2min chapter

Sports Business Radio Podcast cover image

Dave Kaval - Athletics President

Sports Business Radio Podcast

CHAPTER

Navigating Stakeholder Relationships in Sports Management

This chapter explores the intricacies of managing relationships with stakeholders in the sports industry, focusing on communication and negotiation strategies for a successful transition to new markets. It also highlights the collaboration between team management and baseball operations to retain top talent and ensure a bright future for the franchise.

00:00
Speaker 2
How do you carry those forward, those relationships? Again, business partners, sponsors, fans, broadcast partners. How do you carry those forward to your next market?
Speaker 1
Well, you have to actually have conversations and negotiations with each individual one and ensure that whether it's your broadcast partner, like we're still going to be on NBC California in Sacramento. That was one of the reasons that it made sense to go up there for three years. So we have the broadcast piece, you have the fan piece, you have the league piece, you have the player side, the union. There's so many different stakeholders in these jobs. And many times the role of a team president is just to kind of, you know, massage all those different groups and try to keep the train running in one direction while also ensuring that you're getting feedback from all the people to make proper decisions. And that's really what the job is. I mean, for the students to kind of understand it, the day-to role is balancing a lot of those needs in a way to create something in the business that makes sense. And I think that's lost. People lose sight of that a little bit, but that's kind of what it is. From
Speaker 2
what I've heard, you know, I used to work for the Portland Trailblazers. And there are some sports organizations, business and sports ops, very separate. From what I've heard about the A's, you work very closely with baseball ops, and you guys are in concert on major decisions. Is that accurate to say?
Speaker 1
Well, we're very fortunate to have both Billy Bean as our special advisor, obviously from Moneyball, the book and the movie, and then David Forrest, who's just one of the best general managers in all sports. So he and the team of people he's built have done an incredible job building young players and teams and these nucleus of talent. Because if you look around the league, you see ace players everywhere. You see Matt Olson, Matt Chapman. You see Sean Minayev, I think was pitching tonight. What we always had the challenge was we didn't have the financial wherewithal, the revenue base to keep those players on our own team. They always went to the Yankees or somewhere else. The exciting thing about this new stadium in Las Vegas is we're going to be able to sign those players to long-term contracts and they're going to be able to play here for the Las Vegas A's. That is a big deal because we know how to develop talent. We have the actual secret sauce. We just have to put a business framework in place to keep those players here. And you add a couple of free agents to the mix on top of that, look out. I think it's going to be a product that people are going to want to see.

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