There is a city in the north of England where two football clubs pretend the other doesn’t exist while making each other famous, where the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of the 1990s famously couldn’t stand each other, where Morrissey once sang about the rain and everyone nodded as if he’d said something profound, and where Ian Brown strolled onto a stage at Spike Island in 1990 and basically started a religion. 

Manchester is not just a city with so much to answer for. It is the belief that grit, creativity and an almost pathological belief in yourself can outperform almost anything. It is exactly the right place to train the next generation of leaders in sport and entertainment.

Manchester Metropolitan University Business School has just announced its MBA in Sports and Entertainment, launching in September 2027. And if you want to understand why this matters you need to understand the city it’s coming from.

There Is a Light That Never Goes Out

Start with football, because in Manchester you always start with football. Manchester United and Manchester City between them represent one of the most scrutinised, monetised and globally consumed rivalries in sporting history. 

In 2025, despite on-pitch challenges, United was recognized by Forbes as the second most valuable football club in the world, with an estimated valuation of approximately $6.6 billion (£4.9 billion to £5.2 billion).

City’s Abu Dhabi-backed transformation is a masterclass in sovereign wealth meeting cultural soft power. In the last 10 years, the manager Pep Guardiola has secured 18 major trophies, including six Premier League Titles. 

The combined revenues of the two clubs last year was £1.36 billion, but their cultural footprint dwarfs even that numbers. Every shirt sold in Jakarta, every Champions League match streamed in Lagos, every TikTok clip of a Haaland goal in downtown Chicago is at the intersection of sport, media, technology and culture, exactly where this new MBA kicks off.

This was never just about football

But Manchester’s sporting story extends well beyond Old Trafford and the Etihad. The city is home to the national centres for basketball, cycling, lacrosse, squash, taekwondo and water polo. The Manchester Velodrome, the National Cycling Centre, has produced more Olympic cycling champions per square metre of track than arguably any other sporting facility in the world. This is a city that has embedded excellence across the sporting spectrum.

And then there’s the music. Oasis gave the world Britpop and two brothers who treated every press conference like a contact sport. The Smiths produced some of the most literate, melancholic and oddly danceable music in British history. The Stone Roses essentially invented the blueprint for the stadium-filling indie bands that would colonise the following three decades. Joy Division, New Order, The Haçienda, Madchester – take your pick of the canon. 

The point is that Manchester has never treated music and sport as separate from each other, or from commerce, or from identity. They are all part of the same civic DNA, and the global business of entertainment has spent the last thirty years catching up with what Manchester understood all along.

Responsible leadership on and off the pitch

It is against this backdrop that Hannah Holmes, Dean of Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, has announced a programme that reads like a statement of intent. “As sport and entertainment continue to converge into a dynamic global ecosystem shaped by media, technology and culture,” she says, “the need for thoughtful and responsible leadership has never been greater.” 

an industry that has seen governance scandals from FIFA to the English Football League, where the monetisation of fan loyalty and World Cup ticket prices has become a flashpoint, and where the line between cultural influence and manipulation is increasingly blurred, leadership that combines commercial acumen with ethical seriousness is not a luxury. 

Holmes describes the programme as designed to equip “experienced professionals to lead at the intersection of commercial strategy and cultural influence.” Sport and entertainment are no longer simply industries that generate revenue. They are among the most powerful forces shaping how people see themselves and the world. 

A football club is a community institution. A music festival is a statement of values. A streaming platform decides what stories get told and whose voices get amplified. The leaders running these organisations need to understand not just balance sheets but the human stakes of the decisions they make.

Ready for the big stage

Anastasia Kynighou, the MBA Director explains that the programme is positioned for those operating at the senior end of the industry: current and aspiring CEOs, commercial and marketing directors, senior leaders within clubs, leagues, venues and media organisations. But it also reaches toward another group of “founders and entrepreneurs across sport, entertainment and cultural industries” and “emerging creative leaders shaping brand, content, media, fashion and live experiences.” 

These are the people who are building the next The 1975 from a laptop, or who are turning a niche sport’s digital presence into a global media property. The programme understands that the old hierarchies of the industry are dissolving and that the next generation in sport and entertainment may be working from a café.

Sports rights are now entertainment content. Athletes are media brands. Venues are experience platforms. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour generated more economic activity than the entire GDP of Iceland from concert tickets alone.

The economics are staggering. Global sports market revenues are projected to exceed $600 billion by 2030, while the live entertainment sector – battered by the pandemic and rebuilt with extraordinary resilience – is on a parallel trajectory. The professionals who will thrive in this environment are those who can navigate complexity across commercial, cultural and technological dimensions simultaneously. 

Extra time in the city of dreams

They need to understand the data analytics that now govern player recruitment and fan engagement. They need to understand the geopolitics of hosting rights and the cultural sensitivities of global brand expansion. And they need to understand, at a fundamental level, why people care. Why a city can simultaneously celebrate two bitter rivals, mourn the end of a band, and feel that both experiences are, somehow, the same emotional thing.

That, in the end, is Manchester’s deepest gift to this conversation. It is a city that has never pretended that sport and culture are peripheral concerns. They are central to its economy, its identity, its international reputation, and its sense of what life is for. 

When Hannah Holmes says she looks forward to “welcoming the next generation of leaders to Manchester,” she is inviting people to shape the future of the industry in a city that always plays to win.

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