There was a time in American history when the country had no income tax and great monopolists ruled the corporate sphere. Monopoly was the defining characteristic of the American economy.
Sports was no exception. Major League Baseball began to demonstrate that it was an unfair monopoly violating antitrust laws, specifically the Sherman Antitrust Act. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the justices essentially ruled “Baseball was a monopoly, but that’s okay.” Their underlying legal argument that baseball was not interstate business and that all business in baseball is local.
This was a fiction. The real argument was “Well, it’s sports. Everybody likes it, and so we should give it an exception from antitrust laws.” The court’s action formed the first closed league in world history, a legal monopoly. No one else has the ability to form Major League Baseball in any city, territory, or other part of the United States. The only Major League Baseball is Major League Baseball – an excellent economic model for them.
After baseball in the 1920s, professional football leagues and other nascent leagues began to form in a large-scale professionalization of sport. Athletes were paid and coached. Being trained began to take hold. Sports management grew as a viable academic field and profession.
After World War II, the country settled into a different mindset where television began to dominate the cultural space of American homes. In 1958, right before New Year’s Eve, the National Football League became lucky. Their NFL championship game, between the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts, was on black-and-white TVs all over the country. It was an exciting game in a snowstorm, with sudden-death overtime and great heroes such as Johnny Unitas and Frank Gifford.
Both America and football fell in love. America, football, television, and the whole world saw that money could be made for people who understood the power of television as it related to the broadcast of live sports.
The International Olympic Committee also took notice. Already, major sneaker companies and Olympic athletes had formed relationships. The acceleration of those relationships, combined with the acceleration of non-sports brands with live sports, became as big as almost any business in the world. For the next forty years, live sports dominated television, through the creation of cable in the late 1970s all the way to the beginning of the 21st century.
Today, the major questions remain: will the value of live sport continue to anchor the value of the $600 billion global sports business? Will different kinds of consumption, from different kings of consumers, through different kinds of technology diminish or increase the value of sport in the marketplace, particularly due to the increased ways of consuming it? How must sports management education adapt?
