Global Business Strategy of Sport

Seminar
This event has now finished.
  • Date and time: Monday 2 December 2024, 11am to 12pm
  • Location: In-person only
    P/L/001 - Lecture Theatre , School of Physics, Engineering and Technology Building, Campus West, University of York (Map)
  • Audience: Open to staff, students (postgraduate researchers only)
  • Admission: Free admission, booking not required

Event details

Sports business includes production and marketing of sport goods, sponsorships, merchandise, player contracts, media rights - and the associated market power, politization and corruption. The globalisation of sports business is a relatively new phenomenon. It took off with the commercialisation of the two major international sport events, the Olympic Games and the FIFA football World Cup. The case study provides a detailed account of the central role that an individual (Horst Dassler) and a company (Adidas) had in the process of developing the international dimension of sports business. This has progressed exponentially since then. The lecture provides evidence of this development: global marketing of national leagues such as the English Premier League, NFL, expansion of championships and tournaments, globalisation of player labour markets, the importance of individual media rights, huge differences between sports, sportswashing and corrupt governance of international federations.

About the speaker

Professor Klaus Nielsen

Professor of Institutional Economics at Birkbeck College, University of London. Research areas: innovation, social capital, and sport economics and management. Co-author of ‘When Sport Meets Business. Capabilities, Challenges, Critiques‘, 2017 (also published in a Chinese version) and  ‘Professional Team Sports and the Soft Budget Constraint‘, 2022. Instrumental in the establishment of the Danish elite sport organization Team Danmark. Recent external evaluations commissioned by the Finnish and Swedish governments: ‘Elite Sport in Finland’ (2022) and ‘Swedish Elite Sport’ (2024).