Sports Management Blog

This post contains my live notes on one of the topics covered during the 2010 Lausanne International Sports Management Conference. Apologies for any typo and/or misinterpretations which might have snuck in the text.
Feel free to comment below!

Several speakers give their (short) perspective on the management of mega-events.

1st Speaker: Denis Hainault (Vancouver 2010 General Manager Olympic Ice Hockey Venue) on Venue Management in Mega Events

Several functions related to the event’s organisation, on which a single perspective needs to be brought from a venue perspective. Ends up being fairly complex, sometimes venue team needs to act a bit like a “referee”.

Need to have an extremely rigorous plan – and stick to the plan. Success is in a large part related to the quality of the venue-management team, and to how the team is managed. Applying sound leadership principles in that setting is critical.

2nd Speaker: Andreja Wieser (PROSKE group’s Head of Sports) on Management of dignitaries during Olympic Games

Protocol rules are pretty strict, but there is still a lot of passion involved in working with dignitaries.

Within Olympic events, the rules are very well defined at IOC level – the Chief of Protocol, however, has to navigate through its intricacies and convince all stakeholders of the necessity to abide by those rules.

The accreditation process is a key element in any large-scale sport event.

3nd Speaker: Jonathan Hill (COO Kentaro Group) on the “Brazil World Tour”

“Brazil World Tour” is a series of friendly football games between the Brazilian “A” national team and other high-profile teams, organised outside of Brazil and marketed by Kentaro.

Brazilian team plays all of its friendly games in the run-upto the 2014 World Cup outside of Brazil (a lot of Brazilian players do not play in Brazil anyway…). Since Brazil is hosting the next World Cup, no qualification games get in the way.

4-steps approach:

1. Strategy definition (simple: find opponents, find stadia, negotiate commercial rights);
2. Scheduling of the games (taking into account many considerations linked to the Brazilian team’s opponents’ needs);
3. Structure the deals with the various teams & venues;
4. Manage operations (incl. ticketing, promotion, team logistics, media management).

I thought I’d kick-start this blog with a few thoughts about why it could be interesting to write about sports management and social media.

First, I have a feeling that sports management itself is not necessarily a topic which is widely or appropriately covered on the ‘Net. Sure, there are commercial organisations active in this field which try to increase or maintain their visibility by touting their wares or value proposition on their website or blog. But I have yet to come across a forum for unbiased, non-commercially oriented exchanges on what are the key factors for a sports organisation to be managed for success.

Second, while social media is all about encouraging self-designated membership of chosen “communities of interest”, and about offering those members a way to produce & share user-generated content (think Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, or microblogging pioneer Twitter), these functionalities of social media do not seem to me to have made sufficient strides in the field of sports management – which is puzzling, since sportspeople typically think of themselves as dedicated members of a community of interest (triathletes, inline skaters, runners, you name them – they are all much more than part of a club, a Federation or a sports organisation, they feel they are part of a community).

Finally, there seem to be very few attempts out there to bring these 2 fields together, at least in the open-discussion form of a blog – with a few notable exceptions. Jason Peck’s Take A Peck blog provides very valuable insights specifically on sports and social media, with a US perspective; Lewis Howes’ Sports Networker blog also puts social media front-and-center in his dicsussions on sports, giving contributors in his very wide network a chance to share their expertise; Russell Scibetti, a regular contributor to  the Business of Sport blog, is also extremely knowledgeable on the topic of technology in sports. All are excellent, and I encourage you to subscribe to their feed – as well as follow them on Twitter, at @jasonpeck, @sportsnetworker and @rscibetti, respectively. (I will provide in a later post more Twitter handles of users I find interesting in this space).

In this blog, I will therefore try to start what will hopefully become a lively exchange on the ways in which social media functionalities can and should be introduced into the management of sports organisations and/or events.

Since my background is in consulting, and more specifically on financial budgeting & controlling, I will also post the occasional article on the financial management of sports organisations – from a budgeting as well as an expense-monitoring perspective.

Do you also think that the sports business could do a better use of social media? Do you know of any good blog which covers sports management and social media? Share your views & tips in the comments below!