A sports marketer is the person behind your sports hero. The one responsible for spotting new talent, negotiating contracts, building the PR machinery, and popularizing a game and a player. Consequently, a sports marketer has a very exciting job.
Since marketing is the key word in this field, a Master’s degree in Business Administration with emphasis on sports management or sports marketing is the perfect criterion. Although, you will gain many insights about the business through on-job trainings, a marketing degree will open the right doors for you and help land you your first job.
In general, well known clubs, teams and corporate houses prefer recruiting MBAs as their employees.
Sports marketers are people who have endless possibilities as every type of sport needs professionals to look at the business side. This is a dynamic field and you need to be a high-energy, enterprising individual with a passion for the sport you follow. With new games like snowboarding, dirt biking and extreme-skiing entering the traditional sporting arena, any avid sports buff can pursue this as a career, provided he has the aptitude of a marketing guy.
As in any other profession, there are certain specific duties that sports marketers are expected to perform. These include:
As a sports marketer, you may consider working in one of the following profiles:
Marketing Directors: Build visibility and reputation of an athlete, team, or company. They also oversee the entire gamut of marketing exercises.
Promotion Managers: Responsible for game-day promos and activities
Community Relations Directors: Ensure that professional sports team maintains good relations with the community.
Sports Agents: They represents athletes and negotiate contracts to improve the marketability, visibility, and earnings of players
Public Relations Directors: Organize press box activities
Directors of Corporate Sales: Generally, they work on behalf of teams to form partnerships with businesses.
Ticket Operations Directors: Mainly responsible for the sale of single game tickets, season ticket packages, club boxes and luxury skybox tickets
Facilities Directors: Responsible for managing sports facilities.
Market Researchers: Responsible for conducting surveys on sports trends and sports statistics for teams, sports associations, sports retailers and manufacturers.
With an increasing viewer base in the field of adventure and extreme sports, new jobs are being generated every quarter. Young starters therefore, have the possibility of entering into well-paid but high-stress jobs.
Your financial gain will depend on the kind of sports that you are engaged in. As has been mentioned earlier, there are very few sports that enjoy worldwide popularity. Most often than not, the popularity of a particular game is concentrated within a certain geographical area. And, it’s certainly no lie that some sports are defiantly more lucrative than others. Therefore, an entry-level marketer working for a professional basketball or baseball team in the US can earn somewhere around $30,000 in the first year. More experienced workers can earn more than $75,000, whereas, top-level marketing executives can earn up to $150,000.
Professional sports have enjoyed a phenomenal growth over the last few years. Television gave the much needed thrust to this market segment. Worldwide match coverage and sports channels have ascertained the popularity of certain sports and clubs such as European soccer clubs, Manchester United and Real Madrid that enjoy huge fan support in South-east Asia.
As far as the marketability of sports is concerned, cricket is big in the Indian sub-continent, soccer is the mainstay in Europe and South America, whereas basketball, baseball and football are more popular in the US. Besides these, there are games like tennis, F-1 racing and golf which mean big money but may not enjoy a worldwide following.