Digital Sport-Management Games and Their Contribution to Prospective Sport-Managers’ Competence Development

The immersive and engaging characteristics of digital games are leading current pedagogical discussions about digital media. Game scientists, (pedagogical) researches, and practitioners continue to attempt to embed digital games in pedagogical settings. They consider these games to be so called serious games. The idea of serious games is that a digital game is not only played for fun and entertainment, but to employ the specific game-play for serious learning processes and outcomes in a specific field of learning or work. Hence, the question arises, whether a digital sport-management game can assist prospective sport managers and students of sport management at the introduction to this complex field of work. To tackle the research question, it is necessary to investigate the profession of sport managers in “real” life and compare the game-play of a digital sport management game to them. Therefore, the best selling and most famous so-called commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) game FIFA Manager 09 by EA Sports is picked to be the subject of analysis. “Virtual” sport-manager competencies were compared to “real-world” sportmanager competencies to find any matching. As a result, there actually is a high congruence between sport-management competence-models and the digital game’s game-play.