Finding the fans.

• Author: Schley, Stewart

I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE OF SPORTS, AND IT LOOKS PRETTY MUCH LIKE your company after a bad quarter.

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Worried executives. Disturbing market-share forecasts. Competitive analyses that smell of doom. Price pressures. Technology disruption.

Pick any sport and it's the same story. A decades-long run of loyal fans, predictable ticket-sales levels and relatively sparse competition has given way to a capitalist's free-for-all in which, as a provocative new book about the sports industry explains, "every fan is in play."

In "The Elusive Fan: Reinventing Sports in a Crowded Marketplace," a trio of authors examines the dynamics behind a wholesale rewrite of the sports-business playbook.

The biggest factor: fragmentation. Just as cable TV and the Internet have busted apart what once was a tidy little oligarchy controlled by a few media titans, an explosion in micro-targeted sports enterprises has raised the competitive pressure on every fat-cat team owner who ever planted his/her posterior in a luxury box seat.

In a world where sports fans are super-served daily with choices that range from NASCAR races to prime-time college football to a 24-hour golf channel on TV, "the only effective position for a sports decision-maker is to manage the change process and build better strategies for the competition," according to authors Irving Rein, Philip Kotler and Ben Shields.

Rein is a professor of communications studies at Northwestern University's School of Communication. Kotler teaches international marketing at the Kellogg School of Management. Shields, a Northwestern doctoral candidate, is a specialist in sports and technology.

There's plenty at stake. The worldwide sports industry produces $100 billion annually in revenue, according to some estimates. There are more teams, leagues, vendors, equipment suppliers, TV rights deals and stores that sell replica jerseys than ever before.

But a more crowded marketplace also produces more voices clamoring for the attention of fans whose judgments about which sports to follow produce serious and lasting economic consequences. A seemingly innocent decision by a 15-year-old to begin paying attention to the National Lacrosse League box scores, multiplied by millions of young fans, has mighty implications for box-office receipts and TV ratings years down the road.

The challenge for sports teams and leagues is figuring out how to win the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of consumers in a world where work...