LEADS THE SPACE
Bob Heere, PhD
Executive Director, Sports Innovation Space @ UNT
Bob Heere leads the Sports Innovation Space. He is a full Professor in the Department of Management at UNT’s G. Brint Ryan College of Business and Director of its Sport Entertainment Management programme, the home of the online MBA ranked first in the world among online programmes in 2024.
He is one of the leading scholars in sport management. His research on fan communities, and on how people come to identify with the teams they follow, has taken him to five continents with collaborators from more than twenty nations. He served as President of the North American Society for Sport Management from 2018 to 2020, and was named a Research Fellow of NASSM in 2013 and of the Sport Marketing Association in 2018.
Before UNT he held appointments at the University of South Carolina, the University of Texas, Florida State University, the Cruyff Institute for Sport Studies and Auckland University of Technology. Alongside the research he has worked with the Royal Dutch Football Association, AFC Ajax, Fulham FC, the Shanghai Sports Federation, the World Golf Foundation, the Dallas Cowboys and the PGA of America. That mix of academic depth and industry work is what the SIS puts at the service of its members.
