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.

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.”

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.