Understanding Sport Management

International perspectives

Trish Bradbury, Ian O'Boyle, Trish Bradbury, Ian O'Boyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317328391
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Sport management is a rapidly developing industry which continues to grow in size and scope on an international scale. This comprehensive and engaging textbook offers a complete introduction to core principles and best practice in contemporary sport management. Adopting an issues-based approach and drawing on the very latest research, it demonstrates how theory translates into practice across all the key functional areas of sport management, from governance and leadership to tourism and events.

Written by a team of experts from across the globe, the book explores sport management from a truly international perspective and looks at all levels from professional, high-performance sport to non-profit and grassroots. With extended real-world case studies and an array of helpful features in every chapter, it addresses crucial topics such as:

• managing organisational performance
• communication and social media
• sponsorship and marketing
• the impact of sport on society
• future directions for sport management.

Complemented by a companion website full of additional teaching and learning resources for students and instructors, this is an essential textbook for any degree-level sport management course.

SECTION 1

The sport management environment

CHAPTER 1

The new sport management environment

Ian O’Boyle and Trish Bradbury

Key Terms: Professionalism; Commercialisation; Governance; Financial Management

INTRODUCTION

Sport management has come a long way in the past 20 years. As a previously volunteerled sector even at upper echelons of the industry, the sport management environment has now evolved into a legitimate professional and commercial sector and continues to grow in size and scope in many nations throughout the world. The growth in broadcasting revenue and other commercial aspects of the industry have largely fuelled this more professionalised approach and this has undoubtedly had a trickle-down effect throughout all levels of sporting structures, from elite to community based sport. The industry has often been criticised for not staying on pace with developments in the traditional business sector such as adopting what may be considered to be best practice in those environments, but over the past decade we are seeing more and more sport based organisations align their operations with traditional business and management practices that has legitimised the sector further and has made it a respected and vibrant part of the global business and management environment.

However, the uniqueness of sport, as an overall product, presents a number of challenges and complexities that must be overcome, such as the use of performance enhancing drugs in elite level sport, governance failures and challenges at almost all levels of the industry, specific strategic and marketing principles that must be applied, and the emergence of match fixing and other forms of unethical behaviour, to name a few. This book discusses the most important of these challenges as individual chapters and relies on the most up-to-date academic research in the field to provide insight and perhaps to illuminate a path of how such challenges can be addressed and overcome. As the opening section in this book, the current chapter attempts to provide a context for the current state of the sport management field while also highlighting what is to follow in the forthcoming chapters.

THE SPORT MANAGEMENT ENVIRONMENT

The sport management industry, like most other sectors, is heavily impacted by a number of other environments, such as the political, economic, social, technological and legal environments. From a political standpoint, many sport organisations rely directly on government support to fund their activities and to produce high performance athletes while maintaining growing participation levels in their respective sports. We also regularly see the impact that geopolitics has on the sport management environment through the selection of countries to host mega sporting events such as the Olympic Games and football World Cups. Organisations such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) have become as much politically based entities as they are sporting organisations with ties to major players in the global political environment that heavily impact the global sporting framework. From the economic and social perspectives, the sport management industry is also impacted due to issues such as the global financial crisis, which saw a general decline in commercial sponsorship within the sector, and social trends such as individuals leading more sedentary lifestyles and growing levels of obesity in various countries. Technology is also having a major impact within sport management from the growth of eSports, to improving the capabilities of sport organisations, to enhancing the customer (fan) experience through increased viewing options via smartphones, tablets, social media and live streaming of many major sporting events. And of course, the impact of the legal environment on sport management continues to be significant, particularly around issues such as the growth of combat sports like the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and their regulations, corruption and financial irregularities in organisations such as FIFA, match fixing and the use of illicit and performance enhancing drugs by athletes.

As the sport management industry has adopted a more professional ethos, we continue to see a steady growth in the ability of certain entities to generate significant levels of finance. We often see big headlines of the major sporting leagues around the world signing multibillion-dollar broadcasting deals that allow these entities to increase player salaries and financial returns to owners/investors while safeguarding the future of such leagues through a strong financial foundation. However, although in certain contexts, such as in the sport of Australian Rules football, there may be a trickle-down effect to lower levels of the code, many non-profit sport organisations continue to struggle financially and are often at risk of building up large levels of debt and having to be bailed out by affiliated organisations, as was the case with the Otago Rugby Union and New Zealand Rugby (NZR) in 2012.

It is becoming increasingly important to ensure that individuals who are in positions of power in sport organisations, such as senior managers and board members, have an adequate level of business and financial management acumen to provide the prospect of financial sustainability for their respective sports. There are many sources of finance a non-profit sport organisation can access, which is often referred to as the ‘income mix’. In many western European nations and within Australasia, significant funding for non-profit sport comes from government entities, but this is often tied to the potential for those sports to perform well at major sporting events and achieve high performance results. As a result, this form of funding is notoriously unpredictable and unstable and sport organisations should not rely solely on this type of income. Diversification in the income mix is crucial for the sustainability of these sporting codes and the ability of organisations to generate commercial income, including corporate sponsorship, is paramount. Yet again, however, the ability of sport organisations to achieve this is often dependent on the calibre of individuals involved in the management and governance of these entities.

Perhaps the biggest issue to impact the sport management environment in recent years, both at the elite and non-elite level, is the area of sport governance. The topic received global media attention in 2015 due to the level of corruption that was uncovered in FIFA surrounding the illegal payments and misappropriation of funds embedded in the culture of FIFA and facilitated by some of the most senior figures in the organisation, including former president Sepp Blatter. What followed was an investigation by the Department of Justice in the United States and several indictments of senior FIFA officials. FIFA itself has attempted to undertake a reform process but has been criticised for not doing enough, and many of the alleged actors in the corrupt regime of the ‘old’ FIFA continue to act in positions of power in the supposedly reformed entity.

One of the major points in relation to this embedded culture of corruption and failings of sport governance has been the awarding of FIFA World Cups to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022, with both bids apparently awarded through bribery and other unethical and immoral actions on behalf of those in influential positions. With regard to Qatar 2022, the labour practices involved in the building of stadia to host the event have come under scrutiny, with many construction workers having been killed due to unsafe site conditions and other workers denied basic employee rights. FIFA has tried to distance itself from these issues by claiming that it is not its responsibility to govern the labour practices of a country that is hosting a future World Cup.

FIFA is not the only international sport governing body to have made headlines for poor sport governance practice in recent years. The IOC’s lack of leadership around the hosting of the 2016 summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro has been called into question. Many health experts throughout the world had called for these Games to be postponed or moved to another location based on the prevalence of the Zika virus in Brazil and the potential for it to spread globally should the Olympics go ahead in Rio. Unsurprisingly, however, the IOC has been unwilling to postpone or move the Games and this decision has been supported by the World Health Organization (WHO), with whom the IOC has a ‘close’ relationship that has been labelled by many as a conflict of interest surrounding this decision.

Lack of good governance practice is apparent not only in the upper echelons of the sport management environment but also in systems that are characterised as non-profit and responsible for governing sporting codes from elite to community level. In countries where a federal model of sport governance exists, such as the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and a host of other major sporting nations, the issue of governance has been at the fore as sporting systems try to establish streamlined networks that work closely together to achieve ‘whole of sport’ progression as opposed to an environment where organisations often work in isolation and at times are in conflict with their affiliated entities. This issue has been recognised by a number of state based sporting agencies such as UK Sport, the Australian Sport Commission (ASC) and Sport NZ, which have all called for better governance practices in non-profit sport and have produced documents and resources to assist organisations in this endeavour.

In relation to sport governance, an issue that regularly receives media attention and is certainly a concern for many sporting entities is the area of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sport. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is often criticised for not having a strong enough hold on the issue of PEDs in sport and for not dealing with the issue appropriately. High profile athletes such as Lance Armstrong and Maria Sharapova have brought the issue to the fore once again in recent times, and the extent to which PEDs are being abused in high performance sport appears to be far greater than most would have predicted. Russia’s state-sponsored doping programme is a prime example of how far governments are willing to go to achieve success in international sporting events and paints a dire picture of the culture of using such drugs that appears to be embedded in certain sports and within certain countries’ sport science regimes.

As we can see, the sport management environment is far more complex than it was a decade ago, both in terms of its professional and commercial capabilities but also in terms of the issues facing the sector. The industry needs effective leadership from within its own ranks that is based on best practice from more established fields such as the traditional business discipline. Academic work is an important element of driving the sport management industry forward and relevant academic research is beginning to play a significant role in the development of policy and practices within many sporting bodies both at the governance and management levels. We anticipate that this book, which relies on the latest research in the field in relation to a number of pertinent areas of sport management enquiry, will add to the current conversation and assist in developing a best practice approach for a variety of areas in the sport management industry.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

This opening chapter presents a rough guide for the current context of the sport management environment and some of the major issues facing the industry in the 21st century. This is followed by Chapter 2, which deals with the role of sport in society. Sport has been ubiquitous to all cultures throughout history, playing an essential role in the social and community life of people across the globe. We have found evidence of sport and play in cave paintings, ancient artefacts, art and media, with sport being a space for acculturation, learning important life skills, health and fitness and of course enjoyment as a participant or as a spectator. The focus of this chapter is on the impact of sport in society and the various roles that sport can play for individuals, the community, nations and internationally. This chapter will provide a brief discussion of sport and its role in society before discussing how sport impacts different aspects of society, including: playing sport, sport and government policy and sport for development.

Chapter 3 addresses the structural and functional aspects of sport governing bodies. After describing the unique attributes of a sport governing body, the authors describe the need for and the nature of the horizontal differentiation of the three manifestations of sport: egalitarian sport, elite sport and entertainment sport. It is also stressed that there should be a vertical differentiation of the three hierarchical units in a sport governing body, which are the institutional subsystem (i.e. board of directors), the managerial subsystem consisting of the chief executive officers and their associates, and the technical subsystem, which is involved in producing the services offered by national sport governing bodies (NSGBs). The chapter also outlines the specific responsibilities of an NSGB stemming from its position as the apex of an inter-organisational network.

Chapter 4 explores the world of professional sport. Professional sport is associated with a payment to athletes involved in delivering sport, usually via a club or league competition. These sports comprise many stakeholders who have a direct impact on their functioning. These stakeholders represent internal groups such as the athletes, clubs, leagues and governing bodies who have a direct impact on professional sport. This group represents the people who provide the rules and regulations and actual spectacle of professional sport. External groups represented by the fans, communities, corporations and media are other stakeholders who contribute through attending, reporting and having a commercial association with professional sport. The involvement these stakeholder groups have on the professional sport system is addressed throughout this chapter.

Chapt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Section 1 The sport management environment
• Section 2 Foundations of sport management
• Section 3 Elements of sport management
• Index