To work in the sports industry is now very competitive as there is a good supply of workers with good qualifications which is pushing the standard of sports coaches and workers up.
Consumer Spending
Consumer spending gross’ over half of the income that football makes, which is up to millions of pounds. The customers and fans are always out to buy the latest products which are associated with either their team or general football. This includes; newest strips, football boots, footballs or magazines. This allows the people merchandising the products to price everything quite high which is why consumer spending totals out as much as it does. Tickets are very high on demand with every football team as the number of fans to the number of seats in the stadium is not enough. This is more of a problem with the premier league teams rather than the lower divisions, although this problem is starting to disappear with the arrival of televised matches. Now that the football matches are televised people do no longer want tickets to the matches as before. The biggest part of consumer spending is brought in through sports clothing and footwear. This table shows the amount that it makes:
This yet again shows that the popularity of the sport is increasing. Consumer spending will continue to increase its profits with the increase of popularity and as long as the teams in the premier league maintain their current status within football their fans will continue to spend the money that is being made towards football.
Athletics & Fitness
Athletics and fitness has become one of the biggest trends in the sports industry, this is because of a huge boost in the number of people concerned about their health or either just wanting to get themselves into shape. The participants of this activity are now under great demand on wanting to join a private gym or athletics clubs. There are five different sports areas that come into athletics and fitness, they are:
- Keep fit/aerobics
- Weight training/gym
- Jogging
- Athletics
- Martial arts
These five sports are all a type of fitness. These are the sports that are looked at as basic exercise and are a way of keeping fit and maintaining and increasing health and fitness.
Participation
As a none competitive sport there aren’t as many people involved with leagues and clubs and it is more of an activity done on your own. This is due to the massive boost in people concerned about their physical health and appearance. Within athletics there are many governing bodies but closest to us is the NOEAA (north of England athletics association) which holds 3 different activities in competition level. The NOEAA is the governing body for athletics in the north east of England. It is responsible for the promotion and development of athletics within that area. It governing body as a whole divides itself into north, east south and west. I have looked into what the north eastern clubs are available. There are; road running and cycling, track and field, cross country and swimming which are all held in clubs and participated at competition level.
With the amount of people concerned about keeping fit caused a huge rise in the amount of gyms and leisure centres available. There are more of both private and public leisure facilities; the local councils have a wide variety of leisure centres around the counties. Here in Durham there are 5; Sherburn, Deerness, Abbey, Coxhoe and Meadowfield. All of these gyms are council run. This allows people to participate and access these gyms easily as they are spotted around the county. This table shows the levels of participation in fitness and running in 1998 and 2000:
As you can see from the table there was a massive increase in the number of participants in every activity as there were even figures available in 1998 but when looking at the numbers for 2000 every sport has a figure and it has also increased dramatically.
In most cases the participants that take part in sport regularly will more than likely take part in other sports also. This table below shows how much regular participants in each of the activities above also take part regularly in other sports activities:
Nearly a third of those who regularly take part in keep fit also visit the gym regularly, and 18% also go jogging regularly. They are also twice as likely as sports participants in general to regularly take part in athletics or running, there are 13% that do so. About half of the people that go jogging are also regular participants in keep fit activities and the other half also do weight training either do weight training or gym.
Employment
With the wide range of activities within fitness and athletics this means that there are a lot of jobs available which more than likely will open other options to different activities as the relatively same skills will be needed for the general jobs. This is only unless the job is skilled and specific to a certain sport and needs qualifications or certificates.
Consumer Spending
This table below shows the prices since 1995 within the sports industry:
(Prices in £millions)
By 1999 there was an added growth of 7 per cent and total expenditure of £13, 067.88 million. The large growth in participation is due to the growth of private sector sport. The sporting goods sector is the largest sector of the industry and data that we receive is reliable enough to predict how much will be spent on sporting goods in the next few years. Golf is the largest market as a result of popularity and growth of the market and how much it costs to buy the equipment.
Unit 3 – Task 2
Football
The organisations of sports events, leagues and tournaments etc. takes a lot of planning out and the plans for it goes through a number of different people. The planning becomes more important when you move up the scale towards the more professional level, then more important again when it comes to tournaments eg. FA Cup.
Starting at the lower level, the organisation of amateur and none competitive leagues go through a list of people but not as many as there tends to be with professional leagues. The league is organised by 2 or more people for 1 league and are responsible for all the administration in this league. This includes sorting out the teams and fixtures etc. When it comes to cups and tournaments within the county, this goes to a higher level and it goes to someone that is involved but has little to do with every team in the county and that person is responsible for entering the teams into the cup. It is the managers of the team to organise everything once the match is set up; travel, pitch, or problems with when the match is etc. all of the people listed above do not get paid for this service except the director of sports for the county as he is responsible for football and every other sport in the county.
Once it gets to national level there are associations and boards that organise the events. The biggest football association in the England is The F.A (football association). The F.A weren’t very well known about until the start of the premier league in 1992. The F.A deal with 2 competitions within football, they are the 2 biggest events in English football, the F.A cup. This then escalates to the highest level which is international level, FIFA. FIFA are involved with every league and cup that exists in football, they organise the biggest cup in football history which is the world cup, FIFA are left in responsibility of international teams and tournaments that involve them.
Athletics
Athletics is only really recognised on international level, eg. The Olympic Games and commonwealth games. This is organised by 2 groups if we consider Britain in international games. First of all there is the BOA (British Olympic Association). It was founded in 1905 and is the national Olympic committee for the UK. BOA represents 35 national governing bodies of sport who are members of the National Olympic Committee and its athletes. The BOA have several jobs to do, they organise and find the entire Olympic UK team. Once BOA have done their job and prepared England for the games it then goes up to the ISF and IOC. All international sport is controlled by the international sports federation (ISF). During the Olympics they join with the International Olympic committee (IOC) in order to organise the games. ISF’s are independent organisations consisting of member’s representative of the governing body in the countries where sport is played. ISF’s are funded by national government. The IOC was founded in 1984 and has 90 non elected members. The IOC is funded by the sale of TV rights and sponsorships. It is the IOC who controls and decides on the location of the Olympic Games. There are also the 3 other levels of competition within the country which are; national, regional and local. The national events are run by many different organisations but the central point which everything goes through is the UKAA (United Kingdom Athletics Association). The UKAA has contacts to every organiser there is and they tend to go through the people that organise the regional events to pull together the national events. Once all of the different regions have been sorted out the competitions are pulled together and finalised by the UKAA which allows it to all fall into place. The regional events are organised and ran by 3 different associations; the south, midlands and north athletics associations. All 3 of these organisations help to plan out and run the regional events but tend to branch off into smaller organisations which help to run the events as there will be more competitors within a small area in a regional event. This is also helped by the local level of participation as local clubs and groups will be easily contacted by the regional organisers which allow them to simply phone up and give notice of events that are taking place. Finally the local clubs are run by the parents of competitors and on the odd occasion somebody with a coaching badge. Athletics doesn’t have many local clubs as the standard is so high the best go through to the regional clubs and events as they are noticed.
Unit 3 – Task 3
Football
Football is funded mainly by sponsorship, organisations and companies pay millions to get their name put onto the shirts and other products involved with football. Sponsorship is encouraged by a number of bodies including; the institute of sports sponsorship which compromise around 100 UK companies involved in sponsoring sport. There is also the sports sponsorship advisory service which is jointly administrated with the ISS and funded by sports England and similar advisory services of the Scottish and Welsh sports councils. Football sponsorship is not simply huge sums of money that companies spend in promoting their product. Many companies have found it advantageous to sponsor grass-roots sports, a company that provides sports development programmes to local areas. Sportsmatch was started by the UK government and every year around £3million is available to match every pound of sponsor’s money. It was administrated in England by the ISS and in 6 years made £2,000. Together with sponsors money this has generated over £40million of sponsorship to go to grass roots development programmes. There is also the consumer spending involved which racks up plenty of money for the sport which runs itself in pulling in huge amounts of money. This involves huge amounts of money on spectation, merchandise and subscription fees. A lot of footballs funding comes for sponsorship, the money that is involved with sponsorship goes into the millions, this is due to the popularity of the sport and companies know that good advertisement will come out of paying millions for clubs to wear their logo on their kit. Ticket sales are also a huge portion of the funding, as football fans know it costs a huge amount to own a season ticket at a top club. Newcastle are currently selling their season tickets for roughly £500 at the minute and they will continue to raise the price as the demand for these tickets are so high.
Athletics
Athletics is funded quite differently. It must be done in such a way that raises enough money for what is needed; when the Olympic Games are held they build a new stadium and set of facilities in every place, therefore money must be made in order to get this. A lot of the stadiums that are built are often courtesy of a grant from the IOC. The finances of the department of athletics can be broken into two categories. One is the annual operating budget, and the other is endowment funds. The annual operating budget for the department of athletics is currently about $3.4 million. This is the amount of money spent each year in the three other departments of athletics, recreation, and athletics and recreation services. Endowment funds form the other general category of the department’s finances, and are made up of money raised by the department. There are two general endowment funds. The first contains $1.5 million that is used for scholarships and awards for student athletes. Some of this is kept for certain teams and some for athletics in general. The large bulk of this endowment fund has been generated through active fundraising. The second endowment contains $1.6 million. It is an operating endowment that has never been used. Again, some of this is money is kept for specific teams, and some is for the department in general.
Unit 3 – Task 4
Media covers a huge amount of sports coverage and events worldwide which has led to an amazing increase in popularity in many sports. The mass media has 4 different areas in which it can publicise sport, these areas are:
- T.V
- Radio
- Magazine
- Internet
All of these 4 areas cover different aspects of the sports industry in different ways. Media and sports are important to one another as the both help to bring in money and viewers.
Football
Football has been affected by the media greatly in the past few years. This has happened since the televised showing of live matches and the organisers of the TV showing times have had the say on when the matches must be played, this shows how much the media has affected football.
T.V
The effect of playing football on television has great benefits as they show live matches, highlights and various other football related programs which bring in big viewing figures. There has been a lot of controversy with sky television and how much rights they have to live football matches as the already have the rights to the premiership and every important English game and are now after the rights for the world cup but the companies that organise what channels show matches decided that terrestrial television had to be given a chance to show the world cup. This means they will get greater viewing figures as more people can watch these channels as not every household has sky.
Radio
Radio broadcasts football in a different way, if live matches are on they will show them but the programs that television use are not available on the radio as obviously there is no visual. Radio tends to have quite a big chunk on the news about football, relating to latest news; transfers, injuries, cup ties etc. Radio tends not to use advertisement as much as T.V does either; this is because they are limited to how they can advertise.
Internet/Magazine
Magazines and newspapers use the same kind of coverage on football, with print they can only offer the latest news but this is why the press and paparazzi are always at the scene of something new as they need to be there to get the latest information and news straight out to the
public. A lot of the time when the newspapers can’t get any of the latest news they will tend to go into the personal lives of footballers and fish a story out that will interest the readers about them. Internet can provide all of the above; it can show the matches and bring you the news when it arrives but it is the least used kind of media for the simple reason that not every household has either the availability to the internet or do not have people that are able to find their way around.
Unit 3 – Task 5
Trends around sport build through the participants of the sport and what they’re doing at the time as the viewers want to be like them. A trend is something that a group of people follow onto in order to copy they’re favourite players etc.
Football
A major trend in football at the moment is the charity wrist bands. These have become popular since Lance Armstrong started promoting his “live strong” testicular cancer wrists bands. Since then a lot more have been made but footballers advertised them on television and are now wearing all sorts of different ones on the pitch, people see this and now want them as a fashion accessory. The bands started off to raise awareness of the illnesses that people are vulnerable to, now the bands have turned into a “fad” purely because it turned into a trend and was cool to do, this has allowed the charities to make a lot of money in a short space of time but like all trends it will die out and will no longer be popular.
There are many other trends within the sport, they range from clothing to the extent that Manchester united fans are following the trend to support them as they have been the number 1 team in England for a long time. Another big trend is the predator boot, promoted by David Beckham. Since the first predator boot was released in 1996 there have been many others that have been a huge success and this is all down to the face that David Beckham was wearing them and young football players thought that this would improve their game. All of these trends start to happen mainly through advertisement when people see what is happening in the football world, this sets off a lot of small groups of people starting to buy or wear the latest trend and this starts to spread, this allows the trend to grow to national size and before long the trend is all over the country. This is when the marketers look for new trends as trends start to dye out when it becomes national.
Athletics
As it is not a highly popular sport there aren’t a lot of trends in athletics to do with clothing etc. but people like Paula Radcliff have set off trends. The way she has performed has led people to participate in running themselves. Unlike football which is a regular week to week occurrence you have to train immensely and prepare yourself for runs this long and a lot of people have found it very inspiring to watch things like the London marathon and the great north run. After every Olympic Games there is a slight increase in the number of participants in athletics clubs which is due to people watching it at home and is then interested to participate. There is such an increase as there are so many different sports involved so the amount of people that want to try each sport brings in big numbers to all of the different clubs. The same as football, athletics has its trends with the clothing that is worn, especially with trainers. A lot of the running shoes have become very popular and trendy to wear, marketers think this is because of the originality of the footwear and that people are wanting to look different but there are so many people with this urge to look different that they all end up buying the same original clothing, leading to many different trends within the industry.
