Challenges Of Sport Business

In the last thirty years, sport clubs have become a real enterprise, devoted to the production of entertainment: a carefully crafted product for the supporters and the media. The mean scope of a sports club is to reach the most victories; this can be achieved by defining and optimizing the available resources. The victories therefore confer a selective advantage on branding scenarios. A sports club brand is a sort of promise to supporters: more victories, more followers. The victory is the sport club product. How can a sports club achieve victory?

In keeping with a systems engineering approach and on the basis of victory meaning, we have to consider all stakeholders that are part of the club. Then, we have to know all functional joints between stakeholders and define their characteristics. It is clear, that is not easy. The sport clubs are often inefficient and affected by a lack of communication among their internal functions. Often the decision maker does not have complete information on the environment, ignores certain options or cannot foresee the consequences associated with them. These inefficiencies generate an excessive waste of resources.

A sport club is a system of interacting elements organized to achieve one or more stated purposes. It consists of subsystems that cooperate to achieve the objective and to solve inter‐disciplinary

problems involving multiple and heterogeneous stakeholders. As the sport club system is very complex, it requires the introduction of a professional paradigm that operates within the project management framework: the sport project manager.

Rather than a purely statistical approach, neural network and systems engineering can be used to analyse, program, simulate, evaluate and aid decision making within a sports system. The goal is to optimize the main efficiency parameters. For example, once important processes within a sport club are defined, such as the evaluation of the performance of the athletes, an optimization can be performed.

A tool can be created, to capture all the decision-making information in a single system, to manage every aspect of the decisions – from prioritizing projects and resources to selecting the best supplier or candidate; to understand the reasons behind the final choice, while collaborating and reaching a consensus decision.

Despite this, we have not forgotten the costs and time aspects. In keeping with a systems engineering and neural network approach, we can reduce or keep track of the time, while for the costs we should integrate another optimization system. In any case, we need to note the costs of the project: it's essential we begin to evaluate them before moving.

This concept was presented at INCOSE ASEC Conference in 2014.