Sharona Friedman, the president, C.E.O. and co-founder of the Global Sports Institute, pictured at London's Wembley Stadium. The GSI offers a range of post-secondary courses in sports finance, marketing, media, and player analytics, and plans to open a campus in Toronto, based out of BMO Field.Justin Griffiths-Williams/The Globe and Mail
Sharona Friedman will never forget the pain she felt at the age of 13 when a dance instructor said she wasn’t attractive enough to enter solo competitions.
Friedman grew up in Toronto and took up jazz and tap dance as a kid. She got good enough at jazz that she competed across Ontario with a team and spent hours practising routines. One day her father asked the dance studio owner why Ms. Friedman wasn’t entered in more solo events.
“She specifically said, ‘Your daughter doesn’t look as good in the costumes as the other dancers. She needs to lose weight,’” Friedman recalled.
Desperate to keep competing, Friedman went on extreme diets, stopped eating for days and developed bulimia. It was never enough and the studio kept excluding her from competitions. She finally quit dancing a year later.
“It still stings,” she said in a recent interview. “Nobody wants to be told that no matter how hard you try, you’re not good enough because of how you look.”
As she got older, Friedman used the experience as motivation. She studied nutrition and psychology, and thought about counselling young people with eating disorders.
Instead, she turned to education and became passionate about helping everyone involved in sports learn as much as possible about coaching and management.
She’s now head of the Global Institute of Sport, or GIS, a London-based organization she co-founded that offers a range of sports-management degrees. Many of the courses are taught in famous venues including London’s Wembley Stadium, the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Australia and soccer stadiums in Brussels, Miami and Sydney.
'We aspire to have a campus on every continent by 2030,' Ms. Friedman saysJustin Griffiths-Williams/The Globe and Mail
The GIS also operates an academy partnership in Dubai and gives students hands-on experience with clubs such as Jamaica’s Mount Pleasant Football Academy, winners of the CONCACAF Caribbean Cup last year.
This fall GIS will open its first Canadian campus at Toronto’s BMO Field and offer a one-year MBA program specializing in sports management. The program has been developed in partnership with Wilfrid Laurier University, which will award the degrees, and Toronto FC.
“We’re on track for about 500 students this year, and that’s worldwide,” Friedman said as she walked through a luxury suite at Wembley Stadium which doubles as a lecture theatre during the day. “We aspire to have a campus on every continent by 2030.”
Friedman, 48, hardly lacks for ambition or enthusiasm. She comes from a family of entrepreneurs, educators and survivors.
Her grandmother, Rachel Kirschner, grew up in a village outside Warsaw in the 1930s and learned how to read at a young age thanks to a friendly farmer’s wife. Kirschner read everything she could find and followed the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany with horror. She convinced her family to leave for Israel, which saved them from the Holocaust. Her grandmother eventually came to Canada and opened a series of schools in Toronto.
“I’m alive because my grandmother learned how to read,” said Friedman. “That’s what education can do.”
Friedman studied business at Laurier and earned a master of law and business from the University of Toronto. After graduating she headed to Britain and landed a job as a marketing officer for the University of Chicago’s London campus and then worked at Imperial College where she managed international marketing and student recruitment.
What the president of the WNBA’s Toronto Tempo has learned about the business of sports
In 2013, she made her first foray into the world of sports education by joining the University Campus of Football Business, UCFB. It was founded two years earlier by the owners of Burnley Football Club who wanted to bring more business acumen to soccer.
Friedman knew next to nothing about soccer. She recalled sitting in the UCFB office and staring up at a photo of England superstar Steven Gerrard. “I didn’t know who the hell that was,” she said. But she immediately felt at home and embraced the concept. She got the job as a marketing manager and quickly established new campuses at Wembley and in Manchester.
GIS was created in 2020 as a division of UCFB and it concentrated on international sports management. In 2024, Friedman and another UCFB executive, James McKeown, took over GIS and launched it as an independent entity. The company still has ties to UCFB which remains a minority owner.
They expanded the campuses and programs and formed partnerships with universities in Britain, Canada and Australia. They brought in guest speakers including former England soccer manager Gareth Southgate, Premier League manager David Moyes and former player Chris Smalling. And they appointed an advisory board which includes Michael Bartlett, the chief executive of Basketball Canada, as well as executives from the Premier League, the NBA’s Orlando Magic, Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment and Tennis Australia.
Roughly half of GIS students study online and the remainder take classes in one of the stadiums. Courses range from finance, administration and marketing to media training.
Rosa Maitland enrolled in GIS almost on a whim after graduating high school with no clear plan for her future.
Canada Soccer to use donation to develop female coaching talent
“I really enjoyed GIS and I’ve been working in sports since then, so it was a great stepping stone,” said Maitland, who works with England’s Football Association and is also business operations manager at The Powerhouse Project, a British organization that encourages women and girls to get involved in sports.
“You get used to it,” she added, referring to taking classes at Wembley. “It’s like semi normal, but this isn’t normal,” she added with a laugh.
Friedman still has big dreams for GIS. She believes programs like Jamaica’s Mount Pleasant, where the team owners have helped bring at-risk kids into sports, represent a model for the future. “It’s a big sentence to say but I believe it very genuinely, I think we can change the world.”
Despite the success, the pain she felt as a teenager hasn’t entirely faded. She still thinks about her weight and her appearance constantly. “But my brain tells me, ‘I need to be better and braver than that,’” she said. “I need to look the way I look, and do what I do, so that people can understand that people are human, that they look a certain way.”