Sports are a multibillion-dollar global business that will continue to grow by leaps and bounds into the foreseeable future. The bad news is: It's never been harder to attract, engage, and retain the sports fan. Today's sports fans are bombarded by choices. Traditional sports, such as baseball, football, and basketball, compete for fans' dollars with snowboarding, lacrosse, poker...even paintball. The old business formulas, developed in the age of three TV networks and creaky stadiums, no longer apply. World-renowned communication expert Irving Rein, international marketing guru Philip Kotler, and communication specialist Ben Shields deliver an innovative new business model centered squarely on fan satisfaction and retention. They give you the tools to transform your sports product into an enduring brand-immune to the vagaries of winning and losing-that quickly adapts to changing market conditions. Along the way they illustrate their points with fascinating case studies, including Manchester United's transformation from a plucky home team to a billion-dollar international franchise Professional golf phenomenon Michelle Wie's quest to maximize her talents and marketability Southlake Carroll High School football team's benchmarking of professional and college football programs to build its own brand Daytona International Speedway's reinvention of fan intimacy Combining expert analysis with field-tested strategies for winning hearts and minds, The Elusive Fan is your guide to surviving and thriving in today's ever-widening world of sports.

"Sports Investing: Profiting from Point Spreads" introduces strategies and tactics that turn the sports betting market into a more businesslike activity. We prefer the term "sports investor" instead of "sports bettor" because we take a professional view of the sports marketplace.

Sport has become big business. This book takes a global look at the business of sport focusing upon the structure of the sport industry, commercialisation of sport, sport marketing, franchising, television and other rights and the rise of the global super athletes and teams. This is positioned in a global political and economic context and in the framework of global uncertainties and scenarios.

Alexis de Tocqueville once described the national character of Americans as one question insistently asked: "How much money will it bring in?" G.K. Chesterton, a century later, described America as a "nation with a soul of a church." At first glance, the two observations might appear to be diametrically opposed, but this volume shows the ways in which American religion and American business overlap and interact with one another, defining the US in terms of religion, and religion in terms of economics. Bringing together original contributions by leading experts and rising scholars from both America and Europe, the volume pushes this field of study forward by examining the ways religions and markets in relationship can provide powerful insights and open unseen aspects into both. In essays ranging from colonial American mercantilism to modern megachurches, from literary markets to popular festivals, the authors explore how religious behavior is shaped by commerce, and how commercial practices are informed by religion. By focusing on what historians often use off-handedly as a metaphor or analogy, the volume offers new insights into three varieties of relationships: religion and the marketplace, religion in the marketplace, and religion as the marketplace. Using these categories, the contributors test the assumptions scholars have come to hold, and offer deeper insights into religion and the marketplace in America.

In setting the foundation for this book, the unique qualities of sport as a tourist attraction are presented and discussed theoretically. It then addresses in six chapters central themes of sport tourism development.