Sport is now at the mercy of the mega event
Constant demand for bigger, brasher and brighter poses a threat that needs to be recognised, writes Ben Bloom
Does hubbub around the Mayweather v Mcgregor fight benefit boxing? Does anyone care?
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment that sport began to die in Britain. The birth of the Premier League in 1992 is probably the most pertinent date. Perhaps the moment BSKYB went digital in 1998. Or maybe it is more recent – some time in the late 2000s or early 2010s – when Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat made social media king.
Most likely it is a combination of all factors that have combined to form an increasingly fast-paced, bite-sized, consumer-driven society that simply has little time for the idiosyncrasies of individual sports. A time where the finer details are forgotten and a status quo has emerged that threatens the future of sport. This is the era of the mega event.
With the Premier League so dominant, minority sports – and such a term could now legitimately be used to describe every sport that is not football – just cannot find room to resonate in the public realm and only the biggest events manage it. Take cricket. At the same time that the sport struggles to locate its place in modern society, the Ashes grows bigger with each series. Your average British sports fan may not be able to tell their Gary Ballance from their Mark Stoneman, but get KP or Freddie on the topic of Aussie baiting and their appetite cannot be sated.
It is the same across the board. Golf ’s viewing figures are in permanent decline, yet the entire nation somehow knows Matt Kuchar is a sure-fire each-way bet (the proliferation of gambling on sport has also been a factor in the growth of singular large-scale events) when it comes to golf ’s chosen one: The Masters.
Racecourses are threatened with closure, while for just four days a year the Cheltenham Festival flourishes. Aided by the presence of Usain Bolt, the Athletics World Championships in London sold out this summer just a few weeks after competitors had outnumbered spectators at the British trials event.
Then there was the fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor Mcgregor, trumping anything that has come before, even in the mega-hyped world of boxing. The media must accept some blame. By poring over every detail of a particular event, while ignoring 99 per cent of everything else that sport offers for the rest of the year, we only perpetuate the hegemony of singular mega events at the expense of individual sports.
Does the hubbub around the Mayweather v Mcgregor fight benefit boxing? Does getting up at 7am to go to the pub for the British and Irish Lions have any bearing on rugby union? Most worryingly, does anyone care? More people are watching, talking about and writing (in no more than 140 characters) about an array of sports than ever before. After all, no self-respecting sports fan would want to admit missing the big fight, the big match or the big series. These events, we are always told, are “unmissable”.
For many, these events are not so much a chance to watch top-level sport, but an opportunity to take part in the spectacle, to tell your mates you were there, to take a day off work and, crucially, to drink copious amounts of alcohol. How many who attended Gold Cup day went to Cheltenham for the actual racing? What memory of the annual Lord’s Test do the fans have who spent the entire day glugging champagne in the Harris Garden?
As mega events rise, distinct sports – football aside – gradually die. Fans turn into one homogenised blob, fed the same thing in near-identical packaging, at the expense of the subtleties that made individual sports so great in the first place.