La Salle Sport Management Students @ Global Sports Forum 2011

A group of 5 students of BES La Salle took part as volunteers in the 3rd annual edition of the Global Sports Forum 2011, which took place on the 10th and 11th of March at the Palau de Congressos de Barcelona and which is organized by HAVAS SPORTS & Entertainment. This is the third consecutive year the event takes places in Barcelona and the third year as well in which BES La Salle sport management students form part at one of the most outstanding and international events in the sports arena. In this blog article we aim to explain and share with students and professors what our contributions to the event were, which the main trends of discussion were and what the learning outcomes from this experience are. Students’ contribution during the event This is how we worked during the two days: Nicholas De Roche, Yan Niznik and Albert Furnells were helping the visitors of the forum to learn more about the My-GSFB Application. This application enabled the visitors to network with other visitors as well as stay up-to-date regarding what was going on during the conference. Kristian Dobrev and Sara Tendero were helping with the content management of the sessions held in the forum. Main Topic Trends The topics were based on the GSFB 2011 question: ‘Sports: What’s next?’ 1. Women in Sport - Still a long way to go «Women are the future of men ». With these words from the French poet Louis Aragon, Lucien Boyer, General Commissioner of the Global Sports Forum Barcelona 2011, started the first debate on “Women who made a difference in sport”. In the conference there were outstanding women guest speakers like Samantha Davies, Donna De Varona, Mia Hamm, Chantal Jouanno, Urvasi Naidoo, PresPernilla Wiberg and  Katarina Witt. All of them expressed that women need more female role models in sport and that there still exists noticeable differences between men and women in sport. There is still a long way for women but with the support of other men in sport, the government and a better promotion of women in sport, women will be able to surpass these differences. Together we can make it! 2. Sports & digital content management There were several conference sessions held around how to manage brand’s online content and how to enhance the online and offline experience of an event, a brand or a sport. One example was the Senior Vice President of Yahoo!, Rich Riley, who, during the session “Sport, flagship content shaping the future of my brand: the Yahoo! Experience,” expressed that the future challenge is to broadcast the sport content into a digital format and be able to take it offline by creating a series of  activities and awareness to make the most of sports events. He gives the example of how the content of the South Africa World Cup was spread all over Yahoo! Another example was the one explained by Christian Hernandez, Head of Business Development for Facebook in the UK, who claimed that “Real Madrid, Barca and Manchester United are by far the best clubs using social networking” since they always promote their sport events on Facebook. 3.Upcoming Sport Major Events During the Forum, several talks were dedicated to important major sport events, which will take place in the future. Carlos Nuzman, President of the Organizing Committee of Rio 2016 (Brazil) explained how they handled the bidding process to host the Olympic Games and how the Olympic Games can make a huge impact on the city of Rio during the “Setting new standards for the Olympic Games in Rio” session. Another example of an upcoming event was discussed during the session “Sochi 2014: a discussion with Dmitry Chernyshenko”. He discussed how such a global project like Sochi 2014 was perceived as a challenge in several aspects; in terms of promotion of the event, how to deal with safety and how to protect Sochi’s environmental safety, and how all these factors will come together to give a new image of Russia. 4. Sport as driver of social change Raï and Didier Drogba’s intervention at the Global Sports Forum Barcelona definitely created buzz around the visitors. They both participated in the talk “Athletes as Leaders of Social change: A Discussion with Rai and Didier Drogba” to give examples of how sport and social change can also go hand-on-hand. Rai explained how the programme Gol de la Letra enables children from disadvantaged neighborhoods to participate in workshops based on art, culture, education and sports. Didier Drogba emphasized the need of sport starts to get involved in social causes and discussed how the South Africa World Cup created a lot of jobs in the country. He also explained how Raï had always been a role model for him and his future social projects. As Raï did during the conference, we would also close this chapter with Nelson Mandela’s quote “Sport can change the world”. During the Forum many sessions were held.  We found it impossible to include all the topics in here, but we strongly encourage the reader to visit this link which contains all the session reports of the conference and which offers a lot of interesting insights for future sports managers. What are our learning outcomes? New models in sport are coming up;

• The progressive and better participation of women in sport implies more women acting as a role model and better and more promotion of women in sports.
• Sport Digital Content; like in any other business sector, brands, events and athletes need to understand how to manage digital content effectively so that sport institutions engage fans online to later maximize the effect of the offline experience in the sport events.
• How the implementation of a sport event can have a huge positive impact on a city in the long term and high event management represents the convergence of important social challenges for a city.
• Sport has a huge power of mobilization. Sports leaders need to take advantage of this power in a positive way to make sustainable social changes.

As sport management students, we had the chance to see and understand how major event management is dealt; organization, team communication, working under pressure and taking the right decision are the essence of events - and we loved it!