Effective Sports Management (ESM) involves being good at motivating, directing, organising, planning and visioning. Sports management in the South-west, Nigeria relatively lacks contemporary requirements of ESM as they function on trial and error basis leading to poor performances in sporting festivals and other sporting events. However, reports have shown that South-west zone performance in major competitions does not reflect ESM by sport administrators. Previous studies focused mainly on resources acquisition with little consideration on managerial capabilities. This study therefore, was designed to investigate Managerial Capabilities (MC)-human resource management, technical abilities and conceptual competencies as predictor of sports effective management among sports administrators in the South-west, Nigeria. The study was anchored on Organisational Theory, while descriptive research design of correlational type used. Multistage sampling procedure was adopted. Purposive sampling technique was used to select staff of the state Sports Councils and Ministries of Youth and Sports who are in the managerial cadre. Total enumeration technique was adopted to select all the managerial cadre staff in sport council and Ministry of Sports. One thousand and thirty four sports administrators in South-west were enumerated. The instruments used were human resource management (r=0.70), Technical abilities (r=0.72), Conceptual  competencies (r=0.72) and ESM (r=0.74) scales. Data were subjected to descriptive statistics, Pearson product moment correlation and Multiple regression at 0.05 level of significance. The respondents’ age was 37.60±2.30 years and 76.7% were male. Human resource management (r=0.58) and technical abilities (r=0.53) correlated with ESM. There was a significant joint contribution of MC (F(3;1030)= 221.753, p<0.05, Adj. R2=0.391) on ESM, accounting for 39.10% of its variance. Human resource management (β=0.39), technical abilities (β=0.30), and conceptual competencies (β=0.09) contributed significantly to ESM.Human resource management, technical abilities and conceptual competencies influenced effective sports management in the South-west, Nigeria. Authorities of the Ministries of Youth and Sports as well as Sports’ Councils/Commissions across all the six states in South-west, Nigeria should intensify efforts to organize sensitisation programmes to boost managerial capabilities for effective sports management.