Get used to changing face – and channels – of sport
Sky’s new format shows football is entertainment now and other fields are only for diehards, writes
It is almost inconceivable you will like everything. Sport, as a single entity, is crumbling
Yesterday morning, Sky Sports subscribers awoke to find its five traditional streams replaced by a range of specialist channels. Cricket and golf have joined Formula One in getting their own home. Football has two dedicated ones. You can buy one or two channels to save money, or the whole lot at no extra cost (for now). As Sky puts it: “We want to give our customers more choice, flexibility and value.”
Beneath the PR sheen, however, lies a more awkward truth. Sky’s move is a sign of weakness, not strength: subscriber numbers are stagnating, advertising revenues are falling and its live sport portfolio is being nibbled away by rivals such as BT. Digital platforms like Facebook and Amazon are encroaching on its turf. Twitter are reportedly interested in seizing rights, too.
Implicit in Sky’s move, then, is an admission: that the concept of getting everything in one place
– a vision briefly glimpsed during the last decade, when Sky’s monopoly was almost total – is gone forever. Instead, the sports broadcasters of the future will be more akin to services like Netflix: curating rather than simply providing content, directing viewers to what they want, rather than dumping everything in their lap.
I wonder, too, whether this reflects a wider trend. Evidently, Sky now sees us primarily as fans of an individual sport; not sport in general. You may be a football fan who also likes golf, or a cricket fan who watches rugby league and darts. But these days, it is almost inconceivable that you will like everything. As such, the idea of ‘sport’ as a singular entity is beginning to crumble.
This has been coming. Football’s popularity is now so stratospheric that you could argue it transcends sport, and is better understood as a form of entertainment. The Premier League’s true rival is now something like Love Island or Game
of Thrones. You could say the same of big showpieces like Wimbledon, a large portion of whose audience probably watches no other tennis during the year.
So there are two developments taking place simultaneously: as Big Sport is being siphoned towards the realm of public entertainment, everyday sports are turning into echo chambers. Diehard fans have hardened and deepened their devotion, to the point where the gulf to the casual observer is virtually unbridgeable. This is where you get the tiresome online bickering between fans of different sports, or the sneering parochialism of devotees mocking fickle newcomers, with all the logic of Christians chiding people for celebrating Christmas but not the lesser festivals. (“Where were all these glory hunters at Whitsun, eh?”)
Meanwhile, the word itself has been hijacked to the point of redundancy. These days you have sports drinks, sportswear, sports watches, sports cars, none of which constitute actual sport. ‘Sport’ is a catch-all terms that no longer means anything at all. Is it still really valid to group bass fishing, blood doping, snooker, the Ashes, Parkrun, Alexis Sanchez’s contract saga and a Conor Mcgregor press conference under the same banner?
Probably not. And so, over time, we have got better at hiving ourselves off from that which holds no interest for us.
At curating every aspect of our lives, so we may never be disturbed by a dissenting opinion, an irrelevant option, an unwanted snatch of golf on the television. Sport is everything. Sport is whatever you want it to be. Sport is nothing.