One of the first things that happened in media history was the inclusion of a sports page in the newspaper. This happened in the 1800s when there were penny papers. The newspapers really needed to figure out how they could sell their papers to new audiences and people who weren’t already reading it. Sporting news was a great way to achieve that goal.

So, they began including a page on sports. A new kind of customer base came in and wanted to read about that. It really helped to legitimize sports as a force in society. That’s one of the only things that you can pick up the paper and really know it has its own section.

Radio’s Role in Global Sports Media History and the Need for Sports Management Education

That’s one piece of sports media history. Obviously, following newspapers, we had radio, where people could sit at home and listen to broadcasts of games. Even if they weren’t in that city, they could still feel like they knew what was happening in the game, and they didn’t have to wait until the next day’s newspaper came out to read about it.

Television Contributes to Media and Online Sports Management Education

From there, the evolution goes into television. One of the unique aspects of sports is that nobody really wants to watch a game that has already happened because it’s too easy to find out what the outcome was, especially today with the internet. There was one monumental game that in 1997 was actually voted the most popular network broadcast of a sporting event ever.

Wearable devices have become such a valuable tool for sports teams. Not only does it help us evaluate talent, but it can also help us develop and coach talent because it provides feedback to the athlete. By providing feedback to the athlete, it allows us to monitor his or her actions on a real-time basis. Wearable devices have become a valuable tool for global sports organizations and athletes, as well as sports management. Wearable devices can monitor athletes’ fitness and wellness. It can also monitor capability in different athletic movements.

It not only can be used to evaluate athletes, but it can also be used to develop, train, and provide real-time feedback. This is really important because athletes are often looking to succeed at the highest level and particularly elite athletes. Sports management education explains the evolving technology. It states that instead of just being used in an evaluative sense, we’re allowing wearables now to be employed as coaching devices.

There’s another reason why the business of sports is different from most other businesses. It’s because of the human element. On the sports stage, athletes can play out the virtues of grace under pressure, courage, leadership, and winning and losing. Sports is a really good stage on which to play out social conditions, and social conditions, when they’re properly understood, can be leveraged to create a better sports management business opportunity.

Here’s what I mean. Look at 1971, the first fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. In 1971, Muhammad Ali had been out of the sport because he had protested going into the Army and the Vietnam War. He had called America a country that was unfair in matters of race, and he had given up all his wealth from his chosen profession of boxing to stand on those principles.

He became a symbol of peace on one side of the issues in a very polarized America, and then he wanted to come back and fight. And Joe Frazier, the African-American heavyweight champion, was willing to fight Muhammad Ali. No one else would. Ali boldly claimed, “And this may shock and amaze you. But I will destroy Joe Frazier.”

Only Ali so sharply understood the divisions in America. He wasn’t just interested in promoting a boxing match for a global sports payday; he was interested in creating an entire culture around him. His interest was much larger than just focusing on boxing fans. Ali began to promote the fight not just as Muhammad Ali coming back to fight the current heavyweight champion — even on its own, a very compelling contest.

Instead, Ali framed the fight in more dramatic terms, “You see that guy over there? He’s an Uncle Tom. He represents the other side of the issues. He represents one kind of America. I represent another. Didn’t you know?”

And so it was no longer just for sports fans or boxing fans. It was for anybody who was thinking and breathing and who had an opinion during this intensely polarized time of differences of opinion. In other words, he took this contest from being just a boxing match and made it into something that was interesting to everybody.

The same thing happened when Billie Jean King played tennis against Bobby Riggs. Bobby Riggs wasn’t really a male chauvinist; Bobby Riggs was a gambler. As he once said, “If I can’t play for big money, I play for little money. And if I can’t play for a little money, I stay in bed that day.”

Riggs was trying to pay off his gambling debts and needed to figure out a way to create himself a payday. He looked around for the most divisive issue right then in 1973. Women’s liberation was a top contender, so he took the stance of saying that women shouldn’t be playing tennis.

At a time when women were on the rise, there was a charismatic leader named Billie Jean King. She didn’t even play the match, but Riggs created this utterly compelling match-up. It wasn’t between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King but between the oldest match-up in the world: man versus woman.

There was a lot riding on this event while Bobby Riggs looked at it as sort of a joke. The implications of this match for sports management education were high. People were watching to see what would happen for women’s rights and the expectations of women’s abilities. And Billie Jean King took the match, and she won. Because of that, we’ve seen a lot of changes in online sports management education.

Those changes have included the evolution of Title IX in the collegiate setting, which says that sports programs have to ensure equal opportunity for women to compete. So while big football and big basketball are generating most of the money for collegiate sports programs that money has to be redistributed to ensure opportunity for women to compete as well.

How do teams make money? They make money now in almost any way you could imagine, as long as it touches on something related to sports. What does that mean? It means that in the past, we looked at team revenues in terms of ticket sales, then in terms of merchandise, and some of the other ways that we think about going to the game.

Sports Management Education Examines Added Revenue Streams

But over time, certainly, over the past 50 years, we’ve seen revenue come in major numbers, in billions of dollars through television rights. Now we increasingly see it coming through all the ways we get to watch our games. As if that’s not enough, enter sports betting and all sorts of things online, including E-sports.

Television Revenue in Sports Management

Television revenue for the past 30 or so years has been a major driver of revenue for sports clubs and franchises anywhere in the world. Now what we’re starting to see, of course, is that it’s not just about watching them on television. We also watch on a second screen, which is kind of interesting, because it’s now for many people become the first screen.

Global Sports Access

Anywhere and anyway people are accessing sports, whether it’s a game, a behind the scenes video, or a little piece of the action that you didn’t even know existed, all of that is worth many billions of dollars to teams and the players who play on those teams, plus the players we watch in individual sports, like golf or tennis.

The relationship between athletes and the media has changed significantly. Nowadays, athletes don’t necessarily need to rely on the news media to share their stories, successes, or activities. In addition to social media, sports organizations and sports management have the ability to share their own news now. In the past, they were reliant on traditional media, television stations, and newspapers for these things.

Social Media Is the Future of Global Sports

In some ways, social media has given athletes more power of their own. This freedom has empowered them to tell their stories. But, in another sense, this has made things more difficult for them because they have to stay on top of social media all the time. They have to constantly check on what people are saying and posting. As a result, we almost see the media reporting on what happens on social media now, rather than, just covering breaking news stories the way they used to.

The Atlanta Braves’ facility is a good example of a ballpark that is very interactive with the fans. They offer their fans sports perks like renting a baseball glove or ziplining at the stadium. In addition, there are a number of other exciting things that fans can do when they aren’t watching the game.

Sports Management Education for Marketing Global Sports

The interesting thing about this interactive model is that it also benefits sponsorships. Sponsors want people to come to the game. Often, they have signs at any given arena or stadium. For example, Pepsi places advertisements all over the stadium, and they want as many eyes on those signs as possible in order to see a return on their investment.

Great Sports Management Leads to Great Sponsorships

These interactive experiences are a great way to draw people to the ballpark. Sponsors greatly appreciate this because more eyes in the ballpark mean more eyes are their sponsorship signs.

One example of the sports ecosystem is the Little Caesars Arena in Downtown Detroit. The community around this arena has always been vibrant. Even though it has seen its share of ups and downs, including more challenging times recently than in the past, it remains spirited.

We are looking at how sports can be used to grow a city through economic and social development. We are looking to take some of the things that aren’t working so well and use these events and venues to spur something new.

Sports Management Investments to Improve Development

Sports facilities have a unique way of helping communities come together. Part of this is due to the development of property that, otherwise, might not have a significant impact on the community for decades to come. It may be in a Brownfields area or an opportunity zone that would never see the level of investment if not for these facilities. So what we see in this type of ecosystem is the community coming to the downtown corridor to watch live sports.

Around 20-30 years ago, sports facilities were developed in the suburbs. People would trek out there or to areas on the fringe of the urban population to watch the games. Now we are seeing sports being developed more in the urban core. Along with that, we see transit and modalities that would never have happened if it weren’t for these investments.

This is not to say that sports are solely responsible for this kind of rebuild. It’s just saying that they helped accelerate the local government’s investments in the community. Sports helped bring more people to the local downtown market. It gets people to walk or take public transportation to the games, letting people spend more time in the urban core.

The Future of Global Sports Ecosystems

Whether these people live there or just visit, they are shopping there now. They are spending time and money there. They eat at the restaurants and see the events there. These people are crowding out money that’s usually being spent somewhere else. In addition, they are generating incremental income for the local community.

Let’s refer back to the example of Little Caesars Arena in the Detroit area. This building opened a year ago as the successor facility for the Joe Louis Arena. There has been a resurgence of putting sports in downtown areas. In Detroit, the Lions played out in Pontiac and the Pistons that played in Auburn Hills.

Even though the Joe Louis Arena was downtown, the Red Wings moved about a half a mile north to the Detroit District because there was a more modern facility there. It’s in downtown Detroit in a place called the District Detroit. It’s close to Comerica Park, where the Tigers play, and the Ford Field, where the Detroit Lions play.

Even in an area that has become a local sports hangout, you wouldn’t even know that the Little Arena was an arena if you walked up to it. Its facade appears to be offices, restaurants, and open spaces. It doesn’t look like the traditional arena of the past. However, when you walk in, you are greeted with videos and the history of the Red Wings and Pistons, who play there.

The flow through the building makes it a wonderful place to watch a sporting event. They offer many different ways to consume the game through great restaurants, shops, and video monitors. In addition, the inside of the building is full of digital media to help viewers enjoy the games. The Little Caesars Arena is a wonderful facility that will probably be the hallmark for how arenas will be built for the next several years.

Now there is this area in the urban core that is sports-related. But if you walk around, there are also restaurants, shops, and parking in the same urban core. More people are moving into the downtown corridor, which may not have happened without sports being built up there. It could have taken many more years to succeed without this kind of influence.

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.