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.

Global sports analytics is integrating the new data and information that exists today in abundant form into different decision processes, be it for on the field of play or in the C-suite for the sales and marketing team. Today, sports analytics is so critical to decision processes. We have an explosion of information because of different data-capture devices and technologies that are out there. Anyone who’s going to work in the sports environment today or in sports management needs to understand how to incorporate that information into decision processes.

One of the things sports analytics does is it helps increase the probability of a successful decision. Business is all about making decision after decision to drive revenue, to reduce costs, to get the best players on the field. When you look at it that way, you realize that you can’t just do that all from instincts and intuition. Instincts and intuition count for something, but also you’ve got to be able to employ data and information to generate insights.

Our online Sports Management Education course looks deeper into understanding sports analytics and its relationship to sports management.

Sports can serve as one of the best areas to be able to boost self-confidence and to develop a sense of self-worth that can last a lifetime. Granted, this requires a strong support system and a safe space to fail. You need to have someone there who’s going to be constructively critical when you’re making mistakes but also make it clear that they believe in your ability to improve. Without that, sports run the risk of becoming a venue for developing a fear of failure, especially if someone is all over you, beating you down every time you do something wrong.

Sports are a great platform to reflect on and also reinforce issues of equality in society. When we have categories in a sport that separate people based on age, or weight, or gender, we may be making statements about the way people should be separated in the world. Ultimately, it should be all about fairness. If we don’t have categories that promote fairness, then why should we have categories at all?

As an example, there are certain sports where women compete just as strongly as men, whether it be sailing, or equestrian, or ultra-distance swimming or running. However, sometimes in these sporting events, men and women are still separated. This is simply a relic of historic sexism. And if there are changes to be made that can be better reflective of an inclusive culture, then we should make those changes. It may be time that we don’t think about gender in the biological or traditional sense, but we instead think of it as the way that an individual chooses to identify.

When it comes to creating categories for track and field, it should be based on things that are more specific. If we have the technology to determine how biology influences one’s ability to compete at different levels, then perhaps that should be the standard for how we separate people into different categories.

Generally, when we think about sports, we think of them as being a great avenue to improving health and fitness—and this is true. But in certain ways, it can also cross a line. One example of this is either adults pushing themselves too hard or children getting pushed too hard, and they end up developing injuries from overuse. Another issue that’s occurring today is this popular notion of self-quantification. When people are all wearing Apple watches and Fitbits all the time, it can potentially lead to losing the notion of what it means to be fit and healthy. Instead, we’re chalking up our value to a number.

This can be a problem, but if we’re able to separate ourselves from these arbitrary quantifications of our steps, our heart rate, and these competitions and put the emphasis back on just getting out there to play, be physical, and connect with other individuals, we will be better off as people. Keeping this in check is something that we as a society really need to keep an eye on as technology becomes more and more pervasive.

Online sports management education allows you to learn more about the impact of technology on athletics, as well as concepts regarding sports management and global sports. It’s also a convenient, effective way to gain your sports management education.

One of the really important developments in sports technology and innovation is 5G wireless bandwidth. This allows for exciting new aspects of sports management that can be learned in sports management education or online sports management education.

Think of it this way: Fifth-generation wireless is like a 100-lane highway. It’s able to move mounds of data faster than you ever dreamed before. It’s dramatically faster than 4G.

For example, a movie that would have taken six minutes to download in 4G could now be downloaded in less than 10 seconds in 5G. The better news is that it only consumes 10% of the battery power that 4G would consume for downloading that movie.

This network speed affects IoT, Internet of Things, which is essentially wired devices that connect to the internet.

When we have a 5G network, we’re able to move the information and data that comes from wireless, wearable devices so quickly that it can be delivered to not only the coach on the sidelines who’s watching and evaluating the players practice, but also directly to the fans because of the bandwidth capability. The impact this could have on global sports is astronomical.

It’s an exciting time when we’re beginning to see all sorts of data and information about what’s going on in the field of play, and it’s really largely made responsible by the combination of wireless devices, the Internet of Things, and the 5G network.

Sports can be a valuable developmental tool for youth. Many young people today in the US and all over the world participate in sports. Of course, it has physical health benefits.

It gets our young people off the couch, out of the house, and engaging in physical activity. In the long run, it can do many positive things, including mitigating insurance costs and health care costs over the long term.

Self Esteem Building

Beyond all that, it does a lot more. It does something within the individual themselves, perhaps building self-esteem. Also, teaching what it’s like to be part of something bigger than yourself. Particularly in team sports, that comes through loud and clear.

There are many ways in which sports can play a key role in youth development. However, it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes parents can be overzealous, and essentially hijack the sport from their child, which changes the context.

Parents can become obsessed with the possibility of their kid becoming a star athlete in their community, or in college, and maybe one day professionally. But the chance of that kid making it all the way to the professional level is probably lower than 1% for most sports.

So what is the product of these parents putting so much pressure on their kids to perform for such an unrealistic goal? We see kids losing interest in the sport before they even get to middle school, certainly before they get to high school.

Participation Dropping

Participation rates are dropping because there’s so much focus on those few star performers. Then, even with that pool of star performers, how many of them are going to make it? Not a lot.

We have this system that tells kids at an early age to focus on one sport, whether it’s baseball, basketball, or football, to make sure they’re good enough when it comes time to play at the professional level if they ever actually get there.

Then what happens? They end up hurting themselves before they even get to a serious level, before they even get to high school. They blow out their shoulder by pitching too much. They’ve had too many cumulative concussions by getting hit repeatedly on the football field, or they burn out emotionally.

Sports Management Should Put the Focus Back on Kids Having Fun

It’s not fun anymore. What happens to kids when the fun is taken out of this forum that’s designed for their emotional growth and for their social world? They abandon it. They don’t want to do it anymore.

We need to make sure we can take the power away from parents and give it back to the kids. We need to ask, “What is this about”? It’s about the kids. It’s not about your dreams, mom and dad, which are unrealistic and unfair.

Authenticity is key to any market segment, global sports included. Online sports management education tells us, if you’re going to market towards a particular group of individuals, if you’re going to segment a given group, then you have to ensure that you’re doing it authentically. If you are coming at it from a marketing perspective and you’re throwing out a message that you think only they will understand from your own perspective, not only are you going to be in danger of not properly communicating with this segment, but you could be in danger of perhaps offending this group.

A famous example or a series of examples used within sports management education, speaks of an incident perhaps about 10 or 15 years ago, where they had the whole concept of “shrink it and pink it.” This was a group of male marketers who just assumed that female consumers would like anything small and pink. Without interacting with this segment, they just made it smaller and they made it pink, assuming that female sports fans would like any given product that was small and pink. As we know, that’s not the truth.

All female consumers are definitely not all the same and they’re not all going to prefer anything that is small and/or pink. Not only are you not properly communicating with this given segment, but, in fact, you could be in danger of offending them. A lot of females were up in arms over these “shrink it and pink it campaigns.” It was the idea that, “They don’t get me, and this is in fact the opposite of what I like. If you’ve shown, on a continual basis, to not understand my preferences, then why would I want to continually consume with you in the future if it’s been clearly understood that you don’t understand me.”