It may be easier to sink a hole in one at the masters than it is to define clearly what constitutes power in sports. Is it Alex Rodriguez swatting homer after homer? Or NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell disciplining players and coaches? Maybe it’s Coke’s («www.businessweek.com») sports marketing chief, Katie Bayne, doling out hundreds of millions of dollars. Or NBA Commissioner David Stern scheming to make basketball the dominant global sport instead of soccer. It’s all of these, of course, but we accept that you could spend hour after hour on one of those sports radio shows jabbering about who has real clout and who doesn’t. With star quarterback and dogfighting impresario Michael Vick serving as a recent example, we also accept that power in sports is ephemeral.

The stories you’re about to read examine how power manifests itself in the sports world. To ensure that we brought a full range of expertise to bear, we combined this publication’s business insights with the encyclopedic sports knowledge of the writers and editors at ESPN The Magazine. Some of the stories, including this essay, were collaborations between ESPN and BusinessWeek writers.

BusinessWeek also undertook a major project to rank the 100 most powerful people in sports. (ESPN The Magazine, a strong sports brand in its own right, did not participate in the ranking.) To figure out who should be on the list and in which position, BusinessWeek assembled a panel of 20 seers from sports and media. We gave our panelists several criteria. Among them: how individuals rate vs. their peers; how much money they control, generate, or influence; how long they have exercised power; and how lasting their impact on a sport or the larger world of sports will be. For additional help, we turned to you. In four weeks, 160,000 fans stormed BusinessWeek.com to nominate their favorite power brokers.

No ranking is perfect, of course. And we expect—and encourage—readers to debate the final BusinessWeek Power 100. We also wrote about a (BusinessWeek, 9/26/07).

If we learned one thing from this project, it is that today’s sports potentates are nothing like the luminaries of the past. For most of the past half century, the clout was concentrated mostly in the hands of gentleman owners whose very names were iconic in other fields: Busch, Hess, Wrigley. With their owners’ fortunes made elsewhere, the teams were rich-man trophies. But in the past decade or so, sports has become not only a big business but a highly professional one, too. Walk through a team or league office today, and you might as well be taking a tour of a cubicle farm at any corporation. Sit in on a meeting of sports executives, and you hear talk about enterprise value (what a team would be worth if it were taken over), merchandise rights, debt capital, personal brand values, and securitization of stadium naming rights.

Inside this new sports world order—as much MBA as MVP—the teams, the leagues, and their respective commissioners play ever more vital roles. They control hefty sponsorships and valuable broadcast and digital rights as they go global in pursuit of an international audience. The obsessive use of statistics to quantify a ballplayer’s performance and then value, perfected by Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane in the late 1990s—and chronicled by Michael Lewis in his best-selling Moneyball—is applied to all aspects of sports today. The value of the average National Football League franchise is expected to exceed $1 billion in a few years, up from about $250 million a decade ago. With more people able to buy their way into sports but with a limited number of teams—122 in pro hockey, baseball, football, and basketball combined—the stakes grow higher.

PARIS: Fears of a global slowdown in economic growth mounted Wednesday after fresh reports added to signs that turmoil in credit markets was biting into the real economy on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the United States, where a downturn in the housing market had already taken a toll on consumer spending, the Commerce Department reported that orders for durable goods - everything from commercial aircraft to home appliances - had fallen by 4.9 percent in August, indicating that business investment might not be able to pick up the slack.

The mood was similarly subdued in Europe. One survey indicated that consumer confidence in Germany, the largest European economy, had fallen to a five-month low. Two others showed that French and Italian manufacturers were growing more pessimistic about their outlook, following a dramatic decline in German business confidence Tuesday.

The latest data deal another blow to European hopes that the Continent might withstand the slowdown in the United States. European politicians have sought to play down the risk of contagion, putting on a brave face as economists have gradually scaled back their growth forecasts for the region. Some still insist that the collapse in the U.S. subprime mortgage market will bypass them altogether.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, for one, has maintained his growth forecast of 2 percent to 2.5 percent for this year and next, even as banks and international institutions almost unanimously expect growth of less than 2 percent.

And Europe has become less dependent on American growth. Exports to the United States account for less than 3 percent of the euro zone economy, giving rise to a theory of a decoupling of Europes fortunes from those of the United States. But analysts say that this dissociation does not protect European companies and consumers from the recent rise in borrowing costs.

The chorus of warning voices is growing louder. On Sunday the German government conceded for the first time that troubles in the United States might have negative repercussions on the German economy.

“The close links between financial markets mean global economic changes are making themselves felt in our domestic economy more strongly and earlier than they used to,” the German economy minister, Michael Glos, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

In countries like Spain and Ireland, where the housing market has been a major contributor to growth, the ripple effects of the credit market crisis could be the most immediate. But across the region, banks remain nervous about lending to each other and lending rates have shot up.

Adding to the worries is the recent rise in oil prices beyond $80 a barrel, and the continuing rise of the euro to fresh records against the dollar. High energy prices have increased company costs, while the strong euro has made European exports more expensive.

The key to how much damage the European economy may face is whether its American counterpart falls into a recession, analysts say. Fears of a recession eased after the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates by half a point this month, but markets remain jittery. After the Commerce Department released its durable goods report, economists at Morgan Stanley lowered their forecast for U.S. third-quarter growth to an annual rate of 2.2. percent from 2.4 percent.

The U.S. treasury secretary, Henry Paulson Jr., has said he expects U.S. growth to accelerate in the second half of 2007, the Indian finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, told Bloomberg News after meeting with Paulson on Wednesday.

A sudden slowdown in Europe could erode the ability of the Continents biggest economies to curb budget deficits and implement much-needed economic reforms, analysts say. After Germany overhauled its labor market, hopes have been pinned on France, the second-largest economy in the euro zone.

Since the summer, Sarkozy has accelerated his timetable to push through an ambitious platform of reviving the economy, but slower growth could complicate his task by leaving him little margin to appease voters with measures that could cushion the impact of policy changes.

On Wednesday, he unveiled his first budget, pledging to increase economic growth with a \272 billion, or $384 billion, spending package - one week after his prime minister warned that the country was “bankrupt.” Sarkozy is banking on \9 billion worth of tax cuts to boost consumer spending.

Sarkozy has irked Brussels by postponing his predecessors promise to balance Frances budget from 2010 to 2012. The proposals made Wednesday anticipate only a modest decline of the deficit from an estimated 2.4 percent of gross domestic product this year to 2.3 percent in 2008.

But as economists point out, even that modest decline looks ambitious given that the financing of the bill relies on an optimistic growth forecast that was drawn up before the recent upheaval in financial markets.

Expedia (http://www.businessweek.com/ticker/) will purchase a large portion of its stock this summer, boosting Chairman http://investing.businessweek.com/businessweek/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=355281&symbol=IACI ownership stake, but dashing rumors for now that Diller would take the online travel site private.

The company’s plan to buy back 116.7 million shares for up to $3.5 billion would gobble up 38% of Expedia’s total shares outstanding. Diller has owned 75 million shares, or almost 25%, of Expedia since late 2005, when Expedia was spun off from his Interactive/IAC Corp. (http://www.businessweek.com/ticker/). After the buyback, his stake would rise to 40%.

Diller and other Expedia insiders, along with major shareholder Liberty Media Corp., won’t participate in the modified Dutch action. Shareholders can indicate how many shares they want to sell and at what price. Expedia is buying shares for not less than $27.50 and not more than $30. The stock jumped close to $30 in Tuesday’s trading, from Monday’s closing price of $27.50.

“With this action, we couldn’t be clearer that the management and the board of this company are confident in the value of Expedia and its long-term future,” Diller said in a statement.

Expedia has bought back shares before, but never on this scale. It bought 20 million shares in July 2006, announced a 20-million share buyback in August and finished a 30-million-share buyback in January.

Rumors spread last week that Diller was planning to take Expedia private, spin off its TripAdvisor business and cut 400 jobs, or about 6% of the work force. The company denied those reports.

In addition to TripAdvisor, Expedia runs the Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire and TripAdvisor sites. Standard & Poor’s analyst Scott Kessler expects the company’s revenue to rise 9% this year. The online travel market in the U.S. is “maturing,” he wrote recently, with lots of competition and constraints on inventory. Much of Expedia’s success will come from abroad, Kessler wrote. (S&P, like BusinessWeek, is a unit of the McGraw-Hill Companies.)

The next earnings announcement for Expedia comes on Aug. 2. Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Marianne Wolk expects profits to decline year-over-year because of high expenses from a major marketing push in Europe. However, Wolk has a “positive” rating on the stock. In a recent report, she cited the company’s reinvigorated ad campaigns, international expansion efforts and an expected increase in ad revenue.