November 25 - Smartworking (6 hours)

This last topic was focused on the general understanding of why the sport is a growing industry worlwide. The "sports industry" was close to 441 billion dollars in 2021 and expects to reach 600 billion in turnover by 2025. Specifically, the study identifies sports sponsorships as the main source of revenue. It is assumed that the same asset related to sponsorships will exceed 71 billion in turnover within in the next three years. It is now common sense that sporting activity has taken on a progressively growing economic dimension in the economies of developed countries since, at the end of the 1960s, first in the United States and later in European countries, it was increasingly structured according to profit criteria , through managerial organizations, and extending the market logic to activities previously set according to completely different criteria. The underlying phenomenon at the basis of this process is the continuous reduction in working time during the 20th century and the simultaneous increase in leisure time which in high-income societies is dedicated in an increasingly significant part to direct sports practice or to the passive use ‒ direct or through television ‒ of sports shows. This new sector of activity has been the subject of ever greater monetary investments, so that in a long journey that runs throughout the century, the relationship between sport and the economy has become increasingly close, to the point of predicting that almost all sporting activity will be future organized according to market rules, despite the constant tensions between the symbolic and social aspects that it preserves and the conditioning dictated by the strict requirements of the balance sheets. It is known that many of the modern sports were born several centuries ago, but their regulatory formalization took place between the middle and the end of the 19th century. Soon after, international institutions arose that still govern sporting activity today, but their economic importance subsequently grew, with the development of mass communication media: newspapers, broadcasts first only on radio, then on television and now via the internet.