Sports, Inc.: 100 Years of Sports Business (review)

Sports, Inc. covers a broad spectrum of topics concerning the business of sports, with a heavy emphasis on sports marketing. This is not surprising, because Phil Schaaf is identified in the book's promotional material as a sports "consultant" who has authored "three sports books including Sports Marketing: It's Not Just a Game Anymore." The book begins with the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896 and includes material from early 2003. It is divided into two parts, the break coming in 1975 with the demise of baseball's reserve clause. The crux of the book is contained in the second part and emphasizes the marketing opportunities such as sponsorship, endorsements, naming rights, seat licenses, and the like that have developed over the last few decades. Schaaf uses the first part simply to sketch what came before—that the dominant revenue sources in those years were ticket sales and concessions. Parenthetically, while players' salaries rose rapidly after 1975 and teams were forced to look for additional revenue sources, Schaaf attributes the increase in salaries to "greater revenues and more sources of revenues" (p. 136). The discussion of the "Reserve Clause in a Nutshell" (p. 57) is contained in too small a nut.

Normally, Schaaf adopts a detached tone to present the changes that mark the "evolution of sports from an arena of competition to an entertainment industry" (dust jacket). However, there are several features of the author's pedagogy that warrant comment. First, he takes the importance of sports in modern societies as given. He does not try to put it in perspective, even though he includes some numbers that would enable him to do so. For example, Schaaf reports that total advertising spending in the United States in 2002 was $249 billion, which was about 2.5 percent of gross domestic product. In 2001, $6.4 billion was "invested in sports marketing opportunities" (p. 165). This implies that sports comprise about 2.5 percent of advertising spending, although the numbers are from different years and are not necessarily comparable. Whether 2.5 percent is a large or small number is a matter of choice. Second, Schaaf inserts important information and his opinions in unexpected places. For example, in a discussion of the role of GCI, a telecommunications provider to the Iditarod (p. 177), he waits until the very end of this interesting vignette to note that the company is headquartered in Anchorage. Earlier, in contrasting the 1920s and 1930s with today, he notes: "In Babe Ruth's day, there was no Baseball Tonight with Karl Ravech, Peter Gammons, and the rest of the capable ESPN crew" (p. 33). Finally, at times, Schaaf foregoes detachment, and the text reads like an "infomercial." He summarizes the section on the sports property seller with a comment that anyone should be able to understand that "investing your marketing dollars into a team or event vehicle is the most solid play in relationship marketing" (p. 186). Then there's the section that concludes chapter 6, "If TV is King, then ESPN is its Prince" (p. 160).

For business historians, the strength of this book is in the minutiae. Although all the stories are individually available in greater detail elsewhere, this volume includes discussions of the ill-fated Dempsey-Gibbons fight in Shelby, Montana; the marketing of the Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles marathons; the relationship between STP and Richard Petty; Nike and Tiger Woods; the Masters and Martha Burk, the Texas Rangers and George W. Bush; and the eponymous grill of George Forman. The chapter on "Goin' Global" raises interesting questions about Havana and Mexico City as potential venues for North American sports leagues and how China will ultimately be brought into the equation. That chapter, like many others, ends with excerpts of interviews the author had with knowledgeable authorities, in this chapter a marketing official from...