 |
|
|
|||||
You dont need a perfect jump shot or the exhaustive knowledge (or opinions) of Stephen A. Smith to land a career in sports. You can get far on passion and a desire to spread that love of the game throughout an increasingly fan-driven world. Sports marketingwhich encompasses everything from managing multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals and crafting social media campaigns for local teams to coordinating fan activation at the Super Bowlis one of the most robust components of the sports industry, which is worth at least $500 billion globally. To understand the state of play in this arena, Fast Company analyzed nearly 2,800 job listings on Google for Jobs between April and June 2025. We classified hiring organizations into four types: property rights holders (e.g., leagues and teams), media organizations, brands, and agencies. And we divided the jobs themselves into three categories: strategy, creative, and experiential. We then looked at the salaries, job requirements, and locations involved. The results reveal an industry thats more accessible and geographically diverse than you might expect, with plenty of opportunities for people lacking in both educational pedigree and, presumably, athletic ability. {"blockType":"immersive-block-embed","data":{"embedSource":"","embedImageDesktop":"","embedImageDesktopCaption":"","embedImageMobile":"","embedImageMobileCaption":"","backgroundColor":"","paddingTop":0,"paddingBottom":0,"paddingLeft":0,"paddingRight":0,"mediaType":"ceros"}} Whos HiringProperty rights holders account for the highest number of jobs listed for any organization type, at about 34% of listings. And its not just the most recognizable leagues and teams looking for help, though the L.A. Clippers are in the market for a director of sales innovation. Miami University, youth sports company 3Step Sports, and the United Football League’s (UFLs) Memphis Showboats are all hiring. Media companies (such as Amazon and NBCUniversal) account for more than 26% of jobs; brands (think Nike, Lululemon, and Red Bull) represent more than 20%, and agencies (like Playfly Sports, Excel Sports Management, Two Circles, and Endeavor) make up more than 18%. But these different types of organizations arent uniformly looking for the same kinds of people. Media companies are the likeliest to hire for creative roles, with 41% of listings geared toward jobs developing and shepherding content. Agencies and brands are disproportionately likely to headhunt for people working in strategy, with those roles accounting for 60% and 52% of openings, respectively. And property rights holders need people to promote game day, making those kinds of companies the most likely to hire people to fill positions in experiential marketing. {"blockType":"immersive-block-embed","data":{"embedSource":"","embedImageDesktop":"","embedImageDesktopCaption":"","embedImageMobile":"","embedImageMobileCaption":"","backgroundColor":"","paddingTop":0,"paddingBottom":0,"paddingLeft":0,"paddingRight":0,"mediaType":"ceros"}} GeographyAlthough remote work accounts for the highest number of listings, two cities emerge as sports marketing hubs: Atlanta and New York. (Chicago is a distant third.) What explains Atlantas prominence? Its home to five professional sports teams: the Hawks (NBA), Dream (WNBA), United (MLS), Falcons (NFL), and Braves (MLB). Its also the HQ for brands known for getting their names in front of sports fans, such as Coke, Home Depot, and Delta. Charlotte, at No. 5, punches above its weight with its three major-league teams. Its also home to the Charlotte Motor Speedway, plus branches of major agencies like Octagon and Wasserman. {"blockType":"immersive-block-embed","data":{"embedSource":"","embedImageDesktop":"","embedImageDesktopCaption":"","embedImageMobile":"","embedImageMobileCaption":"","backgroundColor":"","paddingTop":0,"paddingBottom":0,"paddingLeft":0,"paddingRight":0,"mediaType":"ceros"}} SalaryAcross organization types, salaries start out roughly the same (north of $50,000 on average) and increase mostly in lockstep. Nike, despite 2024 revenues being down nearly 5% year over year, is among the brands shelling out the most, offering about $250,000 for two upper-level roles. Amazon MGM Studios is among the highest-paying media companies, dangling $223,250 for a senior-level job. As far as agencies go, Game Seven and Saatchi are the top spenders. Game Sevens $375,000 for a global head of accounts is the highest salary in our entire dataset. Full-Time Versus ContractThe vast majority of sports marketing jobs are full-time, at about 81%. The second most common type of employment are internships at more than 8.3% of openings, followed by part-time jobs at 7.7%, and contractors at a surprisingly low 3%. {"blockType":"immersive-block-embed","data":{"embedSource":"","embedImageDesktop":"","embedImageDesktopCaption":"","embedImageMobile":"","embedImageMobileCaption":"","backgroundColor":"","paddingTop":0,"paddingBottom":0,"paddingLeft":0,"paddingRight":0,"mediaType":"ceros"}} EducationIf youre looking to break into the industry and havent even started your freshman year of college, your best bet is to major in marketing. Forty-five percent of listings that stated a preference for any educational degree mentioned marketing in particular. But thats not your only option. The next most common requests are business (28%), communications (24.1%), sports management (15.2%), and journalism (7.4%). Brands are the most likely employers to ask for marketing degrees: 73.3% of jobs at these companies require them. But theres a good chance you wont need a degree at all. The majority of agency and media listings dont ask for one. Neither do nearly 40% of listings from brands nor 30% of listings from property rights holders. Of course, whether employers quietly prefer candidates to have one is another matter. MethodologyWe extracted jobs from the Google for Jobs search module monthly from April to June 2025, resulting in 2,774 jobs when duplicates were removed. We used a combination of Gemini and manual tech token search to extract information on salary, company type, job type, and educational background. The categorization of jobs as full-time or contract/internship and their geographic locations were contained as separate structured fields in Googles data. Monthly and hourly salaries were standardized to yearly rates by multiplying the rate by 12 for monthly salaries, and by 2,080 for hourly salaries.
Category:
E-Commerce
Below, Joe Nucci shares five key insights from his new book, Psychobabble: Viral Mental Health Myths & the Truths to Set You Free. Joe Nucci is a licensed psychotherapist. As a content creator, he contextualizes mental health misinformation. His videos at @joenuccitherapy reached over 10 million people in the first six months of posting and his writing can be found in his newsletter, Psychobabble. Whats the big idea? Psychobabble replaces mental health misconceptions with liberating truths that can help readers avoid misinformation, navigate important debates in the mental health field, and better maneuver their own therapy journeys. The problem is not that therapy has gone mainstream, but that some of the assumptions we have absorbed from therapy culture are actually holding us back from healing, growing, and solving our problems. 1. Psychotherapy heals mental illness, not problems of living. Therapy works, but it doesnt work for everything. Somewhere along the way, as mental health got destigmatized, we started to believe we could apply therapy to more than just mental illness. We started to believe it could save us from more than depression, trauma, and addiction. We started to believe that it could make us the ideal partner, the perfect parent, or help us achieve profound psychological comfort in all aspects of life. Unfortunately, there is no pill and no therapeutic intervention that can erase all of lifes struggles. And yet, therapy is often marketed as a cure-all for anything life throws at you. Of course, theres nothing wrong with going to therapy to vent or if youre bored or lonely. Furthermore, therapy can be quite effective in helping you with subclinical or nondiagnostic problems, like dating issues or struggles with a life transition. But there is a big difference between needing therapy and being able to benefit from it. Knowing where that line is can be really helpful in terms of maximizing how to get the most benefit from your therapy journey. It makes you a smarter consumer of therapy services and better at navigating self-help misinformation. Maybe you need to go to therapy, or maybe the answer to your problem can be found elsewhere. If youre not sure, speaking to a qualified therapist can help you figure that out. 2. Mental health is about agency, not identity. One of the dangers of therapy culture going viral is that mental health has become a form of identity and social currency. In certain places, mental health has become popularized. People collect labels like badges, flaunting their self-awareness: I am anxiously attached. I am neurodivergent. I am an empath. In the book, I share a patients story that is all too common. She could articulate every piece of her psychological history. She was practiced at naming her emotions and fluent in therapy-speak. But she wasnt changing. She wasnt healing. She was stuck and suffering from it. She didnt need more self-awareness. While becoming self-aware is often the first step, the magic of therapy isnt about the analysis; its about translating that insight into action. It is about having hard conversations, naming her needs, and making the call shed been avoiding for weeks. Diagnosis is a doorway, not a destination. Mental health shouldnt be about figuring out what you are. Its about being able to transform your attachment style, optimizing your life around your neurodivergency, or harnessing your empathy in an adaptive way. Its about building your capacity to be better. Diagnosis is a doorway, not a destination. A diagnosis is useful in the sense that it informs a treatment plan. Holding onto your diagnosis as an identity without building the capacity for agency is just taking extra steps to stay exactly where you are in life. That is not the promise of the mental health field. The promise is to transform what you can and accept the rest as problems of living. 3. Therapists are not value-neutral. Therapists are taught to be nonjudgmental, but nonjudgmental doesnt mean value-free. Every therapist brings a worldview into the room. They have their own pasts, politics, and values. A bad therapist will pretend that they are perfectly neutral. This kind of therapist is blissfully unaware of how their own personal lives impact the work you are trying to accomplish in the session. A good therapist will be aware that they are not a blank slate. They are self-aware enough to consider how they might say something thats more about them than about you or why you are seeking their help. They will withhold sharing when its not clinically appropriate. But a great therapist? A great therapist can be simultaneously aware of how their past or personal values might influence them while honoring that your past and life philosophies may differ. They may even talk about their differences to assist in your healing. A good therapist will be aware that they are not a blank slate. The unfortunate truth is that some therapists feel emboldened to let their personal worldview encroach on their patients worldview. Some therapists see themselves as activists advancing a certain agenda. It could be political or philosophical. It might mean encouraging a client to end a relationship, label a parent as toxic, or reframe social dynamics as systemic harm. Sometimes thats warranted. But sometimes its projection. 4. Tragedies dont always result in trauma. Trauma is real, but so is the casual misuse of the term. Not everything bad that happens to you is a trauma. Its inaccurate to say that events are traumatic in themselves because two people can get into the same car accident and one will develop PTSD while the other one will not. A trauma response is not about the past. Its about the present moment and your current relationship to the thing that happened to you. Sometimes, pain metabolizes naturally. Sometimes, people move forward without assigning their suffering a trauma diagnosis. And thats not repressionits capacity. By insisting that everyone has trauma, we risk flattening a wide range of emotional experiences into one narrow framework. We must consider the dynamics of grief, growth, and the full range of negative human experiences that shape our lives. Disappointment, regret, embarrassment, and heartbreak are hard, but they are not necessarily traumatic. Calling them trauma can subtly reinforce the idea that we are fragile and need clinical intervention to process every difficulty. This rebranding is surely good for therapists who want a steady stream of patients, but the idea culturally undermines resilience and turns the lens inward in ways that are often disempowering. 5. Therapy-speak can be medicine, or a weapon. One of the best things about therapy is that sometimes, when you name omethingwhen something becomes conscious through languagethat thing no longer has power over you. Ive seen firsthand how being able to name trauma or abuse can provide relief almost instantly. Ive personally experienced the agency Ive gained from being able to articulate a dynamic that was previously ineffable. But if language can heal us, it can also hurt us: A patient once said, Im drawing a boundary, right after cutting off a friend without explanation. Was it a boundary? Or was it a way to avoid a hard conversation? He gaslit me sometimes means He disagreed with me. Im dysregulated becomes shorthand for I dont want to talk about this. We think were speaking the language of healing. Sometimes, were just dressing up our defenses. Sometimes, using psychology jargon is just a logical fallacyan appeal to authority. When we do this in a way that allows us to be more disconnected from ourselves and from each other, that is the opposite of the promise of the field of mental health. Learning these concepts is a little bit like learning a new language. At the beginning, its important to stay rigid with your grammar and pronunciation. Over time, as you become more fluent, its less about the words you use and more about how you use them. Its not about labeling gaslighting correctly or incorrectly. Its about knowing how to handle it when somebody disagrees with you and knowing what to do if somebody is trying to gaslight you. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
The ChompSaw is a power tool made for kids to cut, craft, and create with cardboard. Its unique design makes it perfectly safe for little hands to use and easily carve precise corners or elegant edges through old boxes. Developed by college friends Kausi Raman and Max Liechty, ChompSaw raised $1.2 million in less than a month on Kickstarter and has already sold more than 30,000 units online. The ChompSaw is a winner of Fast Companys 2025 Innovation by Design Awards.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||