The Business of Sports: An Operations Perspective

While sports are enjoyed by several billion fans globally, the business of sports has evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry. Multi-disciplinary research on developing competitive strategies for drafting players and making on-field decisions is growing rapidly. However, there remains a notable gap in operations management research focusing on the business aspects of the sports industry. This paper addresses this gap in the literature to encourage future research in this domain. We highlight new opportunities for operations management researchers, emphasizing five research themes that are of importance to the sports industry: (1) Revenue management, (2) new technologies in sports business, (3) betting, (4) rule and competition changes, and (5) service operations. We identify important and relevant open-ended research questions and discuss related trade-offs to address the research questions. This paper provides a basis for future operations management research to address the unique challenges faced by sports organizations.