The Sport Of Making Money
Perhaps this time as we are in the build up to the 2012 Olympic Games is a good time to consider where sport is and where it is headed in the future. It seems to be going the way of every other business where profit is more important than the customers or the sport itself. The fans, as customers, are only useful as financial sheep to be fleeced by the money men and the idea of sport for the pleasure of the sport is limited to Sunday leagues and joggers.
The latest example of money talking in sport is the remarkable changes in the TV coverage of F1 in the UK. The BBC had an exclusive contract until 2013. Suddenly and out of the blue, it seems, they have changed all that and come to an arrangement whereby SKY get the rights to show the whole of every F1 race in the calendar for 2012 onwards while the BBC will show half the races live and then highlights of the other 50% of races later in the day.
Money can surely be the only reason this has happened. A shortage of money at the BBC which is struggling to make cutbacks and a surplus of money available from SKY who seem to want to buy up the rights to every sport under the sun in order to force people to spend money to watch what many consider part of our culture.
We are not talking about pennies here either. If you currently do not have SKY TV you will have to fork out around £500 to watch the whole season of live F1 races. If you want to watch it in HD it will cost another couple of hundred pounds or so. This is a serious cost to supporters who have been fans for many years. Only some of those diehard fans will be able to afford it or justify such a high additional expense.
The BBC appear to have tried to make the best of a difficult situation where they just could not justify the cost of continuing an arrangement where they had the exclusive transmission rights. The BBC has to make some severe cost reductions over future years and they have decided that the full cost of TV rights for live showing of F1 racing was too much to pay.
This seems to be the way all sport is going. The profits available from Pay TV allows SKY to outbid everybody else and the money is just too appealing for sports bodies to see the difference between what is good for sport or making money. They see the pound notes in front of their eyes and cannot resist the lure of it even though that may be damaging to the sport.
It seems highly unlikely F1 is going to gain a single viewer through this deal since anyone who had SKY TV could previously watch the F1 races live on the BBC. It seems highly likely that F1 will lose significant numbers of viewers through this deal. F1 is an exciting sport for fans but not once the race has taken place and you have heard the results. Once the result is known there is not much point to watching how it happened and in these days of 24hr news and information on the Internet it is hard to avoid hearing the results.
I think this is a sad event for F1 and a sign of the times that sport is now a just another business selling a product. No longer is it about fans enjoying sport. It is all about the money. F1 is a hugely expensive sport but its success depends on the enthusiasm of its fans to support it, watch it and make it worthwhile for sponsors to spend the large amounts of money needed by the sport. Without the fans it is nothing so when the fans feel cheated and betrayed it must be damaging for the sport.
Even the Olympics is now tainted with the smell of money in everything it does. Sponsors decide what can and cannot be used to purchase tickets, what drinks should be available and even what T-shirts you are allowed to wear, if they get really picky.
As sports fans we have two choices. We either succumb to the power of the accountants and the money men or we walk away and ignore the sports that previously enthralled us but now want us only for our money. I have been a fan of F1 for over twenty years and have hardly missed a race. Suddenly I feel that journey is coming to an end. Do I really care who wins? I did but now it seems less important. I will no doubt watch the occasional race but I will not care as much and I certainly won’t be choosing to pay extra for the privilege of being a fan of a sport.
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