The Role of Sports Economics in the Sport Management Curriculum

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portion of the legal aspects of sport, economic models of the behavior of for-profit and non- profit organizations and organization theory play an important role in governance in sport, finance in sport has a significant amount of overlap with economics. Stier and Schneider (2000) assessed the utility of these guidelines by surveying 91 sport management program directors and 202 professionals in the sports industry about their opin- ion of the suitability of each of these content areas. The 202 industry professionals were classi- fied into ten different segments, including sport broadcasting, event marketing/management, sports facilities, and others. The program directors “agreed” – average score of 1.8 on a seven point Likert scale variable anchored by “strongly agree (1)” and “strongly disagree (7)” – that economics in sport was a suitable subject area. The professionals were “neutral” – average score of 2.5 on the seven point Likert scale – on the suitability of economics in sport as a content area, but there was statistically significant disagreement across industry segments regarding the suitability of economics in sport. The industry professionals surveyed were not opposed to economics in sports as a content area in the sport management curriculum, they were “neutral” to its inclusion. Stier and Schneider (2000) do not discuss the reasons behind this mild disagreement between program directors and industry professionals. However, the difference may be due in part to the overlap between economics and other content areas. For example, lawyers and law firms – one of the industry segments surveyed – may consider economics in sport to be a key part of the legal aspects of sport rather than a separate content area. The difference may also stem from the fact that, unlike sport marketing, sports economics was not a clearly defined specialization within economics in the late 1990s when this survey took place, leading to a lack of understanding of the meaning of economics in sport in the industry. Finally, the disagreement may come from the sometimes antagonistic relationship between economists and segments of the sports industry. Unlike, say, scholars who study sport communication, economists have been quite critical of the sports industry, in particular in the debate on the economic development effects of sports facilities. This might lead some industry officials to view economics in sport as a less than desirable content area. 14
Schneider and Stier (2000) undertook a similar assessment of the graduate curricular guidelines for sport management programs. The SMPRC graduate curricular guidelines contain ten content areas. Missing from the undergraduate content areas listed above are economics in sport and governance in sport; research in sport is added as a separate content area. Also budgeting and finance in sport becomes “financial management in sport” in the graduate content areas. The reason that economics in sport has been excluded from the graduate content areas is not clear. However, like the case of the undergraduate guidelines, there is clearly a significant amount of economic content in a number of the graduate content areas. According to Stier and Schneider (2000) and Schneider and Stier (2000), the SMPRC is currently in the process of revising their curricular guidelines for the 21st century. Part of this revision appears to be in response to the divergent perceptions between sport management program directors and sport management professionals. Who Offers Sports Economics? As part of my survey of programs, I examined the course requirements in the undergraduate and masters programs in sport management in order to determine how many of these programs required students to take sports economics. While examining these requirements, it became apparent that sports finance courses were also an important component of the curriculum in many departments, so I tabulated the number of programs that required a sports finance course. Based on the course titles, I also tabulated the number of programs that required a hybrid sports economics-sports finance course and not separate sports finance and economics courses. These hybrid courses had titles like “Sport Finance and Economics,” “Sports Economics and Finance,” and “Budgeting, Finance and Economics in Sport Man- agement.” Without a detailed examination of the syllabi, I could not tell if these courses were, in fact, one or the other with a misleading title, so I treated them as hybrid courses. Table 6 summarizes the data on sports economics and sports finance course requirements in 15
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