The Sport Business Blog
What a gold medal winning Olympic rowing coach taught me about AI and intuition
How does expert coaching intuition survive the rise of AI? Professor Hans Westerbeek explores decision-making under pressure at the Paris Olympics, and what happens to human judgement when AI takes over the pattern-recognition work that built it.
Scarcity can’t be bought: What LIV Golf tells private capital about investing in sport
Earlier this month at SportNXT in Melbourne, elite fund managers confidently pitched sports as the ultimate, recession-proof asset class. They talked of multi-trillion-dollar valuations, unshakeable fan loyalty, and bulletproof cash flows built on absolute scarcity. Then, LIV Golf filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Despite a $5 billion cash injection from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the league burned through nearly $100 million a month trying to manufacture overnight what takes leagues like the NFL decades to build. LIV's sudden collapse exposes a brutal truth for institutional lenders: you cannot buy generational attachment, and you cannot manufacture scarcity on a five-year timeline, no matter how deep your pockets are.
The Enhanced Games, big pharmaceutical and protecting sport
The biggest disruption in international sport since the 2015 Russian state doping scandal is launching in Las Vegas in May, and most of the sport business world has not yet noticed.
It is called the Enhanced Games. A four-day competition — swimming, sprints, hurdles, weightlifting — with no drug testing, US$250,000 per gold, US$1 million per world record, and athletes openly on a supervised pharmacological program.
But the swim meet is not the story.
About the geopolitical shift of power in global sport business - part 1: Is the West better than the Rest?
sport is universally understood and as such a powerful platform for geopolitical power struggles
Unchecked leadership ambition: a lesson from the Commonwealth Games cancellation
brutal ambition may lead to unchecked autocratic leadership that moves away from the purpose of the organisation
Cracking the code of digital transformation in sport business
what is digital transformation in sport business?
The missed opportunity: Australia’s failure to maximise the impact of hosting the Women's World Cup on free-to-air television
Not all matches of the FIFA Women’s World Cup are on free to air television in Australia. This is a missed opportunity to maximise the impact of the tournament being hosted in Australia.
Is sport (participation) a public or a private good?
who should pay for your participation in community sport? What is the role of government in funding community sport? Is sport participation a public good?
