Do you know how old the sport industry is?

Sport may go back to the Neolithic age of 7000 BC with wrestling matches seen on cave paintings or when military training incorporated the idea to develop, train and prove superior techniques to fight or work together as a team. The history of sport reflects a great deal of our social changes a the objective of sport has changed as one goes back in history.

When did sport become an industry similar to the software, financial  or pharmaceutical industry?

Surprisingly to many sport as an industry was created 150 years  ago and has grown significantly in this period. A very short life span for an industry compared to other business sectors such as medicine, education and food.

Sport was recreational until it became competitive but the real change happened when it became entertainment. Entertainment was accompanied by business and with money came enormous growth.

In the last 150 years, sport has developed from being a huge cost of maintaining and contracting athletes to developing prime teams like the Red Sox. In 1875 the Red Sox had combined athlete salaries accounting for $133.4 million of the team budget and each victory costing the Red Sox approximately $1.4 million in payroll alone, a bargain in comparison to the $2.3 million of the New York Yankees with athlete salaries alone of $209.1 million. It was not until Spalding & Brothers Inc. decided to capitalize on his baseball success by selling sporting merchandise. 10 months later, Spalding & Brothers, Inc. recorded a profit of $1,083 to create a real business of the sport sector. This same projection was seen in broadcasting rights of many sport events with a 12 fold increase in NFL broadcasting rights since the 1980s.

Today the Boston Red Sox has a team value of $2.1 billion and revenue of $370 million. Franchises such as Los Angeles Clipper recently had a potential forsaking price of $2 billion at 15 times revenue.  The Philadelphia 76ers were valued at $700 million and sold in 2011.  The sports business is big, and not just in the US.

In Europe, the three most valued teams with global reach far exceeds the US market with Spain′s Real Madrid worth $3.44 billion, Barcelona $3.2 billion and UK Manchester United $2.81 billion.

The 2014 FIFA World cup ended with 3 million ticket sales over 3 billion viewers worldwide and media rights worth $1.7 billion total and TV channels were rewarded handsomely with record viewers.  The World Cup is only a small fragment of the world soccer market of revenues from ticket sales, media rights and sponsorships have grown annually at 7% and worth over $80 billion. This is without taking into account that sporting apparel, equipment and health and fitness spending generates as much as $700 billion yearly.

Revenues, for example, from Real Madrid were $675 million for the 2012-13 season with commercial revenue padded by a $41 million-a-year uniform deal with Adidas and a shirt sponsorship with Qatar Foundation worth $39 million annually. Barcelona will have an $800 million renovation of the team’s Nou Camp stadium. The project will commence in 2017 and be completed in 2021. The Nike store at Nou Camp stadium has the highest sales of any Nike store in the world.

The average soccer team in the top 50 is worth $1.34 billion today up 8% over the last year. There are 38 teams worth $1 billion. There weren't any teams worth $2 billion three years ago; now there are six. Minimum entry to enter the list for the top 50 is $856 million (AC Milan) compared to $586 million four years ago. The Yankees are the most valuable non-soccer team in the world with a worth of $2.5 billion while TV drives the value of the Bronx Bombers with an exercised option to increase its ownership of the Yankees’ regional sports network. The sport sector is booming.

More money means more completion and more evolution. Sport brands now require complex management with the CEO of the franchises being experts in business and no longer just sport. Today’s sport environment requires complex management to understand the sport environment and make decisions. With a booming sector comes demand for more athletes and the need to improve sport training. Just like any large industry development before, increased demand leads to increased need of supply of sport and sport is built upon athletes. As the convergence between sport and entertainment rises to the challenges of new digital technology which will shape the way leisure time is spent, sponsorship agreements and increased media rights emerge as the main engines of growth.

At TEAM we are focusing on the future needs of this rising sport industry by developing sophisticated measurement techniques of athletes. Technology, data, analytics are all lagging behind in the sports industry.

There is a lot of focus in large data analysis but most of data in sports are dirty and based on static results. A focus towards quantifying the subjective area is needed to know if an athlete is improving. Most coaches cannot even evaluate if an athlete is really improving, and more importantly, why. The coaches’ role is not to make a decision on variability but to be in charge of teaching, mentoring and providing discipline. As the sport industry grows the need to support sport users becomes fundamental to the development of potential future athletes and TEAM offers advanced elite support to the success in their sport, enjoyment in future life of recreational sport and fundamental basics for later life both health, socially and professionally.