Sport will learn that fan-free events are worthless
Coronavirus is showing that crowds are vital to creating the magic and drama, says Alan Tyers Moving the Six Nations behind a TV paywall would be an act of utter idiocy
It is this column’s duty and privilege to bring you the weekly comings and goings of sport on television. However, we as a nation and indeed a planet may be drifting into the arena of the unwell, and coronavirus raises a new area of focus: sport that is not on television. Five Serie A fixtures this weekend were to have been played behind closed doors due to the outbreak, some of them televised, but the Italian authorities decided instead to call all five off.
Last week, we had the strange and eerie footage from Inter Milan’s Europa League match against Ludogorets, which was contested at San Siro, that 75,000-seater cathedral being utterly empty apart from players, ancillary staff and deafening, reverberating dance music. Other coronavirus-hit fixtures including Asian Champions League football, the Tokyo marathon, a Singapore mixed martial arts tournament and French horse racing, notably at Chantilly tomorrow, have taken place or will take place without a crowd. And the possibility has been raised that even the Cheltenham Festival might happen with horses, jockeys, and television cameras, but minus punters at Prestbury Park.
Clearly if you were going to design a mechanism for spreading a respiratory disease quickly and effectively, gathering a few tens of thousands of people into an enclosed environment where they will all be yelling and spluttering with joy or fury over each other, before dispersing them back to the four corners of the country, would be as efficient as any. Sport has plenty of decisions to make as it weighs revenue, safety and risk.
Ultimately, though, left to their own devices, most sports will focus on the first of those three until government tells them to do otherwise.
On the subject of putting money above all else, let us venture further into the dystopian nightmare future (scheduled for arrival any day now, if it hasn’t started overnight) and consider the prospect of sport missing not just a match-day crowd, or TV coverage, but both. Coronavirushit events give a little glimpse of this sporting “if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to watch it…” scenario, and it now emerges that rugby union may attempt to join county cricket in solving that very thought experiment.
The Six Nations, currently shared between BBC and ITV, whose televising has been the average person’s point of entry into rugby enthusiasm for decades, is attracting the interest of Sky Sports. BBC and ITV joined up for an offer worth £90 million annually at the last round of negotiations, but that deal ends in 2021 and
The Rugby Paper reports that joint bids may not be allowed next time, and that Sky may come with an offer the terrestrial channels cannot match.
To allow the Six Nations to move behind a television paywall would be an act of utter idiocy, certainly depriving the sport of by far and away its most effective recruitment opportunity and showcase. Sure, debentures at Twickenham will ensure a crowd for a while yet, but death comes to us all, even those with a Barbour and a Range Rover, and a new generation will have to be found somewhere.
Rugby need only examine the example of cricket post-2005 and post-channel 4 if it wants a road map to irrelevance for a great sport that was once part of our national life. You would rate it completely unthinkable that any sport could cut its own throat in such a fashion, but then you call to mind the sort of people who rise to the top of sports administration and it all starts to make a certain sort of sense, as well as making you feel distinctly ill.