The NCAA (NationalCollegiatee Athletic Association) is very complicated right now. We are only really referring to big-time college football, men’s football, and men’s basketball. Issues are revolving around the black market and the Adidas case where guys were arrested for handing money over. These things wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t pressure around young athletes on national television. Tons of money around them and they aren’t seeing any of it. These are enormous businesses, and these issues defy common sense.

One fundamental question asks if there is something to look at here or not. In 1984, a class-action suit was brought by the major football schools against the NCAA and Walter Byers negotiating to make their own television deals. This case, known as the Oklahoma Board of Regents V NCAA was a supreme court case where Notre Dame at the University of Texas thought that they should be able to make their own deals instead of going through the NCAA.

The NCAA responded to this by explaining that their actions were a restraint of trade and antitrust. They went to the Supreme Court and the court favored the NCAA, confirming that it was a restraint of trade and antitrust. The Athletic Director of the University of Texas, Frank Broyles, says, “These schools can now kill what they eat.” This began the proliferation of conference and school deals for the selling of television rights.

March Madness Keeps Schools Connected to the NCAA

Here’s the curious thing though. Around that same time, another significant college sports phenomenon started becoming extremely popular with the advent of cable television and ESPN. This is known as March Madness with college basketball. Many of the schools with excellent football programs also have excellent basketball programs. However, strangely, the now one billion contract for March Madness is still retained and controlled by the NCAA instead of the schools.

Why would these schools insist on having football rights but not basketball rights? The answer is that if they take basketball rights too, then they wouldn’t need the NCAA anymore. Without the NCAA and the student-athlete, their economic model falls apart. This beautiful thing that rakes in tons of money without paying anyone for it would be gone and there’s no justification for that.

Global Sports: The International Olympic Committee’s Rule 40

People who have no ethical or moral center are aggressively challenging sports business today. They don’t understand, and they don’t care. They don’t care if student-athletes are illegal or if closed professional leagues are illegal. They don’t care that the IOC (International Olympic Committee) has something called Rule 40, which doesn’t allow Olympic athletes to promote their sponsors while competing during the Olympics. The IOC controls all of the sponsorships for the Olympics, so they control the exclusive rights and make all the money.

These strict policies may be completely unfair, but they are what make them so brutally efficient and economically advantageous. They dispassionately, coldly, and clinically understand the models of profit.

Sports Management Education

Until you understand these types of sports business models, then you are just another guy calling up sports talk radio to give your opinion. You need to grow up. Do you want to run this thing? Do you want to own this thing? Do you understand what it means? Do you want to change this thing? If you think it’s a lousy system and want to change it, then maybe you need to join them to beat them because you have to understand it before you begin.

In the early 1990s in Baltimore, it was time to build a new ballpark for the Major League Baseball Orioles. Part of the ownership group had the idea that there was a good place to do it in the inner harbor, an area with rich history that had seen better times and seen better days. This idea to put a new ballpark with an old style feel in the inner harbor around all of this history was a real innovation.

The ownership group also started to rebuild the area around it, not only for sports, but for all sorts of business, for all sorts of retail, for things that the local government was doing, and certainly for things in the social sector and the nonprofit space. But it really was a sports-led development that built the community. When some of the leadership from the Baltimore Orioles then moved over to San Diego with the Padres, also in Major League Baseball, it was time to build a new ballpark there.

Taking concepts for a new ballpark, giving them some historical touches with modern amenities, and doing it in a location that would really speak to things that are important to the community seemed to be a theme that was working and that was something to go on. It’s a fine example of a terrific venue that stands today and that’s in great use today.

The next project for this team was then to go to Boston and take on what became a renovation of Fenway Park, one of the oldest, most storied sports venues on the planet, at least in modern times. The renovation involved everything from rebuilding some of the seating — not all of it, because we wanted to keep some tradition and some history — but it included updating the luxury suites, putting some seats on top of the famous green monster out in left field, and putting a newer kind of seating in the right field stands.

For decades, beer was hand delivered off of a truck each and every day. It’s quite a cost in a number of ways. One of the things that they resolved to do with the new ownership was to take some property that sat across the street, a warehouse in particular, and to convert it into a beer storage facility. What they were able to do was then pump the beer through lines into Fenway Park, cutting down costs for sure but also making things much more efficient and effective.

An International Sports Management Education Example

What’s interesting about this group is that along the way, the Boston Red Sox ownership, led by John Henry, purchased an English Premier League football club, Liverpool, one of the most storied organizations in all of global sports. And along with that comes Anfield, the venue that Liverpool has played at for ages. That ‘s more than 150 years old. You can begin to imagine maybe what it is that might be done in terms of renovating that if we look at the timeline between what happened in Baltimore, what happened in San Diego, what happened in Boston. This is quite a sports management project.

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.

“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.