Research on the Development of Sports Accounting Courses within the Theoretical Framework of Sports Management in Higher Education

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of China's sports industry in recent years, more enterprises are paying attention to the emerging directions of esports finance, sponsorship valuation and digital rights management. However, the current "sports accounting" curriculum in Chinese higher education institutions is relatively conservative and fails to address the financial practices of the emerging industry. This study focuses on analyzing the dissonance between the renewal of the existing sports accounting curriculum and the evolving skill needs of the sports industry, and proposes evidence-based curriculum reform strategies. This study conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 stakeholders, including educators, industry practitioners, and students, during 2025 from selected universities at different levels of economic development in two regions of Guangdong Province, supplemented by thematic assessments of five existing teaching cases. The study found three problems: (1) there is a significant content lag in addressing contemporary financial phenomena such as esports monetization and digital assets; (2) continued reliance on lecture-based instruction with limited integration of experience or blended pedagogy; (3) Regional resource asymmetry is obvious, which restricts the implementation of curriculum and intensifies educational inequality. In order to address them, this study proposes a targeted curriculum revision framework based on Taylor's curriculum development model, which can increase the proportion of virtual simulation teaching and the depth of school-enterprise cooperation, strengthen the industry-university-research cooperation, improve the employability of graduates to a certain extent, and promote the consistency of education content with actual needs.