International sport management education: Curricula, trends, and challenges

The purpose of this chapter is to present the status quo of sport management education and give an outlook on its future directions. First, the chapter introduces sport management education, indicating its development and growing importance. Second, it discusses core components of sport management education and compares those components among current degree programmes. Table 2.1 provides an extensive overview examining the prevalence of sport management education's core components across sport management degree programmes of several universities from six continents. It shows the existence of different degree approaches as both congruency and heterogeneity of contents become apparent among the degree programmes. The heterogeneity in education fairly represents the diversity of graduates' career opportunities in the sports business industry. Moreover, also non-university sport management education is briefly mentioned in the chapter. Third, it discusses current trends, developments, and challenges affecting the sports industry. It focuses on sustainability and social responsibility, digitalisation, internationalisation and intercultural management, as well as integrity and good governance. Sport management degree programmes need to implement such relevant trends in their curriculum. Finally, the findings of this chapter are discussed and concluded.