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STOCKHOLM SCHOOL
OF ECONOMICS

Director for Center for Sports & Business Awarded with Outstanding Pedagogical Achievement for new Sports Course on the Master Level

24 februari, 2022
On February 24th, Martin Carlsson-Wall, the Director for the Center for Sports and Business and Course Director of the new elective course Investments and Value Creation in Global Sports on the master level received the Outstanding Pedagogical Achievement Award for autumn 2021.

With a great deal of patience, long-term commitment, and a persistent character, Center Director Martin Carlsson-Wall created and realized an M.Sc. elective course, Investments and Value Creation in Global Sports, that gathered 68 students from 19 universities and 16 different countries. During the autumn of 2022, the course will run in its second edition. 

The jury’s motivation for awarding Carlsson-Wall was as follows:

“Martin Carlsson-Wall was the director of the newly developed and highly appreciated MSc elective course on Investments and Value Creation in Global Sports, that was offered to SSE’s international networks. The course was especially designed for digital delivery and attracted students from 19 schools in 16 countries. The course combined content delivered by SSE faculty with global thought leaders as guest lecturers, which was enabled by the digital format. But above and beyond the content of the course, the course extended the classroom for those students physically present in Stockholm, using study trips and sports events.” 

Elaborating on the course format, Carlsson-Wall says:

“An important part of the course was to experiment with physical experiences for the participating SSE students in Stockholm. We started with a kick-off at Berns hosted by Citi (to test a new way of interacting with corporate partners), we watched both football and ice hockey games and we played padel together with one of the best SportTech companies in Sweden. The ambition with this was to integrate SSE’s educational mission FREE both digitally and physically in the course. The magic moments are indeed created when you combine digital and physical elements. Digitalization makes it possible to access global thought leaders, and physical events outside of SSE make networking and confidence-building possible.” 

The sports elective included, for instance, guest lectures by Dan Singer, Partner and Leader of the Global Sports & Gaming Practice at the consulting company McKinsey on the Global Sports Market, David Dellea, Partner and Head of Sports Business at PwC on Gaming and e-sport for international federations, as well as Jasmine Robinson, Partner at Causeway Media Partners on Investing in Sports - An American Growth Equity Perspective. 

On receiving the award, Carlsson-Wall says:

“I am very thankful for achieving this award. My ambition is to combine the research frontier with the practitioner frontier so that the classroom becomes a knowledge lab.”

More About Investments and Value Creation in Global Sports

Course 3313, Investments and Value Creation in Global Sports, is an M.Sc elective course that will run in its second edition between October 2022 and January 2023. The course director for this elective is Center for Sports and Business Director Martin Carlsson-Wall delivered together with Tomas Hjelström (Department of Accounting) and Per Strömberg (Department of Finance). 

During the last 10 years, financial investors have gained power and influence within the global sports industry. In North America, several clubs have owners with a private equity background and within European football, many clubs are owned by financial investors, private equity companies, or listed on the stock exchange. 

However, despite this increased financialization, there are strong counter forces. Many sports clubs are driven by passionate interests where supporters want to maintain historical community identities and there are also public organizations on both state and city levels that have highlighted the risks of too much financialization. This tension between financial investments and passionate interests is at the core of this course. The recent failure of the European Super League project demonstrates that this is one of the most strategic issues within the global football community. We also see how the tensions between financial investments and passionate interests are discussed in relation to Olympic Games and other large sports events. 

To deliver this course, two strong research areas at SSE, accounting/finance and sports, are combined. The goal is to create a course that is attractive to SSE students, but also to students in SSE’s international networks such as CEMS and GNAM. 

The course covers the following themes: The Global Sports Industry - An Overview, Due diligence and investing in a sports organization, creating value in a world of passionate interests as well as exit strategies and getting financial returns.

Sports and Business

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