Get your sporting romance while you can
THE second age of television sport is upon us. And I’m not just talking about that unwieldy touchscreen thing which Pat Nevin and Michael Stewart wrestle with on Sportscene.
Sport is regularly said to have sold its soul to that little box in the corner of our collective living room. This is both true and a rather simplistic way of looking at things. Instead of the old cathode ray tube, it is now a either a 42-inch plasma screen or a smartphone in your pocket. And it turns out the television and marketing executives were just getting started.
While darts, table tennis and now Kabbadi appear to have had the Barry Hearn treatment, Geoff Boycott tears what is left of his hair out with the news that the frantic thrashing of Twenty20 cricket – once only for those with shortest of attention spans – has become the new batting orthodoxy. Where TV cameras were once credited with the introduction of the three-point line in basketball, now a player in Steph Curry evolves with sufficient accuracy from that distance to render the court marking almost redundant. Another bright idea, whether it is a line of paint 10 yards further back or something altogether more revolutionary, will avail itself soon enough.
This is the crossroads where football now finds itself. Forests of newsprint have been dedicated to the influence of Sky Sports, benevolent, malign or otherwise, on the development of the Barclays Premier League over the past 25 years. The TV channel itself will tell you it is the best thing that has ever happened. It has certainly been good for their viewing figures and their bottom line.
But overall standards have risen too, driven up by top class foreign imports. The players certainly aren’t complaining: I remember seeing journeyman Barnsley player Ashley Ward’s house on a show called Footballers’ Cribs and can confirm that he has a stable and about nine en suite bathrooms. Armchair fans have loved it too, those who now have to fork out £67 to go to the matches not so much.
Yet aside from common-sense innovations like goalline technology and video referee pilots, sadly the second phase of TV football promises to be even harder to swallow for the rank and file football fan.
The first casualty will almost certainly be that old chestnut called sporting integrity. So every night you sit down and watch Gary Lineker salivating over the exploits of his beloved Leicester City on Match of the Day, just remember that – while Sky and BT Sport will make hay from it in the short term – too much in the way of surprises is bad for business in TV land.
Conquering England is no longer enough in a world where the top clubs south of the border have outgrown national boundaries and now measure themselves in terms of their global reach. That is where Franz Beckenbauer and all this talk of a European Super League comes in, backed by large continental clubs who feel threatened by the Premier League’s gargantuan overseas TV contract. If this all runs to form, it will be watered down in the end to a revamped Champions League with wild cards for big clubs who don’t make it but the words of Relevent Sports supremo Charlie Stillitano this week should be enough to give any traditionalists the fear.
“What would Manchester United argue: did we create soccer or did Leicester create it?” the influential US marketing executive said. “Let’s call it the money pot created by soccer and the fandom around the world. Who has had more of an integral role, Manchester United or Leicester? Leicester is a wonderful, wonderful story – but you could see it from Manchester United’s point of view too.”
The same fault line isn’t so very far away from the other big sporting story of the week – Andy Murray’s goodnatured jousting with Novak Djokovic over equal pay for tennis.
To use Stillitano’s terminology, where should the ‘money pot’ created by world tennis go? To whoever plays the longer matches, even if he is the world No.70 from Ukraine, who can’t even draw a crowd in his home country? Or to the players, be they men or women, who actually bring in the big bucks?
The Scot is on the right side of that particular debate – as he usually is – with Djokovic rather embarrassingly forced to backtrack from a battle which he clearly couldn’t win. But TV certainly knows what it wants, and that basically is the big boys in every sport battling it out, bringing their cast-iron core audiences to the party. It is the best reason of all why we should all break out the blue-and-white bunting and roar Leicester all the way to Barclays Premier League glory in the next few weeks.
ON MONDAY Matthew Lindsay
Conquering England is no longer enough in a world where the top clubs south of the border have outgrown national boundaries