Sport Management and Recreation Review

Everything is becoming more global these days, and from NFL games in London to MLB in China, sports is no exception, . Of course there are thousands of teams and leagues outside of the United States as well. SportBusiness.com covers sports news all around the world. SportBusiness also provides reports and subscription publications for purchase, along with an organization directory, job board, and conference organization. I’ll mostly be focusing on their sports news briefs.

Design

The professional, streamlined design makes it easy to find news in a variety of categories. General categories such as Sport Events, Sport Marketing, and Sport Media are divided by color tabs, with each category broken into sectors (including Administration, Education, Law, Recruitment, and Sponsorship). The news briefs are also searchable by sector, sport, and country. One helpful feature I just found is that each article is tagged by its category, i.e. an article entitled Naming rights deal for Giants, Jets stadium could set record has tags above it for “Marketing | United States | American Football | Naming Rights | Sponsorship” so I can easily search within those categories for further information. Another great thing is the ability to add the site to your news reader as a feed. (If you’re using Firefox look for an orange button like this in your url bar. Click on it and you can add the feed. Overall nice design and ease of navigation. Check here for a tag cloud.

Content

The content of this website might be a little overwhelming if it were not for the simple, organized design mentioned above. It ranges from an article on Chelsea Football Club and Disney’s partnership to one on Nike’s new VP of global football (soccer). The news briefs themselves are actually more like articles, often 2-4 paragraphs long, with plenty of solid information in them.

Links

Many internal links, but I couldn’t find any to outside the website. Not a problem as SportBusiness.com is extensive itself.

Price

Free access is available for the general website, including all of the news stories. The publications and reports are for sale, but I am not familiar with general prices for these types of information so I won’t comment on the prices.

Overall

Overall SportBusiness.com is an information packed place to start your sport management research for whatever country you are looking for. Tags make it easy to search further once you find an article that fits.

After that depressing Superbowl last week I don’t have anything to say about football, which means that baseball season is just around the corner. Less than a week until pitchers and catchers report, so it’s time for baseball. Baseball Musings looks like a great place to check out the upcoming season. Let’s see how it does.

Design

At first glance the design seems to be fine. Simple to read, looks fairly easy to navigate. Search box, check. However, there are a few things that Baseball Musings could improve upon. While I fully support writers earning money with ads on their webpages, some of the ads on the right column of Baseball Musings seem unprofessional and do not match the rest of the layout or the professional content of the site. I’d like to see something that blends in better, along with more relevant ads. (They would most likely earn more than the grocery coupons there now.) My other suggestion while small, would improve the navigation of the site. The title banner should be a link back to the home page of the site. It makes it easier for a reader who is lost in the archives or comments to get back to the main page of the site. While I’m discussing the banner–why doesn’t it go all the way across the top?

Content

I know I just trampled the design of Baseball Musings, but all is not lost. Although the site concentrates on on-field news, i.e. player trades, there are still some articles that discuss business of baseball. Overall the sport content is great quality and the business content that’s there is good also.

Links

The far right column provides a plethora of links to baseball and sports related pages, most of them more sports than business oriented though.

Price

Price is great, it’s free!

Overall

Overall this a good website for a baseball enthusiast, but it doesn’t have a huge amount of sport management content. Definitely a place to check if you are looking for baseball information though.