In August 2012, the Manchester United Football Club (MANU) was again listed on the New York Stock Exchange and it made an initial public offering at the same time. Football shares had been notoriously recognized as illiquid because the fans simply buy and hold them for good. How has the market been changed to accept MANU, small though world famous team? Behind this there has occurred a big change in policy, namely due to the “Jobs Act” in the States, involving reopening the capital market to smaller companies to let them produce employment.
    The purpose of this paper is to show that equity financing for football clubs in the open market not only provides a stable budget foundation for them but also encourages good corporate governance in their management. Once they are in the public market, even football clubs are exposed to pressures from the institutional investors if they mismanage their companies, as shown by results in the league table. In Manchester’ s case the tragedy started on May 9, 2013; the day when the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson published his resignation as the manager, followed by the successive poor performance of the club directed by the successor David Moyes. All those stories had been discounted in the market and the price had not performed well, in line with market index S&P 500. And then Moyes was fired.
    This is understandable in the sense that for the investors the manager could not run the club properly, so they suffered opportunity losses in their investments in the club. Corporate governance is defined here as the way in which corporate directors manage the company to adjust the conflicting interests of the stakeholders. Before the United IPO, the football companies had never been exposed to open criticism in terms of the management of their companies because football performances came first. But now sound corporate governance should dominate.

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    Chelsea Pitch Owners plc (CPO) is a public limited company, the historical result of an effort to protect a financially struggling football club from urban developers hungry for the centrally located ground in London. In the process, ex-Chelsea FC owner Ken Bates invented the scheme, predicting that real estate developers would run away once they found out that CPO is mostly owned by loyal Chelsea supporters as well as the fact that company’ s shares had been scattered all over many places, and so no prospective purchasers could control a majority of shares. But the biggest obstacle was that they would have to give up the usage of the famous brand Chelsea FC in case they moved the stadium to the suburbs, far from the current one. This was the ultimate poison pill clause.
    Professional football clubs are by nature unstable financially because of heavy competition in the league, so gate revenue is critically important for them, though at some times they may enjoy rapidly increasing media rights revenue as well as sponsorship revenue (merchandising included). Surely gate revenue is invaluable because it is firmly supported by fans, whether a club wins or loses. At its core the sports industry is a live event business. In addition, event attendance correlates strongly with other sports fan behaviors, such as media usage. The problem is that increases in ticket sales inventory require large investments in new or renovated facilities. Therein lies the question of how a club can acquire substantial money without raising already expensive tickets or simply moving out of the crowded metropolitan London to the suburbs, far from the hometown and against supporters’ protests.
    CPO reminds us of how a stadium can be best used by any club. Judging from American experiences, we should look more closely for growth opportunities for gate revenue by using the venue for other events, such as concerts and other sporting events.

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    The present study aimed to provide an overview and compare Master′s degree programs to clarify the characteristic features of the curriculum course contents and lecture formats among four Master′s programs in sport management education: the TIAS in Japan and the AISTS, FIFA Master, and FIMBA programs in Europe, by utilization of semi-structured interviews and analysis of the data from the interviewees.
    The paper clarifies that there are two types of Master′s programs designed to foster practical sport managers: 1) programs supported by the IOC and FIFA, and 2) newly developed programs of existing university graduate schools. Both types of programs differ in their lecture formats. In the type 1 programs, experts working in the IOC and IFs are invited as guest speakers to give lectures that are mostly organized around a discussion format and basically involve the use of PowerPoint slides. On the other hand, in the type 2 programs, the classroom format is generally followed, in which individual classes by instructors are taken weekly and over an extended period of time, following the set pattern of the university graduate schools. However, the curriculum is also flexible, where guest speakers are invited, using the same Powerpoint format through discussion as in the type 1 program. Furthermore, the study revealed that the subjects of each graduate school can be divided into common subjects and specific subjects. The point of difference among the said subjects was found to lie in their focus on the graduate′s destinations, keeping in mind the concept of the backgrounds and human resources installed in each graduate school and program.
    In conclusion, our study reveals new findings in context of the professional graduate schools in Japan and Europe.

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