Commercialisation: Professional Sports and Voluntary Sport
Hannah Ingram Commercialisation In Sport. The media is now more powerful and pervasive than ever before; in today 's world it 's impossible to go anywhere or to read a magazine or watch TV without a sports star encouraging you to buy the latest craze item. Whether it 's trainers, clothing, perfume or a car a sports personality will endeavour to sell it to you. The advertisement market loves to use sports people to sell their products, as they know these people attract an eclectic range of attention and puts their product in the "public eye". Popular sports stars now earn as much through advertising as they do from competing and there are many examples of this. Probably the best-known sports star in Britain is David Beckham who earns in the region of '4.6 million a year playing for Manchester United. His personal sponsorship deals include products such as; Adidas, Pepsi and Police Sunglasses. All...
Since its formative years sport has had a commercial component to its operation. As early as 590 BC Greek athletes were financially rewarded for an Olympic victory (Harris, 1964). However, in no previous time period have we seen the type of growth in the commercialization of sport, that we have seen in the last two decades. Today, sport is big business and big businesses are heavily involved in sport. Athletes in the major spectator sports are marketable commodities, sports teams are traded on the stock market, sponsorship rights at major events can cost millions of dollars, network television stations pay large fees to broadcast games, and the merchandising and licensing of sporting goods is a major multi- national business. These trends are not just restricted to professional athletes and events, many of them are equally applicable to the so-called amateur sports. In some ways parallelling the increased commercialization of sport has been the emergence of academic interest in the business and management of sport. Much of the work in this area,
Since its formative years sport has had a commercial component to its operation. As early as 590 BC Greek athletes were financially rewarded for an Olympic victory (Harris, 1964). However, in no previous time period have we seen the type of growth in the commercialization of sport, that we have seen in the last two decades. Today, sport is big business and big businesses are heavily involved in sport. Athletes in the major spectator sports are marketable commodities, sports teams are traded on the stock market, sponsorship rights at major events can cost millions of dollars, network television stations pay large fees to broadcast games, and the merchandising and licensing of sporting goods is a major multi- national business. These trends are not just restricted to professional athletes and events, many of them are equally applicable to the so-called amateur sports. In some ways parallelling the increased commercialization of sport has been the emergence of academic interest in the business and management of sport. Much of the work in this area,
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