Spec Top: Business of the OLY & PLY Game

Every two years the Olympic Games generate billions of dollars of commercial revenue, reorganize a host city, and shape the commercial lives of several thousand athletes – and then the company that delivered them dissolves. This course examines the Olympic Movement as an enterprise: a global governance system (the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), the International Federations (IF), the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), and the National Governing Bodies (NGB)), a media and sponsorship property, a trademark estate, a recurring megaproject, and a labor market. Students work primarily from the documents that actually run the system – the Olympic Charter, The IPC Handbook,  the Ted Stevens Act, the Host City Contract, the Future Host Questionnaire, court decisions, and financial statements – and from the reform agenda as it unfolds in real time.

This elective course is designed for students in the M.S. in Sports Management program; no track, prerequisite, or prior legal or finance coursework is required. It complements the program’s league- and franchise-focused offerings by studying their structural opposite: a global property with no franchises, no annual gate-driven P&L, no permanent operating company, and a revenue pulse that arrives every two years. It serves the program’s larger goals of preparing students to analyze rights structures, governance, event economics, and athlete-facing business across the international sports industry. With Los Angeles hosting in 2028 and Utah in 2034, the United States is at the start of a decade-long Olympic building, hiring, and dissolving cycle, and the course is designed to be updated as that cycle develops.