The future of sport – discuss
As yesterday at 11.00am we watched Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty do their Two Ronnies act scaring the heebie-jeebies out of the UK general public with their presentation on the gathering storm of a second “Covid-19” wave of infections and deaths from 10 Downing Street, it occurred to me that it was also potentially ringing a death-knell for much of the UK’s traditional sporting establishment and structures.
In a way, the travails of football are typifying – if not leading – the paths down with every other national sport is destined to go when something a big and far-reaching as this pandemic hits civilisation.
As Molesworth would have said, “any fule no” that every major sport ever invented is a complex organism that balances its well-meaning, supposedly integrity-led, time-honoured principles with the demands of delivering its hopefully commercially highly profitable entertainment and spectacle to its “fans and crowds”, coping with match day millions travelling to and from matches or tournaments, selling its TV and other rights around the world … while somehow simultaneously accommodating the widespread demands, suspect practices, blackmail and skulduggery of professional advisers, managers, agents and other cockroaches including corrupt administrators that feed off “the business” and keep the metaphorical world of sport going around.
One might describe this as the delicate art of balancing principle and practicality.
Everyone involved in “bringing the sporting entertainment to the people” – including, of course, the media – buys into and plays “the game”.
At one and the same time journalists, sports TV presenters and pundits go along with and respect the secrecy of “off the record” briefings, news embargoes, and various forms of “insider information” unofficial leaking whilst also reserving the right – if a big enough “exclusive” story should ever come their way – to hunt in a pack if necessary and expose the very hypocrisy, cant, dishonesty and “management of news” that all sporting organisations deploy in order to “feed” the unquestionable thirst of the public for mass information about their favourite clubs and/or sporting heroes.
In recent months I’ve counted I think it is at least four famous national league football clubs that have sadly “gone to the wall” and/or into administration – and there are probably hundreds of others that are dealing with similar potentially existentially-threatening dire financial straights.
Club CEOs and managers in English Premiership rugby union – arguably the biggest and most successful league in the sport in Europe – which already has a cumulative debt in excess of £50 million through the absurdities of how it runs itself, routinely flag on TV every week that, without a return to their “previously life” crowds within months, the likelihood that the sport as a whole may go to the wall.
UK athletics – indeed track and field generally, it seems to me, is also virtually on its knees.
The truth increasingly is that for years now the only athletic stadia that ever attract full houses are those at the Olympics – and then only on “finals days”.
When it comes to the “qualifying rounds” of track and field events generally, even in “the good old days” you’d have been hard pressed to know whether you were watching the early stages of the Olympics … or a Covid-19-affected “empty by Government decree” stadium from any point during the UK summer of 2020.
Hey ho.
Still, some things never change I came across this story on the Tour de France this morning on the website of – THE GUARDIAN
