The Case for Sports Commercialization

The Olympics: a model of sports commercialization

■Olympics

The 1984 Olympic Games were in crisis due to financial difficulties during the bidding process, and a TOP business plan to solicit sponsors, offer television rights and sell tickets at high prices as a source of funding was a huge success and turned the fate of the Games around. Since then, the Olympic movement has been thriving: $497 million for the 1988 Seoul Games, $40 million for the 1992 Barcelona Games, and $10 million for the 1996 Atlanta Games.......

A miracle! ---

TOP Business Plan Reverses Fortunes

In 1976, the modern Olympic movement, after 80 years of brilliant and arduous journey, was in an unprecedented predicament, with only the U.S. city of Los Angeles submitting an application to host the games. One of the public pressure that made the IOC extremely embarrassed was that hosting the Olympics was a lose-lose business. Experts cite the following facts: In 1972, the city of Munich, Germany, was in great financial trouble for hosting the 20th Olympic Games. In 1976, the 21st Montreal Olympics lost $997 million and it took more than 10 years to pay off the debt. In 1980, the 22nd Moscow Olympics cost the former Soviet Union*** more than $9 billion. The Los Angeles City Council met after the Olympic Committee's decision and held an expert discussion on whether the city should host the Games. Unfortunately, the experts at the meeting made the decision to refuse to use the revenues to host the Olympics.

The global Olympic movement was in danger of dying an untimely death. The man who stepped in to break the deadlock was the famous American entrepreneur Ueberroth. He turned the fate of the Games around by financing them with private enterprise, and made the 23rd Los Angeles Games a model for how the global Olympic movement can boost local economies. Instead of losing money, the 1984 Games made a profit of $220 million. The Olympic Games created the TOP business plan, which became a model for the business operations of the countries that later hosted the Olympic Games. Ueberroth introduced the concept of the "sponsor" and elevated the sponsor to the role of promoter in his famous TOP program. He limited the number of sponsors to 30 and specified that only one company in each industry should be selected. Ueberroth offered a reserve price of 4 million dollars. This amounted to picking an industry competition. Coca-Cola went so far as to submit $13.5 million to the Olympic organizing committee in order to outbid Pepsi. Fuji of Japan won the bidding with $10 million, dumping its strong competitor, Kodak, and increasing its market share in the United States from 5% to 10%. In the film industry, each percentage point increase meant an additional $10 million in revenue. Ueberroth convinced McDonald's to build an 11,000-seat swimming pool, plus a $4 million grant. In return, McDonald's received exclusive fast-food restaurant privileges during the Olympics. Ueberroth publicly announced three avenues for raising funds: soliciting sponsors, offering television rights, and selling tickets at high prices. On September 26, 1979, the Los Angeles Olympic Committee and ABC Broadcasting Company Guangzhou's first "Sports Community" broadcast 220 hours of Olympic programming over 16 days. On December 3, 1981, the Los Angeles Organizing Committee sold television rights to the European Union Broadcasting Corporation for $19.8 million. The Los Angeles Organizing Committee let it be known that even the President of the United States would have to pay for tickets out of his own pocket. Tickets for the Los Angeles Olympics were eventually priced at $50-$200.

The Olympic movement has been thriving ever since: the 1988 Seoul Games had 160 countries (72 more than Montreal), 8,143 athletes, and a profit of $497 million on $3 billion in expenditures. The Seoul Games were broadcast by 226 television stations in 140 countries and regions, with a total audience of 4 billion viewers. In 1981, only two cities, Seoul and Nagoya, competed for the 1988 Summer Olympics, in 1986, six cities competed for the 1992 Olympics, and six cities competed for both the 1996 and 2000 Olympics. The number of cities bidding to host the 2004 Olympics is now as high as 11! Cities are rushing to host the Summer and Winter Olympics. After Los Angeles won $220 million, Seoul won $497 million. Although the Barcelona Olympic Games won only $0.4 billion, the Olympic Games brought Barcelona $26 billion in economic benefits and created 20,000 regular jobs, making the city leap from a medium-sized city in Europe to the seventh largest city in Europe. Atlanta's Olympic winnings were only $10 million, but generated $5 billion worth of economic benefits without government investment.

The city of Sydney expects to create 90,000 jobs over the 10 years it takes to bid for and host the Games. In addition, the Olympic Games can vigorously promote the development of tourism, construction industry, increase international trade opportunities, promote the host city's transportation, communications, services, improve the environment, and more host countries can not be ignored to bring political and social benefits. Although the location of the 2008 Olympic Games has not yet been selected. The television broadcasting contracts of NBC, NHK, the European Broadcasting Union, TV Australia, TV New Zealand, etc. will pay the 2008 Olympic Games 1.58 billion US dollars, from which the organizing committee of the Olympic Games will get a 49% share. The IOC has also signed and is about to sign the fourth Olympic TOP program with 10 multinational companies until 2008, amounting to more than 500 million U.S. dollars, from which the Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games will receive a share of about 35%. Together with income from ticket sales and licensing, the hosts of the 2008 Olympics have a guaranteed basic income.

One Platform---

Sports Business Technology in MBA Textbooks

Sports is a pivotal industry all over the world in terms of education, quality of life, national economic growth and tax revenue. In the process of economic globalization, sports are inevitably involved in the economic whirlwind and play an indispensable role in the process of economic development. According to one statistic, the commercial operation of sports has become an important means of promoting national consumption and expanding employment in many countries. In the United States, the most developed country in the world in terms of sports consumption, the annual market consumption is 60-70 billion dollars. It accounts for 1.3%-1.5% of the gross national product of the United States, and even exceeds the annual output value of such important industrial sectors as the petrochemical industry and the automobile industry. Through the development of the soccer industry, Italy has made sports among the top 10 pillar industries of the Italian national economy. Its market exchange reached 24 trillion lire at the end of the 1980s, with a per capita consumption of 320 dollars. Switzerland is not a sports powerhouse, but sports is the 13th pillar industry in Switzerland. The British government receives around ￡2.4 billion in tax revenue from over ￡6.8 billion in gross income from sports consumption. This capital is equivalent to five times the government's investment in sports development. A 1998 market report claimed that worldwide sports sponsorship was approaching US$1.53 billion and was still growing at 13%. Over a 10-year period of economic growth, businesses and corporations around the world are spending 300% more on sports sponsorships. North America has the largest share of all sports sponsorship dollars at about 41%, Europe at about 34%, Asia Pacific at about 17.6%, and Central and South America at about 7.4%. The annual amount of sports sponsorship in the United Kingdom is about ￡100 million. The annual sports sponsorship expenditure in the United States is about $600 million.

A worldwide survey shows that the three events of this century that have had the most far-reaching impact on human society, apart from the First World War and the Second World War, have been the worldwide prosperity and development of sport. Sport has become the universal language of the world, with the exception of music. The Olympic Games have even become the largest capacity global carnival in the world community today. During the Olympic Games, an average of nearly three billion people in the world watched the television broadcasts every day. Countless crowds gather around television sets to enjoy the action, to watch their players, and to endure the unbearable yet exciting final results. In the last two World Cups, there were 2.5 to 3 billion television viewers. Famous stars such as Pele, Beckenbauer, Cruyff, Maradona and other soccer geniuses have brought the global fervor and admiration for soccer to an unparalleled level. In the world of basketball, television stations in 195 countries broadcast the game, commentary is provided in 48 languages, and more than 600 million viewers are treated to an NBA finals game held within the United States. Michael Jordan's aerial dunks and the dazzling Sh ow-class performances of such prodigies as Pippen, Barkley, Rodman, Robinson, Malone and O'Neal drove investors, sponsors and viewers into a frenzy. The world of sports has many superstars, making sports a kaleidoscopic world of myths.

Sports' ability to touch people's moods and emotions was immediately noticed by smart businessmen who used it to promote their businesses. In the early 1960s, a technique was developed to market athletes, games and teams. In the ever-increasing battle for business, sports marketing acted as an air-cleaning agent, bridging the gap between marketing products and connecting people emotionally. In just 40 years, sports and the economy have become inextricably linked and are rapidly growing into a proprietary market. The Sports Marketplace (Spo r ts M ark e tin g) has evolved from a single marketing technique to a business platform that can generate triggers for economic growth in the new economy. Many multinational companies and corporations have established sports marketing departments after realizing the function of the sports market in driving consumption.

Promoting products through sports has become a common route for CEOs. Because of the special public relations effects of the sports market, sports marketing accounts for an increasing proportion of marketing expenses. Seeking capital appreciation through investments in sports programs is also often in the planning of investors. In business schools, sports marketing techniques are incorporated into business curricula and textbooks. Those successful sports marketing cases find a cultural and value-based pathway for business school MBAs to optimize the combination of factors of production and resource allocation in a market economy. Since sports marketing is based on the original motive of sports programs, with the famous athletes group as the inspirational body, and with the ultimate goal of product sales to implement the public **** relations, marketing, advertising and promotion, and product testing and other marketing techniques, so the sports market is also known as the project market or sports marketing market. In the western society, many life concepts and values are realized by providing entertainment and recreation services to the public through the sports market, so the sports market is also interpreted as a lifestyle market.

The fact that sports can be a market for the exchange and promotion of sports products and services as well as other life products and services has been confirmed by the practice of the world's economy in a market context. The biggest function of the sports market is to promote the participation and spectator consumption of the common people through sports programs. When the traditional mode of material supply no longer pulls the excitement of the people's consumption, the imbalance between supply and demand provides a space for the creation and performance of a new business model, the sports market. The core of triggering economic growth on the innovative business platform of the sports market is not only to satisfy people's material pursuits, but more importantly, to create people's spiritual and value-based consumption demand. As macroeconomists doggedly pursue the goal of new economic growth points, an interesting reminder is that adding the mysterious and beautiful need for cultural values on top of materialistic consumer needs is one of the puzzling but knuckle-dragging features of the contemporary new economy.

Sport has a special place in China, having played a special role in national diplomacy, national cohesion and national sentiment, and it is sure to take another stab at driving economic development. Because sport is a natural choice for human beings, and China has a population of nearly 400 million people who regularly participate in physical exercise and sports activities. At this critical moment when China is embracing economic globalization, it is undoubtedly a good thing for the country and the people to increase the consumption of sports participation and spectatorship to create effective demand. Beijing time on December 29, ESPN columnist Howard Bryant (Howard Bryant) commented on the Woods "fall" event, he believes that the collapse of the myth of Woods is a typical case of the failure of the commercialization of the United States sports, and Woods shaped a "perfect image The "perfect image" created by Woods does not belong to him personally, but is the "hypocritical skin" of the relevant interest groups "money is the most important". In the article, Howard Bryant also denied that Woods sold his image and privacy for money.

Two days remain before the next decade of the 21st century. But we all know that Woods' jokes apparently don't stop on New Year's Eve.

This year's high-profile awards are more or less "punny" and "ironic," with the Associated Press naming Woods the "Outstanding Athlete of the Decade" and fellow players naming him the "USGA Player of the Year". The Associated Press named Woods "Outstanding Athlete of the Decade," while his peers put the "USGA Player of the Year" wreath on Woods' head once again. The media publicized widely known facts while exposing Tiger's private life. In this "image of the king upside down war", Woods, Erin and their precarious marriage have become all kinds of "paparazzi" to chase the object, and those who are "really involved" or "waiting for speculation". "Waiting for the opportunity to speculate" of the "Tiger Girl" also borrowed the gossip media coaxing speculation in the state of affairs, Woods, some sponsors also jumped out one after another with the "heavenly king" to draw a line, of course, also have strong support for the tiger In the end supporters. Once, Woods "epoch-making" perfect image in the millennium to bring a ray of light to the sports world, but is about to enter the peak of Tiger may be the most brilliant ten years, Woods swung a "heavy blow", destroyed countless people in the heart of the "God of Perfection". The "God of Perfection". Ten years ago, Woods changed the world of sports, ten years later he used another way to "overturn" the previous change.

The fact that Woods has been involved with women is not uncommon, and it is just one of the countless cases in which a "bachelor" has been compelled to be rich and famous. But the collapse of Woods' "perfect image" is indirect proof of the failure of the "star-making system" we've seen before. This is not the first of its kind, as the "steroid era" in baseball has already begun (in 2003, 104 professional players in MLB Major League Baseball tested positive for drugs). Perhaps those who lived through the "Steroid Era" have long since grown tired of the "Woods Scandal". The fact that both Woods and the 104 baseball players in the two sports cases have refused to disclose any more facts cannot be ignored.

In the case of baseball's "steroid era," the failures came from all parts of the industry -- teams, leagues, individual players, the media and fans -- and the chain of exposure and public reaction created a series of "injuries. The chain of exposure and public reaction created a series of "injuries" that had far-reaching consequences. Of course, some groups benefited in the short term from that failure; to this day, no one has been willing to step forward and take responsibility. Indeed, in the "Age of Steroids," integrity has been consumed by greed. The result of the agreement was that players would never do anything like that again, even if they were paid $10 million dollars. This is a hollow excuse. The "dirty" thing was done, and it was obviously too late to undo the damage. As former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, the official in charge of the investigation into the "steroid era," summed it up in December 2007: this is a failure of the U.S. sports system.

In the realm of American sports and culture, Woods symbolizes another kind of institutional failure: the antiquity of the "star-making" machinery itself, which produces stars who don't represent themselves, but only money. What is even more outrageous is that when the "fraud" is exposed, the entities involved in the system pay the stars to "cover their tracks" in an attempt to hide the true nature of what they represent. It's taken a decade to realize the real, bittersweet side of great players, and it's time to shatter the faltering myths that the sports world has tried to maintain.

It's also time to find Tiger's defense in the year-end "sex scandal. The Nov. 27 crash and subsequent "scandal" should have been kept private by the Woods family, not on the front pages of media outlets, including the New York Post, which had the Woods story on its front page for 20 days. Woods is a golfer, not the head of the UN Security Council, so what? He's a man who's made more than a billion dollars and is not even 34 years old, which makes him infinitely more attractive to peachy women, both physically and in terms of money trading opportunities.

There are plenty of voices against Woods from the standpoint of preserving his family and his social responsibility. But what is unacceptable to many professionals is that Woods took money in this "storm"! Like Michael Jordan and LeBron James, they allow their names to be used as money makers in every big event. At this point, Tim Duncan (Tim Duncan) is considered a special case. For money, they allow themselves to be marketed and labeled as something they are not. For the sake of the "dollar," they allow themselves to become the "image" on the advertising posters that their children are clamoring to emulate, but only superficially. Now, Woods has sold his privacy - greatly diminishing the authenticity of his exposure as just another commodity.

When the "perfect image" is completely destroyed, he may realize that it's all about "blood money. Major League Baseball (NFL) superstar Michael Vick (Michael Vick) has already experienced this, and now Woods also recognized. Once, a commodity loses its value, it is discarded like trash.

When it comes down to it, all a ballplayer can do to make up for it is this: be more careful about making public promises, because there are fewer and fewer versions of himself that fit his ideal image. Perhaps Woods can learn from another NBA star -- Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs. Fans have been praising Duncan's baller behavior since he entered the NBA in 1997. Ultimately, it is because Duncan has always protected his dignity and privacy from the "invasion" of commercialization. If learning from each other is too complicated, it should be easier to do this - a really good performance is always enough.

In an era of profit-driven business, when stars are involved in Faustian bargains to fool the public, there is always a price to pay when things go wrong. No one is innocent. Creating a good public image is part of the public's money-making endeavor by the interests behind the ballplayers. They use the "perfect image" to conquer the hearts of the public, treating it as a "hidden currency" to trade, or even a "free card to get out of jail". But this "ideal image" doesn't always work.

When Kobe Bryant was implicated in the infamous rape scandal, he tried to "absolve" himself of those flaws. Most importantly, he didn't succeed. Kobe is now just what he was, and the role of the great basketball player continues. When his "Sprite" commercials were cleared out, Kobe looked to be on the other side of commercialization - or at least a little less deceitful.

Sports culture is not an isolated branch of society. As a public, it's important to see the other side of things. The media play an integral role in the creation of stars, but they may not know what kind of heroes they are creating. Too many people have been caught up in the "fake hero" scenario.

I've been in the media since 1991, and I've been writing a sports column since 1997, covering the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox and a host of other professional baseball teams. However, I have never been invited to the home of any professional athlete, nor have any professional athletes ever visited my home. Only Art Howell and Ken March have been involved in events related to me, once for my book party and once for my wedding, and that's about it.

This is the norm in today's sports world, where media interactions with players are limited to clubhouses, pre-game press conferences, charity galas and industry-related events related to raising the profile of players. Often the purpose of these meetings is directed toward the home run effect that finances bring.

Let's remember that the modern superstar is merely a mouthpiece for the interests involved. To some extent, all the media see them as "corporate conglomerates" rather than "individual players," such as Woods on the PGA Tour, Nike, Buick, etc. The media know that the "corporate conglomerates" have been created together, and they know that the "corporate conglomerates" have been created together, and they know that the "corporate conglomerates" have been created together. The media are aware of the superficiality of the "image of perfection" that they have created together, but they prefer to take the initiative, on the one hand by adding helium to make the balloon of the ideal of the heroic sport bigger and bigger, and on the other hand by holding a needle that can puncture the balloon.

Before Woods' balloon was punctured, the "rottenness" of the system was already evident, but many people just couldn't see it. Before the myth of a certain player is shattered, the relevant commercial organizations have already begun to identify the next "player", and ready to create another set of "skin" representing money. In this cycle, if the standard of modeling remains the same, the Woods story will continue. The jokes, of course, will continue until the next scandal, in which case star-making in sports will become a truly vicious cycle.