Understanding Sport Management: International perspectives

Sport management is a rapidly developing industry which continues to grow in size and scope on an international scale. This comprehensive and engaging textbook offers a complete introduction to core principles and best practice in contemporary sport management. Adopting an issues-based approach and drawing on the very latest research, it demonstrates how theory translates into practice across all the key functional areas of sport management, from governance and leadership to tourism and events.

Written by a team of experts from across the globe, the book explores sport management from a truly international perspective and looks at all levels from professional, high-performance sport to non-profit and grassroots. With extended real-world case studies and an array of helpful features in every chapter, it addresses crucial topics such as:

• managing organisational performance
• communication and social media
• sponsorship and marketing
• the impact of sport on society
• future directions for sport management.

Complemented by a companion website full of additional teaching and learning resources for students and instructors, this is an essential textbook for any degree-level sport management course.

Trish Bradbury is a senior lecturer at Massey University, New Zealand, where she lectures in both sport management and core management programmes of study. She has extensive experience in managing/coaching organisations and sports teams, and actively volunteers in the sport community. Her major research interests concern aspects of sport/business management related to events, HRM, organisation development and performance management. Dr Bradbury has published in various journals such as Sport Management Review, Sport, Business and Management and International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship. Her first book is Sport Governance: International Case Studies (Routledge, 2013).

Ian O'Boyle is a researcher in the area of sport governance and leadership. He is also the Director of the CERM Performance Indicators Project, which focuses on researching operational indicators and customers’ perceptions of service quality for local government sports and leisure facilities and services, providing improved operational decision-making and internal and external benchmarking. His work appears in the leading sport management journals such as Journal of Sport Management, Sport Management Review and European Sport Management Quarterly. In 2015, Dr O'Boyle received a Research Excellence Award from the UniSA Business School in recognition of his extensive high quality research record.