Informative, easy and pleasant reading about sport and sport industry globalization

Giuseppe Telesca
European University Institute

This is a book that maintains its title promise and explores current issues and future directions in international sport business. It provides a very informative and defined map of what is going on in the sport industry and is very easy and pleasant to read, thanks also to a wealth of classifications and tables and to a series of useful and explicative case-studies, commentaries and interviews with senior sport business executives. It is also particularly refreshing that this book – written by scholars based in Australia – offers sport business insights which go beyond the usual suspects (North American or European examples are complemented by references to sport business in other areas of the world – India for instance).

Moving to the analysis of the single chapters, the first, besides introducing the book, briefly provides a two-century historical journey through modern sport, and deals with the global context in which the growth of sport business has taken place. Each of the four stages of globalization identified since 1850 are associated with different features and degrees of development of sport in general, and sport business in particular. If during globalization 1.0 (1850–1914) sports such as soccer, rugby and cricket spread universally, and during globalization 2.0 (1945–1980s) sport was sold and consumed globally through the medium of radio and (later) television, mainly at national level, the last three decades have seen the sport phenomenon becoming ever more globalized and entrepreneurial. With the dramatic changes in technology and the use of digital media platforms, sport business has become able to reach more customers and to better target its messages. If the television allowed a first value explosion of sport business, the even more dramatic second value explosion that we have been witnessing in the last decades seems to be destined to last for a while.

Chapter 2 explores the global sport industry as a whole and offers a comprehensive idea of the sector’s exceptional diversity. While sport industry is classified and analyzed in its different components – the sporting goods industry, the community-based sport participation industry, the commercial sport and fitness industry – it is correctly argued that the industry of major sport events has been instrumental in driving the value creation and growth of the sport sector as a whole.

Paris has been the first ticketless (in the sense of physical tickets) edition of the Games, and AI has been mobilized to improve sport reporting and broadcasting, foil security threats and analyze sporting performances. Chapter 5 touches upon many of these trends.

Chapter 3 looks at the good that sport industry can do for maintaining and increasing social capital through the promotion of development and peace, diversity, equity, equality and inclusion, community cohesion, physical, mental and social health, sustainability and integrity. After all, the birth of modern sport is connected to the early industrialization in Britain, where sport was also used to heal the social infrastructure eroded by the processes associated to the move from an agricultural to an industrial society. Although the chapter emphasizes the role of sport industry as a force for good – particularly through corporate and social responsibility – it does not ignore the dark side of sport business (see, for instance, the commentary on pages 55–6 dedicated to the aborted attempt by major European football clubs to create a Super League in 2021).

Chapter 4 lays the theoretical foundation to discuss innovation and entrepreneurship in sport business and introduces a block of chapters (5 to 7) that, to some extent, sit at the core of this book. These chapters explore and map the extremely rapid changes which have occurred in the last decades (and are still ongoing). The aim of these chapters is to demonstrate that whether, historically speaking, the sport business ecosystem has been evolving in a relatively fixed setting, an era of disruption has recently kicked in. The drivers of this innovation are different in nature – of great interest is, for instance, the chapter 4 commentary which discusses how Covid-19 has brought about, or accelerated, innovation in sport business (see pages 84–7). The consequences of innovation are experienced in various domains of sport business: from the use of technology and data (chapter 5) to the development of sport products (chapter 6), to the changing relationship between sport and media representation and distribution (chapter 7).

As a consequence of this febrile innovation, it is argued that sport organizations which in the past tended to pursue consistent revenue streams and to maintain long-established business models, are undergoing (and will undergo in the future) a profound transformation. A superficial glance at the 2024 Olympics allows us to fully appreciate this element. Paris has been the first ticketless (in the sense of physical tickets) edition of the Games, and AI has been mobilized to improve sport reporting and broadcasting, foil security threats and analyze sporting performances. Chapter 5 touches upon many of these trends. But the 2024 Olympics also reinforced patterns which had already emerged in previous editions the Games. The decreasing (if still remarkable) role played by television, for instance, accompanied by the growing attention to new media, can be better understood after reading chapter 7 of the book, which explains the move from free-to-air broadcasting and linear television to the proliferation of digital media which have also affected the way in which consumers enjoy sport events (the importance of short-form sport content, for example).

How are sport organizations, both at national and international level, both governmental and non-governmental, reacting to the changes in sport business described in the previous chapters? Are governance and leadership in sport up to the task of effectively governing what is becoming a bigger business? And which model of sport governance can provide better opportunities to sport business in a context of ongoing globalization of sport? Chapter 8 tries to answer these questions by exploring different model of sport governance associated with different political regimes and reflecting on issues of legitimacy and democracy in sport.

Chapter 9, by utilizing the 2020 edition of the Global Trends reports written by the National Intelligence Council, which hypothesized 5 different future scenarios for the world in a few decades, tries to imagine the future of sport business under these 5 scenarios: Renaissance of Democracies, A World Adrift, Competitive Coexistence, Separate Silos, and Tragedy and Mobilization.[1] This final chapter represents a welcome reminder that sport business evolution does not depend exclusively on economy and technology.

Having discussed the (many) good things that International Sport Business has to offer to the reader, one cannot help noticing the absence of a chapter devoted to the ‘geopolitical economy’ of sport business (and here I borrow a formulation recently used by Simon Chadwick and Christos Anagnostopoulos.[2]) It is true that globalization and technological change (notably digitalization) have disrupted and radically transformed sport business, and the authors are right to insist on this point. Yet, in spite of what implicitly seems to emerge at times in the book, the role of state actors in sport business, far from becoming negligible (as seemed destined to happen only a couple of decades ago), is gaining momentum and assuming trajectories which differ from the ones of the traditional European model recalled at the end of chapter 2, in which public actors promoted the physical game within communities. The cases of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia staging major sporting events or investing heavily in football and other sports for reasons other than commercial, are only the most egregious examples of this trend. Here the book is found wanting. Take, for instance, the ‘in practice’ section of Chapter 3 (pages 60–2) devoted to the rise of the City Football Group (CFG). The creation of CFG is analyzed as a mere business venture, driven by passion and whose ultimate goal is profit, while questions related to the nature of the Group – led by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates – and its political agenda are bypassed.

In spite of this limit, this book remains an excellent tool to navigate the fast-changing world of sport business.

Copyright © Giuseppe Telesca 2024

[1] https://www.dni.gov/index.php/gt2040-home/scenarios-for-2040

[2] Simon Chadwick and Christos Anagnostopoulos. ‘A geopolitical economy of football: the case of Qatar’. International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, 16, no.2 (2024): 331–8.