By Jeffrey Gangemi

The business of sports is huge, and its scope continues to widen. No longer are industry jobs limited to the four major U.S. professional sports leagues and their front offices. Opportunities now cross over into other realms of entertainment -- from video games to TV to the Internet. "Our field has exploded," says Leigh Steinberg, a longtime NFL agent and the real-life inspiration for the 1996 film Jerry Maguire. "More games being shown on television means more shows to comment on those games, which means more periodicals, more advertising, and an incredible number of new jobs created."

Although lucrative for some -- total industry revenue was estimated at $213 billion last year in the U.S. alone, according to Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal, a weekly trade magazine -- the sports business is also highly competitive. Steinberg, who only employs 13 people in his sports-agent business, says he gets 5,000 résumés a year from people who want to work for him.

To give MBAs a leg up in this popular industry, a host of new courses and programs are cropping up in the U.S. and abroad. Established sports-business programs at regional universities are ramping up their offerings, while some top-tier business schools have joined the fray and are forming strong industry ties. Here's a roundup of the programs designed to help students score in the sports business.

B-SCHOOL DREAM TEAM.  Seeking a new breed of business-savvy executives, sports franchises have begun targeting talented MBA students with industry exposure. San Diego State University's 18-month Sports Business Management MBA program, which consists of 12 months of intensive classroom study followed by a six-month graduate consulting project, welcomed its first class last year. The program was born out of a relationship with the San Diego Padres baseball team, which was hoping to groom some business talent for its front office.

With its inaugural class set to graduate this spring, SDSU is taking giant leaps. This February it will host the first-ever sports-based case competition, with an original case presented by Padres executives, which will pit teams -- from such schools as University of California at Los Angeles, University of Southern California, Florida Atlantic University, and SDSU -- against each other.

Although SDSU's new offering is meant to be a general sports-business management program, students can customize it to focus on their strong suit. "My whole focus was to shape each class and tailor it to how I could use it and sell it to the baseball world," says Jack Tipton, a student in the program, who scored his dream consulting project in the league office of Major League Baseball in New York. Tipton credits networking with B-school contacts with landing the job. Once he was in the door, Tipton's ability to talk shop with his interviewers swayed them in his favor.

CUTTING-EDGE MARKETING.  MIT Sloan School of Management has also gotten into the game. Daryl Morey, a 2000 Sloan graduate and senior vice-president of operations and information for the Boston Celtics basketball team, started a course this fall called "Analytical Sports Management." Morey says he uses MIT's strong suit in analytics and just applies it to sports. He teaches students about forecasting player value by integrating scouting into decision making. Morey adds that the course was so successful that MIT is considering several other sports-related offerings in the next few years.

To give graduates the best inroads into the industry, established programs are looking to stay connected with this growing field. The five-year-old Sports Business MBA specialization at Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business just named Ray Artigue, the chief marketing officer for the Phoenix Suns professional basketball franchise, as its new executive director. "[Having Artigue] is inevitably good for the program," says Kurt Ritter, a second-year student in the program. "It helps in terms of recruiting, because he [knows] a phenomenal network of industry professionals."

Not only is the ASU program strategically small -- only admitting about 12 students per year -- but it's contained within a B-school with the highest BusinessWeek ranking of any of those offering an MBA specialization or major in sports management. It also offers cutting-edge marketing techniques to students. One course, "Fan Loyalty Measurement," brings the concept of customer-relationship management to the evaluation of sponsorship investments. The two-quarter course places students with actual organizations to conduct sponsor-satisfaction surveys, an experience Ritter says helps ASU grads in the marketplace, because they can immediately use such techniques to generate value for an organization.

TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP.  Some big-name B-schools have enjoyed close ties with professional sports for a while. Stanford has been running an executive-education program for NFL honchos since 2003 (see BW Online, 7/29/03, "Stanford Scores with the NFL"). And George Foster, professor of management at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says Stanford may soon join Harvard Business School and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in providing executive education for players preparing for a career after pro sports (see BW Online, 3/28/05, "Going Pro After Leaving the Pros").

MBA programs and students can only benefit from these relationships, which is why Wharton is currently in talks with other professional leagues to replicate the NFL program. Kenneth Shropshire, faculty director of the Wharton Sports Business Initiative, the school's own sports-business think tank, says these relationships are more than just another client for the executive-education staff. "The networking opportunities [for students] are often invaluable," says Shropshire.

Folks on the other side of the pond are getting in on the act, too. In the business of sports, networking is key. A former sports agent himself, Shropshire utilized Wharton's strategic partnership with INSEAD to deliver two sessions on negotiations to the first-ever sports-business class at the European B-School. The mini-course, "Sports Business Management," was oversubscribed, so the school plans to expand it and offer a fuller version this fall.

LOVE OF THE GAME.  INSEAD isn't alone. Other European B-schools are beginning to offer sports-business courses, and administrators say that students are quite interested. IESE Business School at the University of Navarra has developed an internationally focused sports-management course, with cases and expert speakers discussing business aspects of soccer and auto racing. Antonio Davila, an IESE professor of management who teaches the course, says the school is hoping to carve out a niche among the top European B-schools in sports business. "We're the first movers," says Davila.

The jury's still out on which type of program prepares the best sports-business executives. "Some people think that the best thing to prepare for a career in sports management is to get right into a degree program," says Stanford's Foster. "Others say it's best to get a general management degree for branding and then get into the business." The most important thing, he adds, is to love sports. As sports-business classes continue to spread, MBAs who hope to blend business with their appreciation of the game have reason to cheer.