Sports Media and Sport Business Degrees

The Australian sports market is one of the most cluttered and competitive in the world. In a country of just 25 million people, in 2020 the Australian sports market will consist of 114 professional teams, all competing for the same, limited number of supporters, members, sponsors, advertisers, and media rights holders. As such, some of the smaller sports leagues in Australia are beginning to feel the financial strain of competing in such a cluttered market. However, one of the biggest and most significant threats to domestic sports in Australia is not coming from within, but rather from overseas, in particular, from the USA and Europe with the rising popularity of global sports leagues such as the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the English Premier League (EPL). This is particularly evident amongst millennials and Generation Z sports fans. This article explores what these younger demographics find appealing about overseas sports leagues, using the responses of focus group participants, which included twenty-one sports fans aged between 18 and 30. Furthermore, the responses are used to make recommendations for Australia’s domestic sports’ leagues and teams to ensure they remain viable in the future and to predict what Australia’s domestic sports will look like in the coming years.

This article explores the transformation of play in the sport field by combining Johan Huizinga’s historical observations of play with Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital and habitus, using Australian football in the Australian Football League (AFL) as a case study. By developing this theory, this analysis provides a means of understating how the economic and media fields have transformed play, which has ultimately weakened the community. Furthermore, by interpreting Huizinga’s observations using Bourdieu’s concepts, I have provided Huizinga’s observations with a theoretical framework and structure that ensures his observations can be applied to today’s society to understand how and why the play element has changed and what the consequences of such change are for the community.

This paper explores the Australian community’s reaction to the deportation of unvaccinated tennis star, Novak Djokovic, in the lead up to the 2022 Australian Open.

In January 2016, 34 past and present players from the Essendon Football Club were found guilty of being injected with banned peptide, Thymosin Beta 4, while participating in Essendon’s supplements programme in 2011 and 2012. The release of the Court of Arbitration of Sport’s (CAS) summary of findings raised questions about the actions and intent of the participating players. In particular, the CAS highlighted concerns that the players showed a lack of due diligence and curiosity and acted in a secretive nature. This article seeks to provide a means of understanding the actions of the 34 Essendon players who willingly participated in Essendon Football Club’s supplements programme by viewing them as active participants of a community. In doing so it becomes clear that the actions of the Essendon 34 were not unusual, but that a cultural shift within Australian Football League clubs may be needed to ensure a crisis like it never occurs again.