"One day I Will Manage FC Bayern Munich!" - How Sport Management Games Train Prospective Sport Managers, Development Of Competencies by Playing Digital Sports Games?!

Mass media continuously delivers breaking news on various sports. Among these sports, some sports might be more or less famous and popular. Undoubtedly, soccer is one of most famous and popular sports in the world. The huge amount of money involved and the number of worldwide fangroups indicate the high importance of this mass media spectacle. For instance, millions of people watch the world championships, while multiple people work hard behind the scenes to keep this business going. Moreover, soccer as a business enterprise seems to be still growing. Structures which have become as big as soccer naturally need to professionalize. Therefore, various professions tackle the demands of professional soccer. Among these professions, the so called sport manager plays a key role. The sport manager is responsible for serious decisions according to the present and future development of a soccer club. Someone holding that important position needs to be trained well, to be able to cope with the specific tasks within this specific field of work. For this purpose, university and higher education programs offer serious degrees to becoming a sport manager. Sport management even has become a distinct sub-discipline of sport science containing sophisticated scientific theory, content and methodology. Therefore, studying sport management opens the complex structure of the field of work in question that might appear quite simple in every-day conversation at first sight. At this point, digital games and the idea of integrating them into sport manager training processes come in. The immersive and engaging characteristics of digital games are leading current pedagogical discussions about digital media. Game scientists, (pedagogical) researches, and practitioners continue to attempt to embed digital games in pedagogical settings. They consider these games to be so called "serious games". The idea of serious games is that a digital game is not only played for fun and entertainment, but to employ the specific game-play for serious learning outcomes in a specific field of learning or work. Hence, the question arises, whether, and if so how, a digital sport management game can assist prospective sport managers and students of sport management at the introduction to this complex field of work. To tackle the research question, it is necessary to investigate the profession of sport managers in "real" life and compare the game-play of a digital sport management game to them. Therefore, the best selling and most famous so called COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) game "FIFA Manager 09" by EA Sports is picked to be the subject of analysis. In conclusion, "virtual" sport manager-competencies actually match "real-world" sport-manager competencies well. However, further research will be needed, especially empirical studies.