It’s a changing world we live in
Today I return to a Rust regular – the eternal wrangle over whether attending a sporting occasion in the flesh (as part of the crowd ‘on the day’) provides a superior experience to that of remaining at home and watching the same event, match or tournament on television or e.g. perhaps by live streaming on a computer.
Arguably, of course, to a degree the viewpoint any given person has will be affected by his or her individual circumstances.
If you’re a fanatical Liverpool supporter living in Malaysia, for example – apart perhaps, in the spirit of a Muslim making a hajj to the great Mosque in Mecca, making a once in a lifetime trip to see a Reds’ home match at Anfield – you’re most likely only ever to watch your team playing football on television.
And perhaps by doing so be almost as valuable to your chosen club as anyone living in downtown Toxteth, given the size of the English Premier League’s income from overseas TV rights [some £4.2 billion] which comes on top of the domestic broadcasting rights already generating £5 billion over the current (2019 to 2022) cycle.
When it comes to what really matters to football clubs – … er… cash – if one was cynical enough, one might venture to suggest that the main purpose of filling the home stadium with fans for any given match is simply to provide a suitably stirring “crowd atmosphere” for the greater enjoyment benefit of the television audiences watching at home and abroad.
If you then factor in the routine seasonal buggeration factors to the national road and railways systems (hundreds of teams and their supporters criss-crossing the UK every weekend to attend games) – and also the cost of the police and other public services in controlling crowds both travelling to and from the grounds and then keeping ‘troublemakers’ from both sets of supporters apart especially after the alcohol has been flowing – frankly, in this troubled part of the 21st Century it might be nip and tuck as to whether the “whole kit and caboodle” is worth the paper it isn’t written upon.
[Please stay with me, I’m building an argument here].
When you overlay all the above with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and its potential long-term implications for the way we both live generally but also conduct our working careers, it would be foolish to imagine that sport is going to be immune from the issues affecting every industry and pastime known to Man (or woman).
I read overnight on a newspaper website that the embattled and financially-desperate Rugby Football Union is now keeping its fingers crossed that it will be allowed by Government protocols to have crowds of 20,000 at Twickenham Stadium for England’s forthcoming home internationals – even though this will generate a fraction of its income from these games in happier times (normally its leading money-spinning operation). Overall the RFU is facing a potential £107 million loss this year.
I don’t personally attend rugby matches at Twickenham any longer – regarding the matchday experience there as unremittingly poor – but my first reaction to reading this report is to wonder why on earth anyone would want to attend an England rugby international as part of a socially-distanced crowd taking up but 25% of the stadium capacity anyway.
Since the resumption of football, my informal soundings tell me, most fans and viewers have grown accustomed to the “canned atmosphere” being played out over loudspeakers and the oddness of the whole experience. Even the players themselves, after some half-paced training-ground, pat-a-cake, early action, seemed to have warmed to it.
It’s not “football as we used to know it”, of course, but as sure as hell it’s better than nothing – and at least it allowed last season-ending’s dramas to be played out to a conclusion.
Without getting snobby about it, as far as I’m concerned snooker has never required crowds – the action is sufficiently concentrated upon the green-baized rectangle that whether or not anyone but the players and officials are physically on hand is totally irrelevant for television viewers.
In an era when some kids are still not going to school because of their parents’ Covid fears, nearly half of all workers would be perfectly happy to continue working from home most of the time and – even if tomorrow the Government announced that the crisis was over and everything could return to pre-pandemic “normal”, it wouldn’t.
How many football Premier League clubs’ fans are going to travel the length and breadth of the land in order to support their team play when travelling in mass crowds at all might be problematical, the train and bus services might be variable in consistency, and – when they reach the opposition ground in question – to put it politely “one wouldn’t have any idea as to where the hordes of home fans have … er … been” in the previous fortnight and therefore might be Covid-19 positive and/or be ‘contacts’ of those who have become so?
As with every area of UK life in this situation, it seems to me that – based upon their own experiences of life under lockdown and afterwards, including that of family members and others close to them – – every individual, whether ancient and “at risk” or young, is going to make decisions as to what degree of risk they’re prepared to take in any particular circumstance.
A penny to a pound says that there’s going to be a lot less of match/event attending and a lot more television-viewing in future …
