way today, there’s always tomorrow. In sports, hope never dies. That is a truly unique thing.

Become the Best Version of Yourself in Sports Management Education

The psychological aspects of sports are incredibly powerful because they allow you to cultivate the best version of yourself. The ways that you want to operate in society – you want to be brave, you want to be smart, you want to be a good communicator, you want to be able to cooperate effectively, you want to be able to lead a team – these are all embodied on the field.

Online Sports Management Education Superhero

You can become that superhero version of yourself. By cultivating that on the field, you can become a more productive, more effective, honest, loyal, brave, leading person in the office, at home and with your kids.

When it comes to having a successful sports environment, it really comes down to the programming and the coach. Not everybody on the team is going to be a leader, so it’s about enabling those who will be able to develop the skills. These are people who may be particularly charismatic or especially confident, and it’s about identifying these individuals and supporting their development.

With the rest of the athletes who may not have those traits, it’s about realizing what they do have inside of them and how that can influence them and help them become good leaders as well. For example, I had a student who played football, and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to take it to the next level, but he didn’t know what he was going to do with his life. He didn’t feel that he had any other skills aside from what he could do on the football field.

So, we sat down and talked about what he does bring to the table as far as those skills and what those skills are for him. We discussed how it wasn’t about the fact that he could carry a football. It was about the fact that he could read a field. He could sit back and watch things unfold and see where he needed to go. Then, we talked about how those skills could transfer into other areas.

In a way, that’s strategy. That’s understanding the big picture and figuring out where you fit within that picture. And that’s a valuable skill to have across a number of industries. For coaches, parents, and mentors, an important part of helping athletes transition away from their sport and into the real world is helping them understand the transferable skills that they possess and how those skills can help them become good leaders in the careers that they choose.

Those interested in sports management or global sports can learn more about this subject with sports management education, and online sports management education is an excellent option that doesn’t require as many resources.

I’m going to preface this statement by saying that there are always exceptions to every rule. Yet, one of the things that we’ve noticed in sports management, generally speaking, is that younger people are more adaptive to technology than people from older generations. Not only are they more adaptive to it, but they also embrace it more quickly. They actually value, engage and want it more as well.

What we’re seeing with sports viewership and other areas of fan engagement is a technological generational divide across Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials and, now, Gen Z. We’re beginning to see a transition with the younger generations clearly gravitating to a world of technology. After all, Gen Z is the first generation of digital natives who didn’t grow up in a pre-internet world.

These facts are something to keep in mind whenever we’re looking at deploying these technologies as a global sports organization, especially as they are fan-facing and impact the fans. Media companies worry about this all the time. They have to be mindful that not every generation is looking at content the same way.

Online Sports Management Education

As you continue to learn more about sports management as part of your sports management education, we recommend that you pay close attention to this topic since we will need to increasingly use technologies to engage with the younger generations of sports fans. We must be able to adapt to this need and continue to provide options to older generations of fans as well.

With any given organization, whether it’s sports or not, any organization is looking to tap in or hone in on those preexisting fans and make them loyal consumers. You’re trying to aim at the consumers who have consumed in the past, who have come to visit several games. You’re trying to make them more loyal fans so they can be dedicated to your brand.

Studies in Consumer Loyalty Are Helpful to Students in Online Sports Management Education

There are a number of studies out there that show that loyal consumers actually make up the majority of the revenue that the organization is receiving. It’s very hard, whether you’re a sports organization or not, to kind of turn a non-consumer or a non-customer into a customer. While you would love to do so, a lot of effort, and what you’ll see a lot of sports teams do, is concentrate on fans who are already there and just try to make them loyal.

Sports Management Marketing Builds Brand Ambassadors

In addition, what you would like to do is enhance the loyalty of any given sports consumer. You’re probably going to cater your marketing efforts to these loyal fans because not only are you looking to re-emphasize their loyalty, but you’re also looking for them to be brand ambassadors. You would like them to do the work for you, so to speak.

Find Ways to Build Brand Loyalty in Sports Management Education

If they are loyal to your brand, it’s likely that they’ll represent your brand in a positive light or a positive manner. And therefore, you have an extra sense of marketing coming not only from yourself but also from the consumer standpoint.