For the second year in a row, the top ten of the SportBusiness Postgraduate Rankings contains just a single course from outside of the United States of America – which happens to be the only non-US-based course to have ever topped the list in its 13-year history: the Fifa Master at CIES. This year has also seen a decline in the number of non-US programmes in the overall top 40, down to 13 – having made up almost half of the rankings in 2021, when 18 came from the rest of the world.
To understand why America continues to dominate our rankings, we took a look at some of the key distinctions between US programmes and the rest of the world, and some innovations that may change things in the future.
A more developed market
One reason is simply that the US has been doing this far longer. The courses at Ohio University and UMass have finished in the top spot of our rankings in every year but one, and it’s no coincidence both have been running for over 50 years. That’s not just 50 years in which to hone and refine their teaching methods, but 50 years’ worth of graduates seeded across the global sports industry, creating an unparalleled alumni network.
At the centre of the US’s dominance, though, is the fact that the American sports market is so much more mature and developed, in a commercial sense, than anywhere in the rest of the world. Real Madrid, the world’s biggest and most valuable football team, is only the 13th most valuable sports team overall, behind 12 US-based teams from across the NFL, NBA and MLB. And beneath the major leagues, the American collegiate system provides another layer of the sports business which requires just as many people to run, staff and operate it at all levels.
Michelle Harrolle, Director of the Vinik Sport & Entertainment Management Programme at the University of South Florida, notes that this also creates far more opportunities for students to get hands-on experience of the sport industry while studying, and great employment opportunities after graduation. “In the Tampa Bay Area, we have access to the National Football League, the National Hockey League, the United Soccer League, the Women’s Tennis Association, Ironman… all within reach of our campus, so our network is super strong in this space,” she says.
“And this density of professional sports organisations is true for lots of American big cities. Meanwhile, if you take a state like Iowa, there’s not a lot of professional teams, but people live and breathe the college sports teams, so even in smaller markets there’s a hugely developed sports ecosystem.”
Peter Dickenson, Postgraduate Programme Director at Loughborough University, observes that in the North American market, sport is viewed and run much more strictly as a business, while in Europe it still often retains its more social, egalitarian roots. “There’s a lot of stuff that happens in the States, where it’s a cutthroat, business-oriented perspective, that perhaps we’re beginning to catch up with but haven’t necessarily got there yet,” he says. “That said, for some things, we might not want to get there, or have gone in a completely different direction. ‘Sport for good’, it its broadest sense, is still important.”
Employability focus
A bigger sports sector and more developed economic model means not only more demand for educated graduates, but for the kinds of specialist knowledge of the industry that are being generated by sports management courses – fuelling another aspect that gives American courses an advantage in the rankings, which is their greater focus on employability.
It is worth noting here that the methodology we use for the SportBusiness Rankings have also tended to foreground those elements, particularly as we assess only postgraduate, not undergraduate courses. (The QS Rankings, for instance, which look at a much wider range of criteria, places Loughborough as the best in the world for sports-related subjects, while schools in Canada and Australia also appear in the top ten.) By far the biggest weighting in our survey – carrying more than double the points of any other individual criterion – is given to employment status at 12 months and three years after graduation, which plays far more into the US approach.
“If you look just at the state of Florida and the people who govern our university system, there’s a huge focus on how universities are going to help students with jobs,” says Harrolle. “Getting them onto job placements, preparing them for the job market. The way it’s seen here is, you’re paying for a service to be educated, so with that, let’s make sure we’re preparing you the best way possible for what’s next, so we do a lot of ‘above and beyond the classroom’ work, helping you with interviews, teaching you about gratitude, teaching you about leadership, and integrating those within everything we do.”
It is not the case, of course, that European courses don’t focus on creating employable skillsets, but that they often prioritise a more traditional university model of theory and research, says Dickenson. “From my experience of the US market, I’ve seen a lot of student assessments that focus on the ‘real world’, [with] answers are expected to be underpinned academically.” he tells SportBusiness. In the UK system, the focus might be inverted. “We’re pretty good at using academic underpinnings to explain the ‘real world’.” Neither approach is necessarily ‘correct’, he says, but “a bridge linking both camps is paramount to sport management.”
A traditional advantage for American sports management courses has been an ability to be more reflexive and reactive, Dickenson adds. “The US is very agile in what it can do. If something’s happening [in the sports world] and they see a movement in it, they are allowed to run with it. Because of the nature of the US market, if they see something changing, they can go and have a play.” The tenure system in the US also creates a greater level job stability for senior professors, he points out, meaning academics feel freer to play around with elements of their teaching, leading to more opportunities to innovate.
Internationalisation and ‘cross-pollination’
So, are there any reasons that the US’s dominance of the SportBusiness and other university rankings should change in the coming years? One reason may be the increasing internationalisation of the sports industry.
With the NBA, MLB and NFL now using annual international fixtures to expand their reach, and bodies like Fifa and World Rugby looking enviously at the US market for growth, the industry is starting to require different kinds of people, both with more general commercial skillsets, and with more specific local knowledge. The Global Institute for Sport, which operates postgraduate degree courses out of major sports venues in London, Manchester, Miami and Melbourne, is one provider that is prepared for this development.
By having an international base and approach, GIS president Sharona Friedman feels that the course is able to cherry pick the best knowledge from each territory it works in, and then disseminate that knowledge around the world. “When looking at Australia [where GIS has its newest campus], for instance, they’re really big on sustainability,” she says. “They have the best fan engagement in the world, it’s very successful and very different from the model in the US, where they’re much better on things like sponsorship and marketing. So every market has something different they bring to the table, which we want to build into our courses.
“And I would argue that different places have inherently different cultural values, so a part of what we’re trying to do is actually level the playing fields around the world by taking areas of strengths and weaknesses and disseminating them accordingly. It’s about that cross-pollination.”
But internationalisation is not just an advantage for institutions like GIS. Dickenson and Harrolle also both attest to an increased number of international students from the likes of India or China coming to the UK and the US respectively and then taking the knowledge they acquire back to their home markets and developing the sports industry there, where there is now greater demand for those specific skillsets, rather than choosing to stay within the Western ecosystems.
Friedman concludes by noting that the advantages the US has long enjoyed will be eroded as the sector matures around the world, and suggests that “levelling of the playing field” will come to the education sector, too. “Sports subjects have always been really popular in the US, because sport has always been big, big money in the US. That’s now happening all around the world in markets that previously didn’t have commercially developed sports sectors. If you look at the sheer number of people outside the US verses inside of the US – it can catch up and even eclipse it at some point.”