This idea of my identity, this idea that I get to walk around with pride, is about all the different ways we get to plug into sports. It’s what Jesse Owens did to Hitler in the Olympics. Here’s a guy saying, “I’m going to take over the world, and my pure race is better than all of the other races.” That included black people, and that included Jesse Owens. In front of the whole world, in Berlin, Jesse Owens dramatically disproved that theory in human, real, on the ground — literally on the ground — terms.

Two Jewish sprinters weren’t allowed to run, so that footnote should be made. But this is the way sports can amplify, magnify, and otherwise powerfully communicate social conditions in a way that very few other things can, differently than movies or books or plays, which are enormously powerful cultural vehicles. But they’re scripted. The author is intentional. The author is in control.

In global sports and sports management, we don’t know what will happen. And that’s the excitement. That is the humanity of it. We don’t know what will happen until it happens.

Sports management education courses tackle the theme of sports and national identity.

With the advent of social media in global sports, we can see there are now a number of new things coming into consideration within the sports media landscape. Obviously, we still have those same members in sports management. We have the content providers, which are still the sports organizations, the athletes, and the events. And we still do have the mass media, which is television, radio, newspaper, and magazine.

But now, it’s not just one mass audience. In particular, it’s different niche audiences. So, it’s no longer just the entire United States or the entire world. The media could not only be talking to New York segments, but they could also be speaking to Boston segments or California segments.

We could, in fact, be speaking to California residents, and within California, we could be speaking to any number of different team fan bases and fan groups from any given team. What we’re seeing with social media is that those individual fans now have their own platform for themselves. And, in fact, all of the teams allow for platforms. Certain fan groups have certain platforms. So, content providers are giving their information to the mass media.

The mass media has an option to give it to any given fan group or any given niche audience. Where this is also going to differ is that we’ll see that content providers don’t have to go through mass media channels. They can, in fact, with social media, directly communicate with any given fan group [and] with any given niche audience. So content providers, such as the Dallas Cowboys or the New York Rangers or the San Francisco Giants, can now directly communicate not only with certain fan groups but in some cases with individuals who are fans.

They have a sense of direct communication. And what you’re going to see on the bottom is not only direct communication going from the content providers to the niche audiences, but the niche audiences, very importantly here, can have a direct communication line with the content providers themselves. This goes back to great relationships that we can have with having the audience members and the sports teams organizations.

What we’ll see is that the niche audience will not only have the ability to relate directly with content providers, but they’ll still get information from these mass media sources. So, they can get information directly from the sports organizations or the athletes. They can also still get their information from ESPN.

In this case, they have a number of different options [on where] to get their information. They can watch it on television, as would be the traditional manner. But they can also hear [it] from ESPN on any social media medium. So ESPN, Fox Sports, CBS, NBC — they not only have a television channel now, they have the ability to directly reach individual fans through social media. And just like the niche audience has had the ability to give feedback to the sports organizations, you’ll see there’s a small feedback loop where the niche audiences are able to give feedback back to these mass media entities through social media.

“With data analytics, there are a number of different opportunities not only on the field, but off the field,” says Dr. Brandon Brown. “You can be a data analytics tracker in terms of understanding which metrics are going to influence game outcome.”

“One key career that I see moving forward in the sport industry,” adds Dr. Andrea N. Geurin, “especially related to marketing and sports management, is going to be in the marketing analytics space. This is where people have the ability to take a lot of data and look at it and make decisions and understand how that data impacts the organization. Everything that is done in marketing — it does have a very creative twist to it now — is very much tied to data. And data is driving the decisions that we make.”

So in marketing analytics, business analytics is a really important role that organizations need and will be hiring for. I think in terms of marketing and global sports, it’s also a space where people working in sports marketing need to have the ability to use digital media. They need to be able to do video editing. They need to be able to put little promotions together.

They need to have really strong writing skills because when you put something out on social media, again, it needs to have a specific voice, a tone. It needs to just kind of match the brand. So, having the ability to write well and write in different voices is an important skill. Digital media managers and social media managers will be hugely important for sport organizations as we move forward.

Sales is a hugely important piece to every organization. A lot of people, when they start their career in sports, will look to starting in sales. One of the reasons that’s so important is because if you work in sales — and you can show that you have added this much value to the organization this year — that’s a really great personal marketing piece to be able to move up through the organization and to continue a career in that organization or in that field.

Sales gives you some really hard numbers that you can point to in terms of saying, “I created this many new clients this year, or I generated this much in sales this year.” It’s a really important career that sometimes gets overlooked, but it can definitely lead to moving through an organization very quickly.

In the past, I’ve taught sport sales courses. My students have always done hands-on projects where we’ve worked with an organization. The students actually have to get on the phone, cold call people who might want to buy tickets. They have to learn to sell, but they get a lot of guidance from the organization.

It’s been absolutely wonderful for those students because some of them were able to get internships or jobs with the organization that we partnered with in the sports management education course. It introduced them to the idea that, “I could go into sales. This is a really valuable skill.”

I’ve seen so many of my former students who have taken positions in sales. Their careers have skyrocketed within a few years because they did really well at that role, and they were able to move up quickly in organizations and also to get new opportunities with other exciting organizations.

Is golf a sport? The Supreme Court said in the case of Casey vs. The PGA that basic ambulatory skill walking is not required in golf. Casey was disabled. He said, “I don’t need to walk in between holes.”

PGA said, “Yes, you do.”

“Well, that’s not what golf is,” said Casey. “It’s just hitting a ball. I don’t have to walk.”

How can you call something a sport? Walking isn’t needed, but it’s a sport. Is it a sport just because it’s on ESPN? Poker is on ESPN. Is that a sport? Is hot dog eating contest a sport? What tells me it’s a sport? Is it training? Is it practice? Is it competition?

Competition. That’s what it is. Well, brain surgeons are competitive. Are they athletes? Artists are competitive. Are they athletes?

You get to this question very quickly in sports management when you start to talk about esports. Are these people athletes? Well, if you think about the classic athletic traits of speed, strength, endurance, I don’t know. It’s hard to say.

Who wins a running race? A fast baseball player, a fast golfer, or a typical esports athlete? Are they athletes or is just this something that we put the word sports on, put the structure of professional sports around it to make money off of it, and then we say to ourselves, “Yeah, that’s a sport.”

It’s a sport because they have reflexes like a race car driver. It’s a sport because they have to sit for a long time. It’s a sport because of concentration. I suppose you could make up all kinds of arguments for and against. There’s a definition of what is sports business that the North American Sports Management Association provides, and roughly, it says, pretty much anything: anything that’s sports related in global sports or any activity involved in or related to sports.

So, you see, lots of things begin to become sports business. The answer really is, when we’re talking about sports business, we’re not always talking about sports. That’s important because you may run into an existential problem with the business you’re running when people no longer are turned on by the activity or turned on by the human quality that makes a human or one human exceptional vis-a-vis another human. All that you’re really interested in is the pop cultural or commercial elements of the enterprise.

I don’t know if esports is a sport. I don’t watch it.

These are existential problems to consider for students in sports management education.

One of the first things that happened in media history was the inclusion of a sports page in the newspaper. This happened in the 1800s when there were penny papers. The newspapers really needed to figure out how they could sell their papers to new audiences and people who weren’t already reading it. Sporting news was a great way to achieve that goal.

So, they began including a page on sports. A new kind of customer base came in and wanted to read about that. It really helped to legitimize sports as a force in society. That’s one of the only things that you can pick up the paper and really know it has its own section.

Radio’s Role in Global Sports Media History and the Need for Sports Management Education

That’s one piece of sports media history. Obviously, following newspapers, we had radio, where people could sit at home and listen to broadcasts of games. Even if they weren’t in that city, they could still feel like they knew what was happening in the game, and they didn’t have to wait until the next day’s newspaper came out to read about it.

Television Contributes to Media and Online Sports Management Education

From there, the evolution goes into television. One of the unique aspects of sports is that nobody really wants to watch a game that has already happened because it’s too easy to find out what the outcome was, especially today with the internet. There was one monumental game that in 1997 was actually voted the most popular network broadcast of a sporting event ever.

There’s another reason why the business of sports is different from most other businesses. It’s because of the human element. On the sports stage, athletes can play out the virtues of grace under pressure, courage, leadership, and winning and losing. Sports is a really good stage on which to play out social conditions, and social conditions, when they’re properly understood, can be leveraged to create a better sports management business opportunity.

Here’s what I mean. Look at 1971, the first fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. In 1971, Muhammad Ali had been out of the sport because he had protested going into the Army and the Vietnam War. He had called America a country that was unfair in matters of race, and he had given up all his wealth from his chosen profession of boxing to stand on those principles.

He became a symbol of peace on one side of the issues in a very polarized America, and then he wanted to come back and fight. And Joe Frazier, the African-American heavyweight champion, was willing to fight Muhammad Ali. No one else would. Ali boldly claimed, “And this may shock and amaze you. But I will destroy Joe Frazier.”

Only Ali so sharply understood the divisions in America. He wasn’t just interested in promoting a boxing match for a global sports payday; he was interested in creating an entire culture around him. His interest was much larger than just focusing on boxing fans. Ali began to promote the fight not just as Muhammad Ali coming back to fight the current heavyweight champion — even on its own, a very compelling contest.

Instead, Ali framed the fight in more dramatic terms, “You see that guy over there? He’s an Uncle Tom. He represents the other side of the issues. He represents one kind of America. I represent another. Didn’t you know?”

And so it was no longer just for sports fans or boxing fans. It was for anybody who was thinking and breathing and who had an opinion during this intensely polarized time of differences of opinion. In other words, he took this contest from being just a boxing match and made it into something that was interesting to everybody.

The same thing happened when Billie Jean King played tennis against Bobby Riggs. Bobby Riggs wasn’t really a male chauvinist; Bobby Riggs was a gambler. As he once said, “If I can’t play for big money, I play for little money. And if I can’t play for a little money, I stay in bed that day.”

Riggs was trying to pay off his gambling debts and needed to figure out a way to create himself a payday. He looked around for the most divisive issue right then in 1973. Women’s liberation was a top contender, so he took the stance of saying that women shouldn’t be playing tennis.

At a time when women were on the rise, there was a charismatic leader named Billie Jean King. She didn’t even play the match, but Riggs created this utterly compelling match-up. It wasn’t between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King but between the oldest match-up in the world: man versus woman.

There was a lot riding on this event while Bobby Riggs looked at it as sort of a joke. The implications of this match for sports management education were high. People were watching to see what would happen for women’s rights and the expectations of women’s abilities. And Billie Jean King took the match, and she won. Because of that, we’ve seen a lot of changes in online sports management education.

Those changes have included the evolution of Title IX in the collegiate setting, which says that sports programs have to ensure equal opportunity for women to compete. So while big football and big basketball are generating most of the money for collegiate sports programs that money has to be redistributed to ensure opportunity for women to compete as well.

Let’s talk about one of the most dynamic areas in all of sports today. That’s the media landscape, which is changing constantly. One of the things we’re seeing is that linear TV is really plummeting, while over-the-top, or OTT, is rising dramatically. As we all know, sports is really the last major holdout that is saving linear TV. By linear TV, what I mean is sitting in front of your TV set at a specific point in time, watching live broadcasts.

In 2005, 14 of the top 100 telecasts were live sports. 10 years later, in 2015, 93 of the top 100 telecasts viewed were live sporting events. Instead of watching linear TV, people are now consuming broadcasts online, on mobile devices or from non-networks like Netflix, Facebook or YouTube. As opposed to the go-to source for content, a TV has simply become a bigger screen to view video.

In some cases, though, the exception is for major sporting leagues and events. Those are the things that still attract eyeballs on a live basis. Now, over-the-top, or direct-to-consumer, is where the growth really is. Many sports leagues are on linear TV, and they also have an over-the-top offering. Major League Baseball, for example, has their MLB At Bat app, which is a direct-to-consumer offering.

The NFL, of course, has their role in broadcast TV, but they also have streaming with DIRECTV. About one third of Americans say that they watch more streaming TV than actual linear television.

In many ways, streaming matches up so much better with our modern on-the-go lifestyle. Plus, the quality of our smartphones, especially with ever-increasing bandwidth such as 5G, will allow for even greater efficiency for streaming video. Netflix is subscribed to by over half of US households, and they’re also the source of some of the best award-winning content. So, as you can see, the media landscape is changing dramatically and rapidly, and it has major implications for the world of both national and global sports.

Online sports management education is a great place to start if you want to learn more about how media has changed and evolved in relation to sporting events. It’s also a good way to learn many other sports management concepts and lessons to form a complete, high-quality sports management education.

These days, teams and their partners are creating experiences for fans in a way that’s new and different, certainly compared to what we’ve seen in the last 20 years. It used to just be enough to have the experience, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the touch, the feel of sports in a stadium, in your home, or wherever you’re consuming them.

Nowadays, though, we’re seeing something that’s the next leg up, and it’s really all about immersion. If you look at something like the emergence of eSports, it’s really about that immersion. It’s about being entirely enveloped in an experience, and having all five of your senses immersed in the event.

One of the big challenges today (and perhaps going forward) is that the experience you can have watching a sporting event in your home can be at least as good, and in some cases even better, than going to the stadium in person. This can be a tough thing to wrap your mind around because in the past it has always been about going to the stadium and being there for the live experience. So now, the venues — the stadiums and arenas — they are now having to up their game in a way that they’ve never had to before.

This looks different than it ever has, because it’s no longer just about going to the game and having some special type of food or seat, but instead it’s about being there and having an opportunity, usually through social media, to let everyone know that you were there and experiencing it. What’s happening behind the photo or video that you’re taking, whatever is happening on the field, is no longer always the most important thing.

Smartphones, of course, have changed our experience entirely. Currently, we see a lot of the changes going on in hypoconnectivity. This refers to building more and more of a relationship with not just the devices themselves, but the information that they’re giving and providing access to. Because of this, data and analysis are very popular topics right now.

We are now getting more and more detailed information about the things going on that we’re interested in, whether it be the play that’s taking place on the field and how the players are moving around, or even how long the lines are to get the food, drinks, and merchandise that we want to purchase.

So, as a society, we are all in on these changes. One of the questions though, on the flip side, is how much is that extra level of immersion taking away from simply enjoying the games that we came to watch? This is something to monitor as the way we interact with sports continues to change and develop.

For anyone looking to learn more about how the way we interact with sports is changing, as well as much more information on sports management strategies and concepts, global sports trends and marketing, and much more, online sports management education is a good route to consider. And with the online method, you can receive your sports management education without even leaving the house.

It’s interesting that the new generation, Generation Z, sometimes referred to as the “I Generation,” is often referred to as the pluralist generation. This ties in with the idea that these consumers are starting to view sporting events with multiple mediums. What this means is that not only are these consumers the younger generation, and not only are they starting to watch sporting events on television, but they’re also beginning to engage with these sporting events on their personal phone device, or their tablet or all of the above.

This allows a further form of engagement. Consumers these days are very reliant upon engaging with these sporting events. Consumers really value the idea of interacting with any given sporting event because it makes them feel as if they’re a part of it. In addition, it makes them feel as though they have some control over it.

When these consumers are given a second medium to interact with for any given sports activity, they feel that they can have some type of say in what goes on with that sporting event. This aspect of gaining control over the event is seen as evidence that consumers are interacting differently than they once did. Not only are they watching the game, but perhaps they’re also actively tweeting at the team. Maybe they’re on Instagram viewing what’s happening on the sidelines. This makes the consumer feel as if they’re experiencing an all-inclusive environment and that they’re actually part of the sporting event that’s taking place.

It’s important to realize the evolution of sports media. The advent of social media has come into play and helped us realize how important sports media is to athletes and consumers. It’s also important to recognize the value of sponsorships and how sponsorships can help shape a sports organization’s branding process. This goes for sporting event arenas as well, as they can also help with that process of shaping a brand. These things have changed a lot in recent years, and as our culture and society continue to evolve, so will these trends.

If you haven’t considered sports management education, it’s a very effective way to learn more about all concepts relating to global sports and sports management. And, with online sports management education, you don’t even need to leave the comfort of your own home to start learning.

In terms of events that work, we know that there’s typically the main event, but there also needs to be something before and something after. This seems like a simple formula, but it’s not easy to pull off. However, if you can get it right and have some lead-up to the event that’s more than just a pre-game ceremony—perhaps something like tailgating at a sporting event, which most people are familiar with—then you’re on the right track with your event.

It can either be organized tightly or loosely, but there just needs to be something to attend before the main event. And then, once you get to the main event, it’s on. The game is on, but then you’ve also got to leave people with something as they depart, because we know from plenty of research that as important as first impressions are, final impressions are important as well. Walking out of the event needs to be a pretty good experience to go along with it, so that people leave with that last thing in their minds, and know that they’ve had a good time.

Managing crowds at sports venues seems like it would be something pretty simple, but that’s also not necessarily true. Think about any time you’ve been to an event and it’s been easy to move around, maybe compared to a different event where it’s been tough to move around. A classic example is Disney World.

If you’ve ever been to Disney World, think about all of the people who were there on the same day, at the same time, trying to get into the same activities, and the same rides, and the same shows. But at Disney, as long as you stand in line, they’ve got it pretty well figured out. Nowhere is going to be perfect, but they’ve got it pretty well figured out how to treat people and make you believe that you’re having a good and magical time, even when you’re doing something tedious like standing in line.

These are all the things that the better examples in sports venues are figuring out as well. If you’re going to stand there, you may be on your smartphone to pass the time, but that’s not really what the sports franchises want you to be doing. The better ones figure out good ways to keep you involved, keep you engaged, and keep you a part of what’s going on.

Do you have interest in sports management concepts and strategies, or global sports trends? If so, give online sports management education a try, as it’s the most accessible form of sports management education that you’ll find to learn about how to keep people engaged and interested when attending an event.