Event Detail




The Business of Sports and Franchising

We all love to follow our favorite teams in the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB).  We spend our nights and weekends eagerly watching ESPN for the latest scores and trade gossip. But despite all the fun, professional sports leagues and teams are big business. This provides a great opportunity to use sports as a backdrop to examine disciplines like management, marketing, economics, and law.

Our presenter, Richard Brown, will examine NFL and MLB dynamics from the perspective of individual teams.  He will discuss team decision-making and planning functions, competitive moves, organizational constraints, franchising elements, unionization, and industry structure.  This will lay a foundation for the second session, which will cover franchising systems and logic. The concept of franchising lies at the intersection of corporate management and entrepreneurship. This class will view franchising both as a growth mechanism (i.e. should our company grow through franchising or chaining) and as an entry strategy (i.e. should I start a business as an independent company or as part of a franchise chain).

Learning objectives:

  • Understand the key elements of collective bargaining agreements, as well as the impact these agreements have on business entities
  • Analyze the competitive forces exerted on individual teams
  • Discuss industry structure
  • Discuss the managerial choices large franchisors must make to remain competitive
When: Saturday, November 13th, 2021. 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM EST
Where: Your home or office
Speaker: Richard Brown, Ph.D.
CPE Credits: 4 Business Management and Organization CPE
CLE Credits: 4 Substantive CLE 
Program Level: Basic
Prerequisites: None
Advanced Preparation: None
Delivery Method: Group Live and Group Internet-Based
Price: FREE for ALA Members / $49 for Non-Members

The Presenters:

Richard S. Brown, Ph.D. is a professor of Strategic Management at Penn State University - Harrisburg. He has taught at many universities in the Philadelphia area. Courses taught include Strategic Management, Franchising, Mergers & Acquisitions, and Entrepreneurship & Innovation. He has published twenty academic articles in these fields on topics such as mechanism design, franchising, game theory and international location choice. 

About CPE/CLE:

* The ALA partners with McDevitt and Kline LLC for certificate issuance. Live, internet-based courses are approved as Distance Learning courses by the PA Supreme Court CLE Board. For additional information, please visit http://www.pacle.org/. Check with your State CLE Board for rules pertaining to live webcasts. These rules differ from state to state. For example, PA attorneys may earn up to 6 CLE credits per compliance period via live webcasts (or 6 out of 12 credits per year); NJ and DE attorneys may earn up to 12 CLE credits per compliance period via live webcasts (or 12 out of 24 credits per two years).
McDevitt & Kline, LLC is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA), as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors. State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit. Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be addressed to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors, 150 Fourth Avenue North, Suite 700, Nashville, TN, 37219-2417. Web site:www.nasba.org.