Member Article

Football business students have designs on terrace fashion

Undergraduates at a ground-breaking Lancashire college, UCFB Burnley, have been showcasing their creative business talents in their own Dragon’s Den style project.

And the young entrepreneurs have had their designs chosen and put on sale at Burnley Football Club.

Stephen Greenwood and Mark Hughesman, both second year students, were given the opportunity to design T-shirts to be sold exclusively within the Burnley club shop.

In the second year of the BA (Hons) Football & Marketing degree course focuses its teaching around the foundations of marketing and how it directly relates to the football business and surrounding industries.

A total of 10 designs were chosen and all of these are now on sale, priced at two for £20.00. The club shop says they are proving to be extremely popular and selling quickly.

Designing, marketing and selling their own T-shirt designs as these students have done is just one example of the many ways that UCFB engages its students with the fundamental practicalities of the multi-million pound industry.

Mark said: “Football is obviously an extremely lucrative business, driven by marketing so I think that we will really benefit from this kind of assessment because immediately we’re learning how to engage with the industry we want to be a part of in the future.”

Stephen, who designed and sold the T-shirts alongside Mark added: “Practical studies are the best ways to learn the ins and outs of an industry like this.

“It’s great to see that our work has made an impact too, the rate at which they are selling at came as quite a shock, we’re proud that all the effort we put in has paid off! This sort of project definitely gives us a good insight into the impact we can have on the footballing world once we’ve completed our studies too.”

With campus sites in both Burnley and Wembley, UCFB enables students to study a traditional academic subject within the context of an industry for which they have a genuine interest.

UCFB’s degrees are designed to prepare students for rewarding careers within the exciting and inspiring football industry.

UCFB’s Burnley campus launched in 2011 and since then has gone from strength to strength; with facilities that overlook the famous Turf Moor stadium, students not only benefit from practical assignments such as this but also by being surrounded by the operational machinery of a football club, they are immersed in all of the business aspects of the sport daily.

UCFB Wembley’s first student intake arrive in September 2014 and prospective undergraduates have been flooding in on open days to find out more about the exclusive offering of being taught within this iconic and global stadium.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Malia .