As a sports fanatic, you love the thrill of the game and are thankful for all that sports have brought to your life: entertainment, connection, and a source of passion that keeps you eagerly anticipating each new season.
Why not build this passion into your career path? This is achievable through entering the world of sports management. This field brings business savvy to the forefront, using advanced strategies and frameworks to attract fans, boost profits, and inspire impressive athletic performance.
What is sports management, exactly? This encompasses the numerous business strategies and activities that underscore athletics, ensuring that every team, facility, and event runs smoothly. There are many moving parts, and while some sports managers may take on executive roles that involve broad oversight (such as general manager or president of operations), this field also involves a great deal of specialization.
If you’re wondering how to translate your love of sports into an exciting career, below, we explore the field’s most compelling opportunities — revealing what it takes to break into the competitive world of sports management and how ambitious professionals can shape the modern athletic landscape.
What Do Sports Management Professionals Do?
Sports management is a multifaceted field with specialized professionals who address distinct aspects of managing teams, venues, or events. That being said, broad-based expertise can be helpful, as this allows sports management professionals to step into a variety of compelling roles and collaborate effectively with other teams or departments. Key elements of sports management include:
Budget Management
Budgeting and accounting determine how teams, organizations, or events utilize financial resources while ensuring that spending remains consistent with organizational goals or values. This underscores the prudent allocation of funds to improve everything from player performance to fan engagement.
This includes elements such as:
- Budget planning (estimating revenue and predicting expenses).
- Managing numerous sources of income (such as ticket sales, sponsorship, and broadcasting rights).
- Controlling a myriad of expenses (like player salaries or facility maintenance).
Sponsorship Negotiation
Sponsorships provide a significant source of revenue. Insights from sports intelligence platform SponsorUnited suggest that, in 2024, major American sports earned a collective $7.66 billion via sponsorships. Beyond this, sponsorships are valuable because they boost brand exposure and customer engagement.
In sports management, sponsorship essentials include vetting potential sponsors to determine whether they sufficiently align with brand values, while negotiation promotes mutually beneficial terms within sponsorship agreements. These negotiations may delve into merchandising, naming rights, brand visibility, or participation in community outreach.
Event Planning and Coordination
From games to tournaments and even brand activations, various events bring excitement and connection to the wide world of athletics. These occasions must be carefully planned for and strategically executed to ensure that the fan experience feels as seamless and enjoyable as possible.
Many event-specific factors can influence fan experiences, including everything from venue layout to technology integrations, fan services, and transportation. Event planning touches on all these concerns, ensuring that the many moving parts within any given event are meticulously coordinated and that teams exceed fans’ high expectations. Increasingly, this involves tech-forward solutions that provide real-time insights and optimize resource allocation.
Marketing and Public Relations (PR)
The sports business is built on passionate fandoms that will go to great lengths to show their support. To some extent, these fan bases may appear to be built into the very fabric of the communities in which various teams or organizations are based. Yet they are also cultivated through intentional marketing campaigns, which aim to not only welcome new fans into the fray but also ensure that current fans are as engaged and as excited as possible.
These campaigns are carefully curated and intensively tracked. In-depth metrics reveal how various messaging resonates with fans and whether this outreach translates to tangible results such as higher ticket sales or increased television viewership. Public relations in sports can also prove highly influential, utilizing media outlets to communicate meaningful team stories or developments in a way that deepens fan loyalty.
Compliance and Risk Management
The modern sports business presents hazards, ranging from injuries to facility damage to legal challenges. Risk management brings a systematic approach to identifying these many sports-related risks and addressing concerns proactively, so their impact can be limited or at least controlled. Compliance officers and risk managers work to highlight risks, develop policies or protocols, and ensure that all parties adhere to strict federal regulations or league rules.
Facility Management
Sports managers may be heavily involved in overseeing the physical spaces in which athletic activities and events occur. Facility management determines whether these spaces remain safe and hygienic — and whether they can handle the flow of fans and other moving parts that keep athletic events running smoothly.
This can look a bit like a microcosm of the overall sports management field — encompassing facility-specific budget planning, risk management, and operational logistics — with sponsorships and marketing also frequently coming into play. While there can be some overlap between event coordination and facilities management, the latter involves a greater focus on the long-term upkeep that helps facilities remain functional and welcoming far into the future.
Athlete Representation
Individual athletes look to sports managers to help them clarify their goals, both athletic and financial, and make considerable progress toward achieving these objectives. Representatives can help athletes score optimal contracts and may also shape endorsement deals. Beyond this, athletes may look to representatives like sports agents for insights into long-term career planning, including viable options to continue generating revenue after they leave the field or the court.
Career Opportunities in Sports Management
As a diverse field, sports management provides ample opportunities for business-minded professionals to draw from their love of the game. The following are a few of today’s most compelling sports management career paths:
Athletic Director
Athletic directors oversee sports programs, often involving high schools or colleges. These leaders may be involved in hiring coaches, scheduling practices, or managing budgets. Their ultimate goal is to foster optimal health and well-being among diverse student-athletes.
Sports Agent
Offering representation for athletes, sports agents may give advice regarding contract negotiations and can help players obtain valuable endorsements. They offer targeted career guidance, including assistance with financial planning. Sports agents may need to register with sports leagues or player associations, verifying their intention to conduct themselves ethically while complying with league rules and regulations.
Event Coordinator
Focused on games, tournaments, or other events that draw athletes and fans together, event coordinators or planners handle the many day-to-day concerns that determine whether athletic events run smoothly. This calls for precise scheduling, along with extensive coordination with vendors, security details, or venue staff members. Their efforts influence ticketing, concessions, and parking logistics, with coordinators planning proactively yet also addressing a range of difficult-to-predict concerns on the fly.
Marketing Manager
Setting the tone for team outreach, marketing managers are committed to developing large and highly engaged fan bases that consistently show up to games as well as support teams from afar. They are marketing visionaries, developing compelling concepts that reflect sports brands and values while attracting the attention of fans and community members. They oversee a range of marketing initiatives, from email campaigns to in-person brand activations to social media outreach.
Facility Manager
Facilities such as stadiums or arenas allow athletes to shine while providing a comfortable and enjoyable place in which fans can cheer on their favorite teams. These spaces must be carefully maintained — and this is where facility managers make all the difference. Tasked with optimizing turf or court conditions and managing ongoing concerns such as HVAC or lighting, these leaders tackle all the behind-the-scenes details that keep venues safe, accessible, and visually appealing.
Operations Manager
Determining the overall logistics of critical organizational or venue-based functions and workflows, operations managers plan and execute a variety of essential processes that keep entire organizations coordinated and responsive. This may involve some element of game-day coordination but extends beyond specific events to also include equipment management, facility coordination, and staff support.
Essential Skills for Sports Management Professionals
As multi-talented professionals, sports managers rely on vast skill sets that include a wide range of technical competencies, business insights, and interpersonal qualities known as soft skills. The following abilities are especially crucial and can be developed while pursuing a sports management degree:
- Communication skills – Sports management professionals interact extensively with coaches, athletes, media representatives, and team owners. They must be capable of adjusting their tone or language to reflect the varying needs or priorities of these individuals. No matter the audience, however, succinct and persuasive language is highly valued.
- Leadership abilities – Coaches are by no means the only leaders who inspire remarkable feats on the field or off; sports managers accomplish the same, but they may lead more diverse teams that encompass not only athletes but also staff members such as marketing analysts, operations assistants, and other hardworking individuals. As leaders, they must understand the many techniques used to boost morale and develop a strong team culture — but they may need to adapt these strategies to reflect unique personalities or situation-specific challenges.
- Marketing expertise – Marketing concepts are widely applicable beyond the specialization of sports marketing. They also influence sponsorship negotiations, athlete representation, and other concerns. Marketing expertise makes it easier to evaluate key decisions in the context of branding and fan engagement, providing the metrics and analysis needed to connect with target audiences while continuing to drive profits.
- Problem-solving skills – Sports managers face a quickly changing series of challenges, with every day presenting new problems to be solved. These concerns can look considerably different depending on the sports manager’s preferred specialization, but they can often be tackled leveraging foundational problem-solving skills that encompass critical thinking, adaptability, and data-driven decision-making.
- Financial management – Soft skills may be vital to success in sports management, but these should be accompanied by quantitative abilities that allow sports managers to make the most of available financial resources. To that end, sports managers are ideally capable of analyzing financial reports, forecasting revenue, and negotiating financial contracts — all while maintaining an emphasis on compliance through detailed reporting.
- Knowledge of sports law and ethics – The current sports industry is governed by a complex series of rules and regulations, which touch on all the previously discussed aspects of sports management: team finances, facility operations, and athlete contracts. Aspiring sports managers should understand relevant legal and ethical frameworks and continually reflect on how they might build ethical principles into decision-making initiatives.
The Importance of Education in Sports Management
A passion for the athletic world is a must for any aspiring sports manager. However, this alone will not guarantee success in this demanding field. Sports managers should cultivate the aforementioned skills, too — and increasingly, credentials are also expected, including degrees or industry-specific certifications.
Targeted degree programs ensure that aspiring sports managers address the wide range of topics relevant in this dynamic field, offering ample opportunities to apply the skills highlighted above. The right credentials can provide a competitive edge, along with a sense of confidence to help sports managers lead with vision.
Emerging Trends in Sports Management
In contemporary sports management, many cultural trends and emerging technologies join forces to change what we once took for granted about how teams were run. The following notable trends can be further explored through sports management coursework.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) in sports operations – Artificial intelligence and machine learning already play a pivotal part in the sports industry. AI-driven wearables monitor movement and prevent injury while AI-powered solutions aid real-time video analysis. Add ML algorithms for dynamic pricing and AI-oriented fan personalization, and it’s clear why AI is widely regarded as the future of athletics. Moving forward, algorithms will grow even more sophisticated, shifting the field from predictive solutions to a prescriptive approach in which AI provides strategic recommendations to boost operational efficiency, athletic performance, and everything in between.
- Data analytics for smarter decision-making – While in-depth metrics have long influenced recruitment and coaching strategies (as seen in iconic examples such as the Moneyball success story), these are beginning to play a greater role in shaping marketing campaigns and operational concerns. In Moneyball, the Oakland A’s used advanced statistical analysis to identify undervalued players, defying conventional scouting wisdom and assembling a competitive team on a limited budget. These days, sports managers enjoy access to a wealth of cutting-edge tools that allow them to gather data from a wider range of sources — and to analyze that data to optimize ticket sales, merch pricing, facility usage, and beyond.
- Enhanced fan engagement through technology – The fan experience has changed drastically in response to social media and mobile access. These days, fans watch and discuss sports using a variety of advanced apps and platforms, which are cleverly designed to help them feel engaged through personalized content and interactive features. Moving forward, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) could make fan experiences feel even more immersive.
- Esports and virtual competitions – Sports management is not limited to traditional sports such as football or baseball. Esports — involving a competitive approach to gaming — have experienced rapid growth in the last few years, drawing millions of fans to thrilling virtual competitions. At this point, esports faces many of the same management and operational challenges seen in the traditional world of athletics, such as event planning, sponsorship deals, and even facility management.
- Sustainability and eco-friendly event planning – Sustainability is increasingly a priority among eco-conscious fans, who don’t want to feel as if their love of sports might negatively impact the environment. Insights from market research company Censuswide (alongside carbon accounting leader Carbon Responsible) suggest that, among football fans in the United Kingdom, nearly two-thirds believe that football clubs should go to greater lengths to encourage sustainable behaviors among fans. Teams can leverage these intentions by building sustainable solutions into every venue or event — calling attention to, for example, recycling programs, renewable energy, or water conservation strategies.
Sports Management: Key Takeaways
Build your passion for athletic achievement into a career path that places you at the heart of the action. As a sports manager, you can exert considerable influence in a fast-paced field, all while helping both athletes and fans thrive. There are plenty of ways to contribute to the big picture of a vibrant sports industry that inspires community pride — and with the right training and skills, you can achieve your own unique vision of sports management success.
Jumpstart a Winning Career: Study Sports Management With JWU Online
Embrace your love of sports and pursue a career that builds your deep-seated passion into every moment on the job. It all begins with sports-focused management training.
Look to Johnson & Wales University (JWU) Online for a fascinating curriculum. We’re proud to offer a robust program dedicated to all things sports management: our Bachelor of Science in Sports, Entertainment, Event – Management. Take the next step and learn more today.
For more information about completing your degree online, complete the Request Info form, call 855-JWU-1881, or email [email protected].