The Role of Sport Economics in the Sport Management Curriculum

Sports economics has emerged as a clearly denned field in the past five years, and sports economists have recently begun taking up positions in sport management programs. We explore the sports economics-sport management nexus. A survey of U.S. sport management programs and their curricula reveals that sports economics is not widely required by sport management programs, despite the inclusion of “economics in sport” in widely accepted sport management curricular guidelines. Sport management programs have recently experienced trouble filling vacant positions, and new PhDs in sport management lack adequate research preparation, while economics produces a large number of PhDs and sports economics is a growing field. Taken together, these factors suggest that sports economics may play an important role in the sport management curriculum in the future.