Booming Business and New Relationships Across Industries: A Whole New Ballgame
Welcome to NU Executive Talent Trends, a periodic look at the changing talent requirements for leaders in various sectors, drawing on the insights of the consultants at NU Advisory Partners.
By Libby Naumes and Jay Hussey
It’s a thrilling time to be in the business of sports. Continuing a strong comeback from COVID, the sector is putting up staggering numbers: a record 123.4 million people watched Super Bowl LVIII; Major League Baseball teams had more than $10 billion in combined revenue last year; the world’s 30 most valuable soccer teams are worth an average of nearly $2 billion each; and what’s especially interesting for NU Advisory Partners is that those dollars are drawing talented leaders from other industries to professionalize and realign all sorts of businesses.
Here are trends we have been observing in our recent work for sports-related companies:
What’s NU in Sports?
With revenues zooming, revenue streams are increasingly complex and intertwined. Where once in the not-too-distant past the average team might have boasted a handful of revenue categories — national and local media, tickets, merchandise, sponsorship — today there’s also content, events, real estate and multi-purpose venues, and even investments in technology ventures. So along with a lot more dollars, there are now many more diverse opportunities—and complexities— for sports entities to manage.
Athlete empowerment is radically changing the business — and thus the skill sets demanded of executives, agents, and brand managers. Salaries are just for starters. Through endorsements, sponsorships and social media, top athletes — now including those in college and the Olympics — are monetizing their own identities.
The rise of sports betting is creating a fundamentally different experience for consumers, requiring innovation and agility from executives trying to reach them. Teams suddenly need to gain and hold the attention of fans who are watching games in their kitchens while on sports betting platforms (and shopping for jerseys and texting friends) at the same time.
Finding Executive Talent in Sports
We look for candidates whose backgrounds range far beyond the traditional boundaries of sports business. Today, the front office requires more business acumen than ever. Executives need to arrange financial structures for sophisticated investment firms, not just make and count money for wealthy owners. They must understand how to monetize all aspects of an event, not just game-day presence. When they represent athletes, they have to package everything players are allowed to sell. The cross-sector expertise we have at NU is a necessity, since we must be able to spot the kinds of talents who can develop these new capabilities. In a world where assets increasingly seem like media and tech companies disguised as teams (as one analyst recently put it), recycling the same folks who’ve been in the world of “sports” for the past 20 years won’t work.
We see smaller sports and sports-adjacent businesses as hotbeds for the kinds of leaders who can fill major-league roles. There’s a lot of executive talent beyond America’s top four leagues. We see it in e-sports, consumer tech and sports betting companies. And we keep a close watch on sports and teams that are faring well even when they have had to build operations from scratch in very competitive environments, from expansion franchises to startup leagues.
We appreciate analytics, but understand that means a lotmore than Moneyball. Michael Lewis’ classic book, which triggered a revolution in the usage of sports data, is already more than 20 years old. We’ve worked with companies that power the statistics you see on broadcasts, and that collect info for betting and gaming. But we’re also reaching into the tech industry to understand who’s mining data to engage new audiences and build online communities, and what techniques they’re using.
Executive Careers in Sports
As new job titles and responsibilities open up, standard sports-management training matters less than ever. Sports management programs have become very popular, but the next generation of leaders won’t need traditional master’s degrees. The rise of social-media marketing and the expansion of legal sports betting, to name just two ongoing trends, are creating job opportunities that didn’t exist just five or 10 years ago. And the best candidates to fill them will likely come from disciplines that haven’t yet been well-represented in sports.
Over the long haul, sports executives should be willing to work in different segments of their business, and even to spend some time outside of sports altogether. It benefits everyone when a candidate can show they have gained exposure to different businesses instead of staying in a single lane. Experience at startups, competing in crowded markets, fluency in analytics, managing private equity funding — it’s all breadth for success.
NU Advisory Partners + Sports
We have expertise in traditional sports realms and have earned the trust of owners and private equity groups, connecting them with executive-level officers. But we also work with teams and leagues looking to bring leaders with non-traditional backgrounds into their mix, such as media, technology, and consumer services. We bring broader acumen to the table to help companies break out of narrow silos and cast their nets as widely as today’s sports landscape requires.
Recent Sports Searches
Chief Business Officer, National Hockey League Players Association
Chief Financial Officer, Overtime
Senior Vice President, Sponsorship and Integrated Marketing, OneTeam Partners
Track President, NASCAR
Chief Ticketing & Member Relations Officer, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Vice President, Strategy and Analytics, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
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