MS in Sport Analytics
Sport Business Emphasis
Master’s Degrees | Sport Analytics | Sport Business
Online MS in Sport Analytics, Sport Business Emphasis
Think about your local team: The last time you attended a game, the stadium buzzed with excitement—starting from tailgating to cheers from the crowd for every point scored. What interests fans? How can a team best serve a local market? How will tickets sell throughout the season?
Fan support of professional or collegiate franchises in their hometowns sets a foundation, allowing marketing and finance professionals to examine fan response and player and team performance to calculate the season’s trajectory. These trends influence ticket sales for home and away games, merchandise numbers, and how full the stadium will be throughout the season.
If you picture a career tracking these trends, make it happen with the University of Mississippi’s online Master of Science in Sport Analytics with a Sport Business emphasis. Grow your knowledge of measurement, evaluation, and interpretation tactics along with sports marketing-specific applications of statistics, machine learning, and visualization methods. You’ll start with a general data analytics-focused core before refining this perspective toward sports marketing, forecasting, finance, and campaign development.
All courses are structured around an eight-week accelerated format. Ole Miss Online offers rolling admission with five (5) academic start dates per year.
Data Analytics in the Sports Business
The program combines academic, practical, and research‐based skills to allow students to develop their knowledge of sport business analytics. This emphasis will prepare professionals with strong practical skills in analytics, focusing on sport business applications of data acquisition and measurement, statistical modeling, predictive analytics, big data, quantitative and qualitative research, database management, and visualization techniques.
To give you a voice in these decisions and predict trends in a multi-billion-dollar global industry, the Sport Business emphasis:
- Trains you to identify trends and make predictions for game days, local markets, professional and collegiate teams, and sponsorships
- Equips you with the knowledge to design more targeted sports programs, marketing campaigns, and team schedules
- Helps you better analyze and expand a team’s presence in and beyond their region
- Gives you the tools to understand fan behavior and serve them through more engaging, customized campaigns
- Allows you to guide team decisions, including for scouting, recruitment, and trades
- Helps you make more data-driven management decisions
- Provides insight into developing and promoting team merchandise
Curriculum
The 30-credit-hour curriculum is designed to be completed in 12 months, though students also have the option to complete a part-time course progression and are encouraged to complete the degree within two years of enrollment. The online MS in Sport Analytics is split between two portions.
A 24 credit-hour core sequence exposes you to essential analysis, research, and visualization theories and techniques. This encompasses descriptive and inferential statistics, measurement and evaluation tools, predictive analysis, R and other languages, data mining, machine learning, and quantitative and qualitative research design methods.
From here, you’ll start the Sport Business emphasis, which includes six credit hours of courses focusing on data analytics applications in sports marketing and finance. You’ll dive into:
- The principles of marketing, management, communication, and business issues in the sports industry
- Sports industry economic and financial theories
- Better utilizing sports statistics, particularly machine learning and algorithms for forecasting, making predictions, and identifying or improving outcomes
Careers
A 2020 report of the sports industry identified a 15.6% growth of data storage and management over the next several years. This trend reflects an overall demand for market research analysts; the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts 19% more positions between 2021 and 2031.
Honing this transformational skill set toward the business side of sports equips you for roles in:
- Marketing
- Finance
- Sports news and media
- Sports betting
- Professional and collegiate team management
Admission
Reach for your goals, and refine your knowledge toward a rewarding, dynamic analytical career in the sports business. Ready to take the next step?
Look Ahead to an Engaging, Fast-Paced Career in the Sports Business
Prepare to shape management decisions, develop stronger relationships with fans, and guide trades and team expansion. To learn more about the Sport Business emphasis for the online Master’s in Sport Analytics, contact Graduate Enrollment Manager Megan Black at meblack@olemiss.edu to set up an appointment to talk more about the program, your interests and needs, and your future.