The Role of Sports Economics in the Sport Management Curriculum

an undergraduate program would have to each cover five subject areas, assuming no adjunct
faculty in the sport management program. 2 The graduate curricular guidelines contain two
subject areas not in the undergraduate guidelines, so the three full time faculty in a sport
management program offering both an undergraduate and masters degree would each have to
cover four subject areas. The guidelines require sport management faculty to be generalists
who have the ability to teach graduate and undergraduate classes in a wide variety of subject
areas. This goes against the grain in higher education, where a trend toward specialization
in academic expertise has been going on for decades.
Second, the course requirements survey indicates that the curricular guidelines are not
being followed very closely, at least in terms of two of the subject areas: budgeting/finance
and economics in sport. About a third of the undergraduate programs surveyed offer sports
finance courses, and only 16% offer sports economics. While almost half of the undergraduate
programs require students to take principles of economics, it is doubtful that this course
exposes students to much in the way of “economics in sports.”
The tension created by the sport management curricular guidelines and the shortage of
qualified research faculty have been noticed in the literature. Danylchuk and Boucher (2003)
and Costa (2005) both recently addressed the issue of the future of sport management as
an academic discipline. Both of these studies surveyed a small number of prominent sport
management faculty in order to get some guidance on how sport management might evolve
to meet these and other challenges. Danylchuk and Boucher (2003) conclude that academic
programs need to increase their specialization, work more closely with business schools, and
emphasize international aspects in the future. This study also concludes that the sport
management curriculum needs to emphasize several areas, including “core business courses”
in the future. Costa (2005) concludes that future sport management research should make
more use of theory from parent disciplines and adopt more rigor in research design and
methodology, among other factors. Sports economics research would appear to fit the bill in
2 This also assumes that the required principles of economics courses do not fulfill the economics in sport
content area.
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