Sport has shaped nearly every stage of my life. It has been a source of competition, education, travel, friendship, professional opportunity, and personal identity. It has also taken me from Germany to Australia and the United States and ultimately led me to a career studying how athletes, organizations, events, brands, and consumers interact within the global sport and entertainment industry.
I am a Professor of Sport Management at Temple University in Philadelphia. My work sits at the intersection of strategic management and marketing, with a particular interest in athlete branding, fan engagement, digital innovation, sponsorship, and the impact of sporting events.
Although my professional title is professor, I have never viewed my role as limited to the university. I enjoy moving between academic research, teaching, consulting, and the practical challenges faced by people working in sport. I am most interested in questions that matter both intellectually and operationally: how athletes can build meaningful and sustainable personal brands, how sport organizations can form stronger relationships with their audiences, how technology changes consumer behavior, and how events create value for their stakeholders and host communities.
I grew up in Germany in a family involved in sport tourism. From an early age, I experienced sport as more than organized competition. It was also a business, a lifestyle, a social environment, and a way of bringing people together.
My own interests were broad. I played football and became involved in snowboarding, skiing, wakeboarding, windsurfing, and other outdoor sports. I later worked as a ski, snowboard, and windsurfing instructor. Those experiences gave me an appreciation for sport from several perspectives: as an athlete, participant, instructor, consumer, and eventually researcher.
They also taught me that people rarely connect with sport for only one reason. Performance matters, but so do identity, belonging, aspiration, community, and experience. That idea continues to shape how I approach my work today.
At Saarland University, I studied physical education alongside business administration, and business and economic education. This combination gave me the foundation for the work I now do.
Sport helped me understand people, motivation, competition, and performance. Business introduced me to organizations, markets, strategy, and value creation. Education taught me how knowledge can be communicated and applied.
I also spent a year studying business administration at the University of Missouri. That experience introduced me to the American university system and to the distinctive role that sport plays within American higher education. It also strengthened my interest in working internationally.
I later moved to Australia to complete a Ph.D. in Business at Griffith University, with a concentration in sport management. My doctoral research focused on sport brands and the relationships consumers form with professional leagues and teams. Australia became an important part of my personal and professional development. I taught university courses, worked on research projects, developed international collaborations, and learned to examine sport from a perspective different from the European environment in which I grew up.
I joined Temple University in 2013 as an assistant professor. Since then, Philadelphia has become my professional base and Temple has provided the setting in which I have developed as a researcher, teacher, mentor, and consultant.
I received tenure and promotion to associate professor in 2019 and was promoted to professor in 2024. Over those years, my work expanded from the study of sport brands and consumer relationships into athlete branding and NIL, digital engagement and gamification, women’s sport, sponsorship, and event research.
The common thread across these areas is an interest in how people assign meaning and value to sport. A team, athlete, league, event, or digital platform is not valuable only because it exists. Its value develops through the experiences, associations, relationships, and communities that form around it.
My research career has also reinforced the importance of collaboration. Much of my work has been completed with colleagues and graduate students from different countries and academic backgrounds. Those collaborations have broadened the questions I ask and helped me avoid assuming that one sport, market, or culture represents the entire industry.
One of the most important principles guiding my career is that research should be useful.
Academic work is essential because it provides rigor, evidence, and a structured way of testing ideas. However, I also believe that research should help people and organizations make better decisions outside the university.
That belief has led me to work with athletes, professional leagues, events, sport organizations, governing bodies, and public stakeholders. These projects have included athlete-brand development, fan and visitor research, economic and media impact, sponsorship evaluation, event experience, and strategic questions related to women’s sport and NIL.
The practical setting often reveals complexities that are easy to miss in theory. Organizations face budget constraints, competing stakeholder interests, limited timelines, imperfect data, and political considerations. Working with those realities has made me a better researcher and teacher.
The relationship also works in the other direction. Research can challenge conventional wisdom, expose weak assumptions, and give decision-makers a stronger foundation for action. I find the point where these two worlds meet particularly rewarding.
Teaching gives me the opportunity to help students develop the judgment required to work in a complex and rapidly changing industry.
I want students to understand theory, and I want them to learn how to use it. That means analyzing real organizations, evaluating incomplete information, considering ethical implications, defending decisions, and communicating recommendations clearly.
Rather than simply sharing information, my approach is to help them learn how to structure a problem, examine evidence, recognize assumptions, and reach a defensible conclusion.
Mentoring graduate students has become a meaningful part of my career. I enjoy helping emerging researchers develop their own questions and professional identities. Watching former students complete their doctorates, publish their research, win awards, and move into academic careers has been one of the most satisfying aspects of my work at Temple.
Having lived and worked in Germany, Australia, and the United States has shaped how I understand sport and organizations.
Sport may be global, but its structures and meanings are highly local. The role of professional leagues, college sport, clubs, governing bodies, athletes, sponsors, and fans varies considerably across markets. So do expectations regarding commercialization, athlete rights, community responsibility, and organizational governance.
My international background has made me more attentive to those differences. It has also taught me to be cautious about universal answers. A strategy that works in one country, sport, or cultural context may not transfer directly to another.
At the same time, international experience has shown me how effectively sport can connect people across languages and borders. It creates common reference points while still reflecting the identity of a particular place and community.
Outside my professional work, I remain closely connected to sport and the outdoors.
I enjoy surfing, kitesurfing, skiing, snowboarding, hiking, and traveling. These activities provide a balance to academic life, and they keep me connected to the experiences that first made sport meaningful to me.
I am drawn to activities that involve learning, movement, uncertainty, and exploration. Whether I am trying to improve on a surfboard, navigating a new place, or working through a research problem, I enjoy the process of understanding how something works and gradually becoming better at it.
Travel remains an important part of my life. I enjoy experiencing places through their landscapes, neighborhoods, food, local culture, and everyday rhythms rather than only through their major attractions. Living internationally has made me comfortable moving between different environments, and it made me appreciate the value of feeling connected to a place.
At the center of my work is a belief that sport can make a difference.
It can help individuals develop confidence and identity. It can bring communities together. It can give athletes a platform to support causes they care about. It can create shared experiences across cultural and social boundaries. It can also generate commercial and economic opportunities.
Those outcomes are not automatic. They depend on the choices made by athletes, organizations, educators, policymakers, sponsors, and other stakeholders.
My goal is to contribute to those choices through research, education, and evidence-based advice. I want my work to be rigorous enough to advance academic knowledge, practical enough to help organizations, and accessible enough to benefit people beyond the university.