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 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.

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.

In the late 1800s, around the beginning of organized sports management, but before it became a business, it didn’t matter if you won or lost, it was all about how you played the game. When someone said, you were a good sport, they were talking more about your sportsmanship than abilities. This spoke to the way you conducted yourself as a gentleman or lady, to your ability to be a good citizen rather than a good third baseman. Then, athletics was associated with class and behavior. Not with winning or losing or athletic excellence but how you understood and demonstrated fairness and decorum.

In the mid-1800s, the idea of Manifest Destiny became wildly popular. This phrase was a philosophical belief that the United States should continue to move westward and establish and conquer over all the land and all the indigenous peoples of those lands. And because of those actions, there were wars, civil wars, wars with other countries: Mexico, Spain, even the Native Americans. The West was proclaimed “won,” and then there was nothing left to take, no more wars to wage, nothing more to conquer.

The 1890s were known as the Gay Nineties. Not gay as in sexual orientation, but gay meaning grand, jolly, and wonderful. The economy was good, there was gold and cattle, and everyone had lots of money, and there was plenty of land for all the colonizers. And during this time, the president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt felt like the nation had gone soft. He believed the United States had forgotten what it meant to be a leading nation. He decided then that athleticism would be viewed as preparation for war.

This is when athletics started to become serious. And the military academies and best colleges in the US wanted to produce the best athletes. So academies like West Point began to focus on creating better athletes to prove they have the best teams because winning became everything. Because if you won, you proved you were prepared for war. But with the focus being on winning at all costs, it wasn’t too long until cheating started to pervade organized collegiate athletics.

As teams became desperate to win, cheating and fixing games became more commonplace. The more gambling and game-fixing that happened the more people realized they could monetize and turn leagues and sports management education into a professional enterprise.

In an effort to police the monetization of the up-and-coming enterprises of professional teams Teddy Roosevelt created the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Although this ended up being just a body with very little ability to enforce anything. As things started to professionalize the public became enthralled with organized sports that the corruption was abundant. The commercial zeitgeist was portraying an overlord economically, monopolies and great wealth ran everything. There was no income tax and no reward for those who were actually doing all the work, the athletes. So they brought a case all the way to the US Supreme Court.

This case regarding the earliest of leagues, Major League Baseball, faced overwhelming societal pressure to stop the illegal monopolies. The Sherman Antitrust Act was the prevailing law and ruled that baseball was indeed a monopoly but not the kind that the Sherman Antitrust Act was meant to protect against. Although the monopoly was interstate in nature for obvious reasons being teams had formed in nearly every city and every state, the language used stated the monopoly was local in nature and exempt from antitrust laws.

This ruling gave birth to the mindset in America that sports somehow differ, that they were sacrosanct and are able to abide by different rules based solely on their cultural significance. Global sports management clung to romantic notions of sportsmanship while exploiting the commercial realities of that romantic notion. And this conflict still continues today, all four major professional leagues enjoy antitrust protections, whether completely, in the case of baseball, Supreme Court-sanctioned or statutory and in part for the other leagues.

Brendan Parent reinforces the power sports have in the industry with his statement that, “It has become one of the most dominant industry forces in the world because of its universal appeal. It is woven into the fabric of every community across the globe.” Making it a driving force for economies everywhere, he goes on to explain, “…When a sports organization pops up in a particular region, it draws attention from people who live in that region, and the government from other industries to create partnerships, collaborations.”

So the teams bring an influx of attention and interest to a certain area and then are expected to give back to these new partners in meaningful ways. This reinforces the power these organizations hold. The universal appeal draws companies in with opportunities for sponsorships and affiliations to draw more interest in the product they’re trying to sell. Using a town’s favorite players or teams and being able to capitalize on viewership and Global Sports fandom equals profit for these companies and local economies. There’s also the ability to profit from televising and hosting sporting events that adds fuel to the universal sports power draw.

All of this leads back to the universal appreciation for what athletics are. There are examples of organized games being played all the way back in Aztec and Mayan communities; organized gaming has always been a way to perhaps escape from the trials and tribulations of life, enhance community, and build teamwork. There is not a single corner of this globe that hasn’t been touched by it in some way. And that fact is what makes it so marketable, but only recently has professional athleticism become a mega multibillion-dollar global industry.

From online sports management education to million-dollar franchise deals, competing athletically has evolved over the years from a simple pastime every human can enjoy to a multimillion dollar global mega industry, held sacred by the masses.

One of the important areas of sports and sports management analytics for off the field that’s really interesting is this whole area of return on investment for a sponsorship or partnership with a consumer product brand. Teams now are being pressed pretty hard in leagues to justify why they want x-million dollars or x-hundred-thousand dollars in sponsorship fees for a consumer brand to be affiliated with them. Oftentimes they’re giving them signage at the arena live or stadium. They’re giving them broadcast advertising in their telecast of their games. They’re perhaps including them on their website for the team or the league. You’re constantly hearing these brands asking, “Why am I paying $700,000? Why am I paying $4.5 million?” It’s really incumbent upon global sports organizations to use this data that’s at their disposal. They have access to such data as demographic data and behavioral data, including the frequency of returning to a website or how long you are staying on each page of the website.

In sports management education we talked about eye tracking. There’s also eye tracking for stadium signage and all sorts of data capture devices that are monitoring the interaction or the behavior of the fan with the sponsor’s brand. One of the things that sports organizations are doing, particularly with new sponsors that they’re acquiring, is they’re trying to measure, pre and post, the affinity toward the brand by their fans. To put it in perspective, let’s say a certain football team wants to bring in a sponsor. They might do a survey and ask their fan base all across the market how they feel about the sponsor’s brand. Are they buyers of that sponsor’s brand, users of it, et cetera? Then, when they bring the sponsor in one year later, they can do the same survey again and hopefully show them that the purchase intent of the consumer, the fan, has gone up because of their affiliation with the sports team.

There are a lot of entities out there that offer programs and jobs that shape social change. One program is street soccer. There is an organization in Europe that is called the Power of Play. It was a joint program at one time run through the UN.

Online Sports Management Education Opportunities

There are a lot of opportunities worldwide where people are going into Africa, South America, Central America, and Europe, where we see a lot of the refugee movements happening. There are a lot of non-profit organizations specifically focusing on helping others through the vehicle of sport.

It’s just a matter of finding those entities and non-profits that are out there. Many of them are operating in New York. You can also get into the industry across the world, depending on your interest and the sport you’re interested in.

Soccer’s Importance to Global Sports

Soccer’s often the main sport because the world plays soccer. But there are opportunities in an array and a range of sports where people are trying to change.

Sports Management Education Provides Value in Social Change

There is value in sports and the potential challenges that come with developing strong athletes. Sports can impact youth and influence them in the future and future participation.

Sports is important in the lives of adults and can influence their health, well-being, and emotional state. When talking about social injustice, sports can be used as a vehicle for change.

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.

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.

In sports management we tend to see endorsements with individual players. That’s a relationship between a company that is trying to communicate its brand, likeness, and message. It is typically aligned with an athlete who also has a particular image, brand, and message that he or she is trying to communicate.

Licensing is really all about the rights to use an image of a franchise, a club, or even of an individual player. It’s all about taking a message that a club, franchise, or player represents, and connecting it to another company or organization. It also includes connecting the fans, which are the people who are consuming and want to be attached (in some way) to that club, franchise, and image.

Endorsements as a Relationship

Endorsements for sports is really a relationship where a player or a facility is endorsing a product. Licensing, in terms of the legal world, is really intellectual property. Sports management education explains licensing as something that may be used on the field, by the player or by the stadium, but it’s also something that is recognized outside of just the field of play. Brands connect with fans. They have to connect with them before they get there, while they’re there, and after the event. Otherwise, it really doesn’t work. Why would you want to spend your money connecting with somebody just two hours a week, or maybe they never set foot in the building again?

You want to connect with them in multiple ways. You can do that by branding with the ticket, branding in the building via recognition and having eyeballs on advertisement through digital fascia boards, or through the center hung scoreboards. You can put your particular brand on social media and connect with the team or with the facility. That way, you know that when you walk into the building, there’s near field recognition to your mobile device and allows you to both connect on a way that you would not have done otherwise as you walk up to the building, through the building, and after you leave it.

You could easily opt-out of that if you’d like or you could opt-in and most people, in my opinion, don’t have a fear of having the brand connect with you. That’s why you’re there and it’s much more immersive. As I’ve mentioned in the past, immersive involvement is where sports is headed, and I think we’ll see more and more of this.

A Deep Dive in Player Compensation

Players are compensated in a number of ways. Mostly, they’re compensated through their salary agreements with their teams, and each league has a different collective bargaining agreement. Online sports management education teaches the collective bargaining agreement as a very, very detailed contract, which explains how players, from rookies all the way up to veterans, are compensated for on the field, on the ice, on the court, or any other way of how they play. There’s incentive-laden contracts as well, but for the most part, all players receive a similar contract, plus incentives. Certain players may have endorsements outside of just playing on the field. Those endorsements connect the player to the product.

The most obvious and the most well-known is probably Michael Jordan and the Nike brand, with his own brand of Jordan shoes. Nike has transcended this sports market with Michael Jordan over the past 30 years. Even though he hasn’t played basketball for a number of years, it’s probably one of the most recognizable endorsements in all of sports.

Determining the Split in Revenue

Teams make money from media. They make money from tickets. They also make money from their facilities. A lot of that revenue is shared with the players, so the collective bargaining agreements have this concept of sports-related revenues. In football, it’s defined as gross revenues. In hockey, it’s hockey-related revenues. Each of the leagues have their sort of calculation of all the revenues which are used to share between both the players and the owners. Each league, through collective bargaining, decides how that revenue will be split. For the most part, it’s about a 50/50 split of revenues that’s generated in the building and through the teams.

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.