Covid virus shutdown puts a check on sport’s hyperbole

For many of us, the absence of live sport is already leaving a large hole in our so called lives. Yesterday I picked up a Jonathan Franzen novel that's been on the bookshelf for five years, only to wake up two hours later watching reruns of Jack Nicklaus winning the 1986 Masters on YouTube. I'm not proud of this. I really want to be the first person in the above scenario but it turns out I'm not, I'm weak. Replace crack cocaine with golf and I'm just another junkie looking for the next fix.

If you were starting a religion today, you’d be hard pressed to find a better model to base it on than televised sport: it’s local and global, transcends boundaries of race and language and appears to stand for something beyond ourselves. Which is precisely why it’s prized by politicians and the advertising industry, who have spent the last 20 years and more using sport as a primary marketing channel.

They too are addicts to sport’s ability to take complex messages and render them simple. As a result, Big Sport has grown fat on double digit annual inflation in media and sponsorship rights values, outperforming most other marketing sectors.

For media buyers, this summer was supposed to be easy: the Euro 2020 football championships followed quickly by the Tokyo Olympics would guarantee huge television audiences for advertisers. Now they've gone, along with every other live event, taking the advertising money with them.

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"Billions of dollars of the most sought-after inventory just evaporated, forcing advertisers and media planners to find alternatives quickly," Doug Rozen, chief media officer at 360i told Digiday.

So let’s jump to the end of the story, when we’re out the other end of this dystopian Netflix docudrama and our lives return to whatever normal means at that point. What happens then?

Consequences

The great sporting shutdown is going to have big consequences for many people up and down the supply chain. Event-owning businesses large and small are going to run out of cash. Some will disappear while others will be devoured by vulture capitalists seeking undervalued assets. As one lawyer said to me this week, “It’s going to get very bloody, very quickly”.

Depending on your economic worldview, you’ll see this as a necessary correction to an over supplied sports event market or a failure of government to protect valued community assets.

When it returns, there’s no doubt that Big Sport will be welcomed back by its fanbase of addicts like me. But the people in charge of FIFA, UEFA, F1 and the IOC may need to show a bit of humility too because the claims made on sports’ behalf are beginning to show their age.

“Sport brings billions in economic benefit” (But why do we still feel poor?); “Sport is the answer to the obesity crisis” (But our kids are still fat and you’re flogging chips and fizzy drinks); “Sport can lead the way on climate change” (While traversing the world in diesel trucks and encouraging the mass migration of fans every week).

And then you get to the Olympics, which trades as a metaphor for international harmony, multiculturalism, equality and goodwill. Yet since the Games’ commercial rebirth at LA in 1984, there’s been a duality to the Olympic brand, the resonance of which varies depending upon not just how old you are but how much money you have.

These are the fault lines exploited for political gain by the recent Brexit and Trump campaigns in the UK and US, which blamed the world’s ills on immigrants and political and corporate elites.

A post-Brexit poll suggested that the majority of British voters under 40, a huge Remain constituency, agreed that globalisation, immigration, technology, environmentalism, feminism, and multiculturalism were all forces for good. Compare this to the over-50s who voted for the UK to Leave the EU in large numbers, a majority of whom described all of the above issues as a force for ill.

In the US, only 37 per cent of millennials were in favour of Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall, compared to 58 per cent of Americans over 50 who were for it.

Against this divided backdrop, the Olympic Family can look a lot like the marketing arm of a global economic system that has favoured educated, rich people and ruined the lives of the poor and disadvantaged for whom globalisation has meant the Uberisation of their jobs, fat-cat tax avoidance, zero-hour contracts and the loss of workplace rights.

Young v old, rich v poor: this is the fractured landscape that existed before the virus and it will be there when the Olympic torch finally arrives in Tokyo in 2021. The Games will be a wonderful moment to be cherished. But if the last few weeks have taught us anything, it’s to keep the claims made on behalf of sport in some perspective.

Richard Gillis hosts the Unofficial Partner sports business podcast. @RichardGillis1