New course to create next sport CEOs
Thursday 8 March 2018
FUTURE generations of sporting leaders will be created thanks to a new course produced by training provider VSI Executive Education and taught by the University of Salford.
The MBA level programme is designed for elite athletes and leaders with aspirations to be chief executives in the world of sport.
The CEO programme hopes to help transition those with sporting experience and others with leadership ambitions into the highest roles, by marrying their experiences of competitive sport with an educational understanding in business.
Tony Faulkner, Director of VSI said: “Sport is now recognising the absolute need to adopt formal corporate structuring with talented, highly educated individuals in all key leadership positions.
“The CEO is at the top of the tree and the market is demanding that this individual must have knowledge bespoke to sport.
“It is a practical, innovative programme that is in every respect vocational. Our passion has always been to provide a pathway for current and former athletes into executive roles within sport.”
Olympians Kelly Sotherton, Goldie Sayers and Beth Tweddle, England cricketer Matthew Hoggard and PFA Chairman Ben Purkiss are a part of the current VSI MSc in Sports Directorship, currently running in partnership with Salford.
Professor Chris Brady, Director of Centre for Sports Business at The University of Salford and academic lead for the programme said: “During my years of interviewing CEOs from major corporations, sporting organisations and even military leaders the one common lament was that ‘there’s no school for CEOs’.
“They realise that they are often thrust into a leadership role without any preparation for the role. They would have welcomed the existence of such a course.”
Darren Simmons, Managing Director of Executives in Sport, said: “VSI understand the industry of sport and executive education. Armed with this knowledge they can truly innovate and be the market leaders in executive sports education. Following on from the success of their sporting directors course it's genuinely exciting that they're creating a high level programme to develop CEO’s.”
Robert Elstone, the current chief executive of Everton FC previously said when speaking to the MSc Sports Directorship cohort: “Football is a very young industry, it’s still learning in terms of how it’s structured and how it operates.
“As a consequence of that, there aren’t very clear ways in or to progress, so learning programs to develop our own sporting leaders are really important.”
For more information on the VSI CEO programme contact:
info@vsiee.com
0345 459 9765
www.vsiee.com
@MasterSportDir
Find out more
Sam Wood
0161 295 5361
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