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.

The difference in global football, or soccer from the United States perspective, is that most of the global leagues that play soccer have promotion and relegation. There’s this possibility of moving up a division or down a division, and that has a lot of implications for the revenue model.

There’s a risk associated with it that isn’t in the United States. I like to think that the United States is a capitalist economy with a socialist sports ban, whereas with European soccer, and around the globe for that matter, they tend to have a more socialistic economic environment, but also a very capitalistic methodology for promotion and relegation.

The primary risk in European football is moving down into a lower league and therefore not having access to the same revenue sources and sponsorship. That said, the power teams are forced to really buy players and bring the strongest team to the field so that they don’t get relegated. That in itself is problematic for ownership and problematic for the leagues because they have to be concerned that teams don’t overspend to forestall the possibility of relegation. The leagues, like the European Premier League and many of the other lesser leagues, have this concept of financial fair play, where you’re not allowed to overspend in pursuit of wins and losses to prevent you from being relegated.

Franchises tend to be owned, usually, by a principal owner. That’s one person who, for the most part, leads something of a larger group. That’s not always the case, but in the United States and the rest of the world nowadays, most ownerships look pretty much the same. The interesting thing about them, though, is that they’re much more international wherever you go around the world. They’re different owners from different countries, stretching across the world. So sports, which we used to pay more attention to on a local level than global, are now becoming much more global overall.

In a way, it has almost flipped in the sense that the global sports impact has now reached the local level. We can look at some examples, like Chelsea Football Club, which has a Russian billionaire as its owner, in the heart of London, and is one of the most popular clubs on the planet. And its reach goes everywhere around the world, including, increasingly, the United States. It extends even as far as New York City, where it has certain partnerships, not only in business, but also certainly in government and in the nonprofit world. So, as you can see, the reach that it has goes quite a long way.

To learn more about the reach of global sports, as well as everything else related to sports management, give online sports management education a try. You don’t need an extreme amount of time or resources, and you can get your sports management education without even leaving the house.

When people think about sports, whether they are local or global sports, they tend to root for certain teams over others. This is where branding a team comes into play. However, those who have taken online sports management education classes know that when marketing and building a sports team’s brand, they can’t rely on the team’s wins.

Every game and every season is different, and if a team’s sports management team focuses on their wins, then their brand will not hold up on a down season. You have to appeal to the fans of that team for all circumstances. The brand should be relatable. This is what allows the brand to grow and flourish even during a down season.

Sports Management education classes can help you with the knowledge that you need to build an effective sports team brand and make it last. Keep the fans in mind. This is always an important aspect of building a sports brand that you can never allow yourself to forget.

In the past, sports marketers would typically speak “at” their target audience using various methods. With a lot of research, we learned that marketers today focus more on building relationships between their organizations and consumers. This type of marketing strategy is obviously different than previous marketing efforts in which you might focus only on, for example, putting up a billboard to speak at people.

Global Sports Marketing

A billboard doesn’t speak to a particular audience demographic. The message displayed on it speaks to everyone, which means that it’s a large sign that talks at you.

If we’re going to compare a marketing campaign with a relationship, and building and maintaining a relationship for years to come, then it’s important to remember that you can’t use one-way communication to preserve your relationship with a consumer. You can’t be one person speaking at the other. That’s not a good, healthy relationship.

As with any relationship, there needs to be some type of back and forth for effective communication. In terms of speaking to consumers, we don’t want to speak at them. We must engage them so that we can learn what they want, value and need from us as Sports Management marketers.

Online Sports Management Education

A Sports Management education is crucial for many reasons. In relation to marketing, it can help you learn, as outlined in this post, the important differences between traditional and modern marketing strategies. As a reminder: Traditional marketing was a one-way street. It was me speaking at you rather than learning and understanding your wants, needs, goals and preferences. It wasn’t two-way communication. What we’re seeing today is that marketing has evolved to include back-and-forth conversations that help sports marketers better understand members of their target audience.

Classes online in sports management education allow people to have a hand in building others up through athletics. Self-esteem and confidence are absolutely tied into the outcomes of participating in sport, especially as we get older. One of the benefits of working in sports management is the joy of seeing the changes in adults who had stepped away from sports for career or life reasons, like marriage or children, and then come back and find new self-esteem.

Global sports research has been done with people involved in triathlon and running, who participated as a youth and dropped out or who had never participated, and have been convinced to get into triathlon by their friends. They are so excited, especially women. They say things like, “I never thought I was going to be able to swim, and now I can do a Half Ironman,” and “I never thought I could ride a bike. I never thought I would ever do it, and now I’m out here with my friends competing in this race.”

Participating in sport brings out confidence in them, and then that transfers into other parts of their lives and keeps them motivated to continue to participate. They lose weight. They get healthier. They actually do things that they never thought that they could do, and their self-esteem and confidence grow by bounds. Helping people cultivate new self-confidence is a foundation of sports management education.

Whether you’re looking at local, national or global sports, venue operations have changed dramatically over the last several years. In building sports facilities, you’ll see developers, architects and engineers pay very close attention to how fans move through a building. This is because a fan needs to be able to get to their seat, get to the merchandise, get to the restaurants and enjoy the entire fan experience. And they need to be doing all this while engaging with the sponsorship opportunities that occur in the building.

These buildings are now being constructed to manage traffic flow, not only from a crowd standpoint but also to give the fan an opportunity to enjoy all that the venue has to offer. However, it doesn’t end there.

Everything about the venue is a key part of it, beginning with your arrival—the trip over to the sports facility. Once you arrive, it’s then about how you move around the venue and how you leave the venue. All of it matters; all of it is important. It’s all about this sense of the experience you have from the moment that you set out and take your first step toward the stadium on your way to the game. There isn’t anything at the sporting venue that isn’t key to how people experience that event.

Think about it: imagine that it’s tough to get there, to the point that it’s almost like a commute to work. If it’s that tough to get there, you’re going to have an even tougher time getting started and getting motivated to be part of what’s happening.

Facility management is also focused on the athlete and how the athlete uses the building. Often, we’re seeing training assets inside the facility itself. It’s also about how the players come and use their training facilities. It’s about how they use prep areas and how they move from their car to the locker facilities, to the dressing rooms, to the field of play. These venues should allow them to do these things in a way that ensures they’re not being overworked or overtaxed, and they’re ready for the game that evening. Because they want to be sure the athletes are bringing their best to the court or the field or the ice, architects spend a fair amount of time working through the planning process to allow the them and their competitors to move through the building with ease.

Success for a sports venue is measured in many, many ways. As opposed to how success is measured for a sports team—which is typically by financial success or wins and losses—success for a venue means that people enjoy going there, and that it not only draws crowds but also that it draws successful events.

So, when you’re looking at a major outdoor venue, it won’t have hundreds of events per year. This means people enjoy the experience of going to the building. Consider a venue like Wembley in the UK. It’s an iconic event facility that is for the national football team—or national soccer team, if you’re from the United States. They hold NFL events there as well, but it isn’t home to a particular team; it’s home to the national team. Yet, people enjoy going there because it’s an iconic building. It’s enjoyable to watch a game there and think about the fact that so many great things have happened at that venue.

Interested in learning more about the world of sporting venues or concepts relating to sports management? If you are, consider trying out online sports management education. Don’t let a shortage of time or resources prevent you from getting the sports management education you want.

The power of sports is that it becomes a moment of such societal focus. When global sports giants like Pop Warner, Muhammad Ali, or Bobby Riggs know how to engage the media by using sports as a vehicle to amplify social condition, you create an intensity of interest on both sides of the issue. Anyone interested in sports management knows this skill is an essential aspect of any sports management education or online sports management education.

It doesn’t matter which side you’re on. What you need to create is a critical element in the business of sports — a fan. A fan is going to invest himself in a way that is a relationship driven by emotion. It becomes about his or her identity, which in some ways is existential. It’s about getting to walk around this earth with happiness, pride, and belonging.

It’s more than someone at the game and rooting. It’s a fan in an intense, psychological, societal way.

That’s what we’re going for in the business of sports, and only sports can do that. You don’t get banking fans. You don’t get retail fans. Something else happens when fans of rival teams are up against each other.

The power of sports management is that you can create that rivalry. You can create a rivalry as powerful as when you’re talking about race, or should we go to war, or man versus woman. It’s powerful.

The incredible visibility of global sports creates an unprecedented platform to start really important conversations about things like racism and homophobia. To win gold medals for one’s country and still feel like a second-class citizen is the bitter paradox facing many colored Americans. “Because we were black athletes, what we were supposed to do is run real fast and go home, smile, get pats on the back, and still be relegated to second-class living,” says Tommie Smith.

Tommie Smith sets a new world record in the 200 meters with John Carlos taking the bronze. “And I’m supposed to stand up there and look at the flag,” Smith continues, “put my hand over my heart, saying how proud I am because the flags are representing me. I don’t think so, because it did not. So when the national anthem started playing, I was not looking at the ground. I was saying the Lord’s prayer, my head bowed, and my fist went up in the air.” He went on to say, “I wore black gloves to represent social power or black power. I wore socks. No shoes represented poverty. I wore a black scarf around my neck to symbolize the lynching, the hangings that black folks went through while building this country.”

In 1968, when John Carlos and Tommie Smith took the platform at the Olympic games and chose to raise a gloved fist in protest, they were taking a chance that they might never be able to compete at the highest level again. That sacrifice made a conversation happen across the world, which still echoes today. When Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the star-spangled banner, he was putting his career on the line to get a conversation started about police brutality.

Kaepernick says, “A lot of things that are unjust, people aren’t being held accountable for. And that’s something that needs to change. One specifically is police brutality. There are people being murdered unjustly and not being held accountable. Cops are getting paid leave for killing people. That’s not right.”

People are questioning whether this was the right venue for it, whether it’s possible to still appreciate America and be a patriot, and kneel for the national anthem. I don’t think Colin has anything against America, per se. He has an issue with what’s happening in America. This is the kind of conversation that’s getting started, and sports are an extraordinary venue to make this happen.

In the Sochi winter games, there was this question that a lot of athletes had to ask themselves; whether they would go to compete in a country that has laws that are explicitly homophobic and discriminatory against people who identify as gay. There were some athletes who chose not to participate, which is one form of protest. There were some who chose to go but chose to be very openly supportive, either as allies or as people who were gay themselves, in a forum that would be hostile to them – which is another way to take a stand.

There’s no better location to get these conversations started because so many people are watching. Many middle schoolers in the US, Tanzania, or India, who had no idea about the kinds of policies that exist in Russia, were then exposed to it and having conversations about their own policies at home that may or may not be explicitly discriminatory. Sports management education, as well as online sports management education, have the task of including these difficult and controversial conversations to push sports management and sports (as a whole) in the right direction.

The sports ecosystem is not at all what it used to be. It’s not just about owners, players, teams, clubs, and franchises and how they fit into a community. It’s much more about how the community and everything that it’s involved in fits with the sports franchise and its players and owners.

We live in a time where the power of global sports makes them matter so much to people that companies, organizations, and institutions — entities that we would never have considered connected in the past — are now connected. All of a sudden, architectural firms are being called on to build new and different stadiums. Engineering firms certainly have their hands in sports management. They’re partnering with ownerships, and the teams add player representation, along with convention and visitors’ bureaus, mayors’ offices, the municipalities, and local nonprofit organizations that serve the community to change people’s lives in different ways. The power of sports and sports-led development create this ecosystem that is really about what we all know and are all searching for: community.

We just talked about the ecosystem in sports. It’s complex. There’s no doubt about that. It’s a fun business to be in, but it’s an expensive business to be in. Many professionals are associated with it, and the ownership of sports franchises, the leagues, and the people that serve within sports management are changing all the time. What I have seen over my career — and something you need to keep in mind in your sports management education — is that evolution in sports is something that we can expect. You can’t always expect to make a profit. You can’t always expect to win. But you can expect that sports is going to evolve, and it’ll evolve quickly.

Fans are obviously hugely important to a sport organization, and it is so much easier to keep a current fan than it is to develop a new one. So, organizations need to be able to use the data they have about their current customers, not only to keep them but also to move them up the ladder so that they go from being what we would call a light user to a medium user to a heavy user. The goal is always to get that fan more engaged with the team. That’s going to help the team in the long run.

The fact that the teams have so much data that they can use to specifically target fans for specific tickets or packages means that the fans are going to get more out of this experience as well, because they’re not just the targets of mass marketing. It helps them to feel a deeper connection to the organization when there is that level of personalization. As online sports management education emphasizes, it’s really important for teams to be able to segment their consumers. In doing so, they can take this segment and market specific products or packages to people who fall into this category, versus something different for this other group of fans.

All the data that organizations now have about their fans is great for being able to develop those segments and also understanding that sometimes a consumer might not stay in the same segment. If we have them here, but we’re moving them up the ladder of going from a light user to a medium user to a heavy user, then they’re going to also maybe fall into a different category or a different segment as their consumption patterns change.