March experience
For my march experience, I took online courses on iTunes from La Trobe University in Australia. The courses were run by Dr. Liam Lenten and the topics were about Sports Economics. I learned a lot about the business side of the sport and how the money gets distributed between different leagues. The other amusing part of my experience was I got to meet with France Bélanger, the Executive Vice President of Corporation Affairs and Chief Legal Officer and John Sedgwick, the Director of Legal Affairs of the Montreal Canadians. I met with them twice to talk about my project and they helped me answer many questions about the salary cap to further my research. After the meetings, Mr. Sedgwick gave me a small tour of the Bell Center; it was awesome because I got to see places that I never expected to see. Overall, my march experience was a great success.
Online courses
The Business of Football and Footballer: This online course was great even if most of the information had nothing to do with my topic. The speaker was talking about different game theories; a penalty kicker and a goalkeeper was used as a metaphor for TV advertisement. The last 20 minutes talked about the salary cap, the guest speaker, John Dedulica, explained how it worked. The Australian Football League is interesting because it has different rules a team must follow such as: a roster of 20-23 players, 4 must be foreign, 3 must be under the age of 21, and must have a team in the national youth league (16-20) who are not bound with contracts but just registered as players.
Economics and Sports Broadcasting 1 and 2: For part 1, the course covered the role of TV advertising and its business side. It is said that TV broadcasting is now more important than ticket revenue. Many advertising brand are now involved in the sport industry such as cars, food, clothes etc. The NFL is the only sport where every game can play a major role in the playoffs because it has a short season unlike the other leagues(NBA, NHL, MLB) who has up to 80 games a season. The course also covered the popularity of certain sports and the percentage of each gender that watches. The second part explained the different type of broadcasting that leagues has such as radio and stream. The media ownership was also mentioned, the NHL, NBA, and MLB have exclusive right on their home games; however, the NFL don't, the league decides for their right.
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Competitive Balance 1 and 2: This online course was by far the most important because it covered the inequality between bigger and smaller team markets in professional sports. Leagues outside of the United State has different competition structure. The European Soccer does not have any playoffs, whoever is on top of the list at the end of the season wins the title; however, in North America is different. After the regular season, a few teams competes in the playoffs. The Australian League is similar to the leagues in the US. The second part was about the quality of play between teams in the league. The fans will only be attracted to the sport when there is good competition. The major leagues have the highest attendance for any given sport.
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Profit-Maximizing Sports Franchises 2: This course was interesting mainly because it talked about the amount of money a club has to pay to get skilled players on their roster. Dr. Lenten gave an example, a club with no star will cost $25 million/year. If the club adds a star player, it will cost them an extra $10 million/year. The more talented players there is in team, the more expensive it will be for the club. Fans would love to see owners spend more money on player's talent for their team because they want to see better competition. There are teams around the world that are destined to never win a title because it is not in the owner's best interest. For it to happen, the owner will need to fund money from their own pocket. A team must have the right players to build a strong and competitive team.
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Sports Leagues Behavior 2: This online course covered the different ways of sharing revenues. Before television and TV Broadcasting, everything paid at the gate was someway the revenue was shared in some leagues. The NBA and NHL does not have gate sharing but NFL does. It is a 60-40, the home team gets 60% of the revenue and hand over 40% to other team. The MLB has a local broadcasting sharing. Many leagues also set new rules such as banning alcohol and violence to obtain fans to see the games. Parents will most likely let their kid play the sport if it has a good influence. Last but not the least, the largest cities tend to have more teams. New York City has 2 side in all of the major leagues with a total of 9 teams but small cities mostly have 1 in each major league with a total of 4.
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