One of the ways in which the sports industry and sports management have changed and will continue to change has to do with integration, this almost perfect storm, of three factors.

The first is new technology for data-capture devices. Now we can capture data in so many different ways: wearable technology, high-speed cameras, radar that can do much more than it could ever do before. That is one factor.

The second factor is high-speed data processing technology. We’ve seen computers get faster and faster year after year. We’ve seen microchips get smaller. Therefore, processing power has dramatically increased compared to what it was even 5 or 10 years ago.

The third piece is inexpensive cloud data storage. The fact that we can capture more data, that we can store this data very inexpensively in the cloud, and that we can process this data quickly has not only led to an increase in sports data and analytics, but it’s also been a major factor in the technology and innovation aspects of global sports.

Online Sports Management Education

While pursuing a sports management education, you’ll receive extensive training related to this topic. Advances with data and technology have changed the game, so to speak, because they’ve changed almost every way in which we manage, promote, value and interact with the sports people love.

When you look at current-day sports, leagues and teams are facing new competition from streaming services that take niche sports directly to consumers. The World Surf League, karate, and other sports see OTT, or over the top, as the best way to reach out to fans and build their sport. The average fan of sporting events only has so much time that they can dedicate to them.

Even minor sporting events and leagues that are distributed over the top are cutting into the viewership pie. And they’re cutting it into many more pieces. When a sport brand or league goes OTT, it has many advantages, particularly for upstart leagues and sports: very low cost of production, low cost of distribution, and great data capturing that they get back from their viewers and fans. Additionally, fans can also get to interact with said brand.

This means that even if fans are sitting at home in front of a TV, they might prefer to watch it streamed. We’re also beginning to see the combination of live streaming with social media. Young fans, especially Generation Z, want to experience games in multiple ways, viewing a broadcast live from wherever they are and with their communities.

This means that they want to combine live streaming with social media platforms, where they can analyze, celebrate, or even commiserate with like-minded or rival fans. One interesting player in this OTT space is Endeavor. It bought sporting leagues, like UFC and PBR (Professional Bull-Riding), to build an OTT network. Endeavor also bought NeuLion, which was one of the OTT providers to many other sport properties.

Another thing happening is that to capitalize on the exciting fourth quarter of NBA games, and also possibly to capitalize on the legalization of sport betting in many states, the NBA has taken to selling the fourth quarter of games over the internet. These games will be sold at a discount to the NBA League Pass price of a full game, but it will also give fans a chance to tune in to the key finishes of games.

By exploring online sports management education, you’ll learn more about niche, major, and global sports, as well as lessons regarding careers in sports management and recent trends in the industry. Why not jump on the valuable opportunity to start your sports management education online right now?

The New York Yankees logo is a classic example of sports licensing done right. It’s interesting. If you go all around New York City, there’s pretty good chance you’ll find a Yankees hat. The same thing is also true if you go to other places around the United States and even to some of the places around the world that observe global sports.

That logo, the interlocking NY, seems to be found everywhere, in big cities and in some of the farthest reaches. George Steinbrenner bought the ballclub for less than $10 million in the early 1970s, and it’s now worth, depending on whose numbers you’re looking at, about $4 billion. One of the things that he recognized was the power of the New York Yankees logo.

It was at a time where nobody was much thinking about taking that logo and putting it on all sorts of merchandise, promotions, and in as many places as possible in the right way, in the right context. Steinbrenner was able to not just put it out to everywhere, but put it out everywhere in the right way, at the right time, and with the right people. It’s a great example of sports management. Studying what he was able to do with that licensing is a key lesson to understand in sports management education and online sports management education.

One of the interesting areas of sports analytics is dynamic ticket pricing. Online sports management education explains this as a way that sales and marketing organizations within the front office of a professional sports team can impact revenues by pricing tickets dynamically. You may ask, “Well, what does that mean?” If you think back years ago, each ticket would have a static price. If the seat was in the 20th row at center ice or center court, or the middle of the football field, the 50-yard line, it essentially had one price for all games.

Today in many global sports, tickets are priced dynamically because we acknowledge that there’s different levels of demand based on the day of the week of the game. We also acknowledge the different levels based on the time of day that the game is being played and the opponent, including the star players that are coming in from the opposing teams. We even acknowledge the different levels if it’s an outdoor game based on the weather and the weather conditions.

It’s really important that we recognize that certain tickets might be worth two or three times as much under favorable conditions. If the Boston Red Sox are coming to play the Kansas City Royals and they’re playing on a Sunday afternoon in July, that ticket is going to be worth a lot more than if the Miami Marlins are coming in to play the Kansas City Royals on a Tuesday night in April. Those are the kinds of things that we can now capture.

Sports management education teaches us that there are algorithms and methods through data analysis. Looking at history and past history sales as well as ticket sales and pricing, we can assess what the relative demand is going to be for each of those games. We have mechanisms much like the stock exchange does so that we can price those tickets at a variable level. Sometimes teams will impose certain rules so that the tickets don’t float freely, but nonetheless they will vary. They’ll vary according to whatever parameters the team wants to permit them to vary based on the demand.

In the traditional sense, any given time where a content provider, which is a sports organization — say, the Houston Texans — wanted to give information about one of their players to the fans, they would give it to the mass media first. And the mass media would then distribute it to the given audience and probably a mass audience. If a player was hurt, for example, the Houston Texans would utilize that information and give it to ESPN.

Not only would they be able to give it to ESPN how they wanted, but then ESPN would choose how they would want to distribute that piece of information to the fans. So the fans are actually getting watered-down information not only from ESPN, because ESPN chooses to craft the message how they choose, but the information which comes from ESPN is actually coming from the Texans first.

There’s been an interesting example when social media started to hit its stride in global sports. Arian Foster was hurt in a game. He tweeted out an MRI picture. Now, this is a great example of how a piece of sports information changed drastically in terms of how it’s reached in new ways to sports fans members.

Arian Foster tweeted out a picture of his MRI. No longer did that information have to be understood by the Texans. The Texans didn’t have to give it to ESPN. And no longer was it up to ESPN in terms of how they would report this message.

ESPN, in the past, could have had the option to report on Arian Foster from week to week. Or, perhaps, to say whether he’s going to miss several weeks. It was up to the fans to understand the information from ESPN. Now, with this new tweet, Arian Foster gives his MRI directly to the fans.

Of course there are doctors on Twitter. So, they can completely understand for themselves what is going on with Arian Foster. They can actually diagnose how long he would be out, if at all. So, it was a really interesting example in sports management of how these two graphs represent a shift: not only in terms of sports information that certain teams get and certain organizations receive but also in terms of how sports teams and athletes themselves can have a better way of communicating with their fans and their audience members.

The emergence of athlete-driven media is an important part of sports management education courses.

We became the first North American team to acquire an esports franchise in September of 2016. The numbers behind esports are staggering. More people watch the League of Legends World Championships than the BCS National Championship, the NBA Finals, the World Series, the Stanley Cup Finals, et cetera.

The numbers are staggering. The demographics are staggering. And enough fans have yet to be monetized in any way and have yet to really receive some of the professional treatment that sports entities, whether it’s teams or leagues or broadcasters, have currently reserved for traditional sports teams, as it were.

For us, in sports management, this was an incredible opportunity to meet this entirely new demographic, to understand the trends behind the success of esports over the last many years, and what we believe to be the continued explosive growth in the industry. Then, we were able to utilize the fact that we are part of an ownership group that is willing to invest behind somewhat risky, but at the same time, innovative, unique, and new ideas.

We spent a lot of time thinking about, one, do we want to invest in esports? The answer was, “Absolutely yes,” because of some of the demographics that I’ve talked about in the numbers. Number two, which was probably the hardest question to answer was, once we know we want to invest in esports, what is the vehicle that we’re going to choose?

For us, it just made logical sense, given that we are a sales and marketing organization, given that we understand how to run a team, and given that we are blessed to have some of the best sponsorship sales, ticket sales, marketing, fan engagement folks in the entire industry, if not the world.

We figured we could utilize those resources to help really grow Team Dignitas, which is the esports franchise that we acquired, and really help professionalize what is an incredibly exciting but an incredibly nascent industry.

The next six months, year, or three years will really show how successful we, as well as other franchises that follow our path, will be in professionalizing esports and really creating the next sporting behemoth in global sports.

But for us, it is very much about getting a seat at the table to an exciting industry with young fans, passionate fans, and really turning Team Dignitas, which is our investment in this space, into the marquee franchise in all of esports.

These are the kinds of subjects our sports management education course tackles.

There was a time in American history when the country had no income tax and great monopolists ruled the corporate sphere. Monopoly was the defining characteristic of the American economy.

Sports was no exception. Major League Baseball began to demonstrate that it was an unfair monopoly violating antitrust laws, specifically the Sherman Antitrust Act. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the justices essentially ruled “Baseball was a monopoly, but that’s okay.” Their underlying legal argument that baseball was not interstate business and that all business in baseball is local.

This was a fiction. The real argument was “Well, it’s sports. Everybody likes it, and so we should give it an exception from antitrust laws.” The court’s action formed the first closed league in world history, a legal monopoly. No one else has the ability to form Major League Baseball in any city, territory, or other part of the United States. The only Major League Baseball is Major League Baseball – an excellent economic model for them.

After baseball in the 1920s, professional football leagues and other nascent leagues began to form in a large-scale professionalization of sport. Athletes were paid and coached. Being trained began to take hold. Sports management grew as a viable academic field and profession.

After World War II, the country settled into a different mindset where television began to dominate the cultural space of American homes. In 1958, right before New Year’s Eve, the National Football League became lucky. Their NFL championship game, between the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts, was on black-and-white TVs all over the country. It was an exciting game in a snowstorm, with sudden-death overtime and great heroes such as Johnny Unitas and Frank Gifford.

Both America and football fell in love. America, football, television, and the whole world saw that money could be made for people who understood the power of television as it related to the broadcast of live sports.

The International Olympic Committee also took notice. Already, major sneaker companies and Olympic athletes had formed relationships. The acceleration of those relationships, combined with the acceleration of non-sports brands with live sports, became as big as almost any business in the world. For the next forty years, live sports dominated television, through the creation of cable in the late 1970s all the way to the beginning of the 21st century.

Today, the major questions remain: will the value of live sport continue to anchor the value of the $600 billion global sports business? Will different kinds of consumption, from different kings of consumers, through different kinds of technology diminish or increase the value of sport in the marketplace, particularly due to the increased ways of consuming it? How must sports management education adapt?

What you’re seeing a lot of nowadays is that events are not only hosting sport-organization events, but obviously, they’re going to start hosting concerts. There are a number of concert series that will happen at Citi Field. So, they’ll clear out the entire field and make it an applicable space for any given concert or band.

There have been a number of different concerts that happened at the Mets stadium. One notable one is Billy Joel because he’s from Long Island, and he often represents Long Islanders, and therefore, New Yorkers. Again, it’s this whole idea that New Yorkers can go to Citi Field to feel as if this place is re-emphasizing their identity as a New Yorker, not only in terms of Ebbets Field, but also, in terms of the Jackie Robinson rotunda, which signifies this whole idea of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ history. It’s part of Brooklyn history.

Then they can go into this venue and see someone who represents New York, such as Billy Joel. We can usually take these venues and often translate them to outside events, such as concerts with Billy Joel.

What you’re starting to see is an evolution of sports organizations and sports management and how they’re constructing their venues. Previously, it was just however much capacity it could hold. Certain baseball stadiums would hold 50,000, maybe 60,000 seats, without mini suites or party events. And as you saw, perhaps in the early 2000s to 2010, new stadiums were limiting the capacity in terms of the amount of people the stadium could hold and opening up more suites areas, VIP areas.

The idea was while they might not be getting the extra 10,000 seats by going from 50,000 to 40,000 seats, they would actually be getting more bang for their buck in charging more for the suite tickets. They’re earning more revenue, getting more of a bang for your buck, given these suite tickets.

However, what we’re seeing today is that even these suite parts, or these web arenas or areas, in where individuals can come and pay a hefty amount for a ticket — those are actually starting to be on the decline because people are starting to prefer in-house watching. They’d rather actually sit in their house rather than come to a stadium. What stadiums have been doing nowadays is transforming some of these suite areas into priority areas, into communal areas, kind of representing certain living-room-style events.

It’s an interesting thing that sports organizations are now doing in global sports. They’re actually offering certain types of living-room-style events at the stadiums so family members can come together. Groups, communities can come together in this open space so it’s not just so much for watching the sporting event, but it’s more so a medium to come together where you can enjoy time together within the venue.

This information is part of our sports management education course.

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.