This paper seeks to critically analyze the emergence of sport management as an emerging form of management style which is particularly focused on the propagation of sport as a business. Moreover the study will also look into the assertion of Slack (1998) regarding the commonness of sport management as compared other forms of management. In order to carefully analyze the emergence of sport management, a discussion on the materialization of sports from its humble beginnings to the industry’s current magnitude will also be presented.
Apparently, in the area of economic anthropology, Veblen (1899) stipulated on barbarian lifestyles of the upper, non-productive leisure classes that have existed since antiquity. Veblen writes that in his time, the normal and characteristic occupations of the class in this mature phase of its life history are in form very much the same as in its earlier days. These occupations are government, war, sports, and devout observances. Persons unduly given to difficult theoretical niceties may hold that these occupations are still incidentally and indirectly “productive”; but it is to be noted as decisive of the question in hand that the ordinary and ostensible motive of the leisure class in engaging in these occupations is assuredly not an increase of wealth by a productive effort (1899, 40). Moreover, non-productive occupations and endeavors are sought because of status and pecuniary considerations. Even the lower and middle classes of society, who are often engaged in productive and industrious activities such as civil engineering and farming, are prone to engage in what Veblen calls modest conspicuous consumption, conspicuous leisure, and wasteful behavior because these classes emulate the leisure class. Institutions slowly evolve and do so in response to novelty and to pressures from vested interests. Historically derived customs and mores unduly influence current, as well as future, thought and customs, even though the past may not be applicable to current or future situations. (Eby 1998) This conservatism is associated with “social inertia”. (1899, 191) Veblen adds, “The leisure class is the conservative class”. (1899, 198)
Social scientists have written much on the influence that sports have had and continue to have on various cultures (Hoberman, 1984). According to Veblen, the glorification of sports and gaming in general is a powerful leisure-class value that shapes and influences all social strata and encourages institutional conservatism. This happens in several ways. First, just as the lower classes try to emulate the leisure class, sports fans admire and try to emulate their sports heroes. “Be like Mike” (Michael Jordan) was a popular commercial jingle designed to influence children to be like the NBA superstar and to consume a particular product that he was endorsing.
More importantly, sports mania rekindles the “barbarian traits” and instincts that Veblen claims are perpetuated in modern society. These traits include predatory prowess and invidious comparisons with other people and are useful in acquiring wealth and success even at the expense of others. To Veblen, the promotion of predatory prowess among youth is antithetical to humanistic values, but it is inevitable. He also notes that sports terminology often parallels that found in the military and in warfare. “To crush one’s foe,” for example, is a phrase used in both warfare and sports. Sports is used to indoctrinate young people into leisure-class values and is used to maintain the prevailing ideology of rough, cutthroat competition as being acceptable (1899, 254-256).
Various sports are often defended by claims that such activities develop among both participants and observers a sense of competition, leadership skills, workmanship, and craftiness. According to Veblen, this is especially true of football (1899, 262). Despite society’s efforts to equate sports with socially redeeming values, Veblen simply sees sports as emulation of the predatory prowess. “Habituation to sports should conduce to a fuller development of the aptitude for fraud; and the prevalence in the community of that predatory temperament which inclines men to sports connotes a prevalence of sharp practice and callous disregard of the interests of others, individually and collectively” (1899, 274). In short, a “dog-eat-dog” mentality that is cultivated by an addiction to sports can lead to an unbridled self-interest that, when taken to extreme, can lead to business chicanery and nefarious financial dealings that are harmful to most if not all people within a society.
Because sports was an industry that generated more than billion in revenues in 1992, William F. Stier, Jr. (1993b) predicted “an ever increasing need for professionals trained in the managerial, administrative, and business aspects of sport.” Carter (1994) lists and explains the ways that job seekers enter and are handsomely rewarded for sport management careers. Most major league sports franchises have between 20 and 35 highly skilled business professionals per team. Minor league and collegiate programs may have a smaller number of professionals per team. All of these managers are critical to such functions as public relations, event promotion, ticket sales, marketing, advertising, travel logistics, and financial management. Often, public relations people are responsible for “community outreach” programs, which are intended to show how local teams are helping their community to raise money for such programs as the United Way, the American Heart Association, or other charitable institutions. Such “public service” builds community support for a team and probably makes it easier for a team to gather more sponsors as well as local government support. Although the pay is initially low and the work is hard and irregular, successful managers can expect to earn large salaries over time (Carter 1994, 97).
Moreover, people with a sport management background serve both amateur and professional sports organizations and can also be employed by media and promotional institutions (Carter 1994, 141-165). Such employees can help a TV or radio network estimate the potential earnings from carrying sporting events and selling advertising time. Both cable and regular TV networks sell their most expensive advertising slots during athletic events because demand for such ad time is highly inelastic and can reach a large number of young and middle-aged mid- to upper-income males. Advertising revenues are so important to networks that, on the advice of sports advertising and programming experts.
Carter (1994) also points out the growing need for professionals in the sports and gaming industries to monitor regulatory requirements, to manage athletes’ public images and their personal financial affairs, and to manage the details of sporting events such as golf tournaments, bowl games, etc. Failure to meet rules can cost a university thousands of dollars in fines and sanctions such as being barred from both post-season play and playing on national television. Although, in the past, lawyers have typically dominated the field of sport management, Carter predicts that this will continue to change as lawyers focus on athletic contracts and legal issues, while professionals trained in accounting, advertising, promotions, and related areas serve other roles.
It promotes and facilitates the conspicuous leisure and consumption of those who pay for the high-priced tickets of collegiate and professional sporting events; those who make large donations to university athletic funds; those executives who buy luxury suites in sports stadiums and arenas; and those who pay large sums of money each year traveling to watch their favorite team play away from home. It would probably be safe to say that a sign of conspicuous leisure today would be the ability of athletic fans to pay for season tickets for both home and away games for their favorite teams. Even people of modest means will pay dearly for season tickets and team memorabilia because of their devotion to athletics. Owning season tickets, especially those that come with ideal seats, confers a special status on these fans. Being able to travel from city to city in order to follow one’s favorite team also confers a special status because few can afford such traveling expenses and time away from work. One of the jobs of a sports manager and promoter is to exploit the conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure aspects of fan loyalty in order to sell more tickets at ever-increasing prices. Even though athletic events can be viewed in the home, such limited participation is seen as the poor person’s way of participating in sports.
Moreover, Veblen would probably have viewed the proliferation of sport management education as a natural outgrowth of both the leisure and working classes’ preoccupation with sports; the conservatism and pro-business attitudes and “pecuniary interests” of university trustees and administrators who have to approve such degree programs; the promotion and further affirmation within our society of the belief in the virtues of predatory prowess and competition; and the need for managers in industries that are full of conspicuous leisure and waste and non-productive labor.
In the obsession with sports and gaming, people of all backgrounds show themselves to be increasingly dependent upon sports as entertainment, as a means of employment, and as a very lucrative business. With millions being made in the sports and recreation industries, colleges and universities have seen fit to provide programs that will supply a well-trained group of professionals to keep these industries strong and growing. However, the economics of professional sports has been preoccupied with the dual proposition that a large market team will dominate a small market team, and that the competitive imbalance will be invariant under a variety of institutional constraints designed to alter it.
Similar to normal business entities, the business of sport considers as well its competition and its consumers. In order to better look into this similarity, we shall look into the case of football as a sporting industry, particularly the clubs that are within their respective leagues. Predicaments and issues have hounded the football industry in the 1980s. According to the documented works of Jennet and Sloan (1985), the game is constantly in a parlous state of crisis particularly shown in the peak of 41.3 million capacity crowds in the late 1940s dwindling down into more or less eighteen million in the early goings of the 1980s.
This apparently was due to the inveterate absence of investment supplemented with a derisory supervision of clubs was to finish no more than a small number of years later in the Heysel (1985), Bradford (1985) and Hillsborough (1989) arena debacles. Something had to be accomplished if the sport’s outlook was to be protected. It is one of the contradictions in terms of football as a business that while it had protractedly performed a significant function in the cultural existence of the country, in the aspect of commercial entrepreneurship, its were moribund. To illustrate, the Chester Report (Football League, 1983) emphasized the majority of the clubs’ deficiency of profitable responsiveness, and a common dearth of sensitivity to consumer demands (Jennet & Sloan, 1985, pages 44-45).
The commercial supervision techniques made use of by most clubs had kept on practically unbothered for virtually seventy years. An examination of the club’s accounting practices by Arthur Anderson & Co. in 1982 found that ‘these were chaotic’ (Jennet & Sloan, 1985, page 54). The first part of 1990s, professional football teams continued to hardly ever make proceeds. Szymanski & Smith (1997, p 149) argued that in considerable element the clubs’ quandary emanated from the absence of a market in commercial jurisdiction. They asserted that while in a typical industrial organizations which were unsuccessful likely to depart from the marketplace sending-off the lingering clubs to develop stronger by creating a center of attention for customers from non-operational clubs, or underperforming clubs would be obtained by more efficient management organizations, in football, as a tenet neither of these occurrence transpired. This was for the reason that businessmen didn’t by and large purchase clubs to burgeon, and so subordinated productivity to the purpose of being perpetually victorious improved league status, by means of financial support if required. As clubs were customarily not making money there was no inducement for them to be bought by new proprietors for profit-maximization motives.
More importantly, football clubs were by no means premeditated to be conformist profit-maximizing companies. They were projected to perform as sporting clubs. Traditional financial examination is also unsuccessful to put into operation because clubs are efficiently local monopolies with commitments founded on emotional and not profitable interactions. If a club were to go insolvent then it is doubtful that its fans would forge an allegiance to another team. Thus, club proprietors had no encouragement to see to it that their local adversary go out of business; if they had an incentive is to see them continue to exist so they could stack the gate money from the local derby.
In addition, there are two significant distinctiveness of football. Initially, there is the fan equity phenomenon. As stated earlier, teams exists because of emotional ties with their followers. Thus football is a social and cultural institution. Second, it is also required for a good returns is for real competition between clubs, with the opportunity left ajar that even the negligible may attain laurels if they systematize successfully. (Salomon Brothers, 1997, page 9) A prosperous football fan base relies on the subsistence of bona fide competitive uncertainty. Thus the notions of ‘fan equity’ and ‘competitive uncertainty’ are meticulously entwined.
As with the chronological situation of ground security, the football industry look as if not capable to be on familiar terms with this fact, or to bring into being a regulatory structure which will operate to save from harm its key assets. The said notions are important since fans pay money for products as a means of bracketing together themselves with their sporting heroes, but also as a way of putting across shared aims with their fellow enthusiasts. Organized sport and football especially, appeals to an emotional venture by the fan in the competitive events which is very much few and far between in the framework of the archetypal consumer and producer communication relationship. It is this capability to catch the attention of paying spectators at the playing field and through television, and put up for sale connected goods which makes sports clubs and franchises priceless as businesses.
Moreover, football devoid of the fans with a communal emotional venture in their club’s accomplishment, and an emotional investment in the letdown of their rival, does not happen as expected; either with the sole purpose as a human familiarity, or as a profitable endeavor. Marketable forces are in the offing to wear away both ‘fan equity’ and ‘competitive uncertainty’. This is for the reason that institutional tenure of clubs will grind down links with indigenous geographic identities, which is at the starting place of the ‘fan equity’ conception. It will cut into sequential oligopolistic propensities which will trim down the by and large stage of competitive uncertainty in the course of action. Similarly, the deep seated perils of such commercialization are that the fan will come into being as to no longer be aware of any ‘equity’ in the match. The more understanding business analysts attach importance to the potential of this risk.
References:
Carter, David M. (1994) You Can’t Play the Game if You Don’t Know the Rules: Career Opportunities in Sports Management. Manassas Park, Va.: Impact Publications, 1994.
Eby, Clare Virginia. (1988) “Veblen’s Assault on Time.” The Journal of Economic Issues 32, no. 3. September 1998: 689-707.
Football League (1983). Report of the Committee on Football (Chairman Sir N. Chester), Lytham St Annes: The Football League.
Hoberman, John M. (1984) Sport and Political Ideolgy. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Jennett, N. and Sloane, P. J. (1985). ‘The future of league football: a critique of the Chester Committee of Enquiry’. Leisure Studies, 4, pp. 39–45.
Salomon Brothers (1997). ‘UK Football Clubs: valuable assets?’, Global Equity Research: Leisure. November. London: Salomon Brothers.
Stier, Jr., William F. (1993) “Meeting the Challenges of Managing Sport through Marketing, Fundraising, and Promotions.” Paper presented at the International Meeting of the World University Games, Buffalo, New York, July 9.
Szymanski, S. & Smith, R. (1997). ‘The English Football Industry: profit, performance and industrial structure’, International Review of Applied Economics, Vol. 11, No. 1, pages 135-153.
Veblen, Thorstein. (1899) The Higher Learning in America. New York: B. W. Huebsch.
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