A tacky spectacle threatens real sport

So there we were in our hotel room in Manhattan last Saturday night. Fifty seven channels and nothing on. You know the sort of thing. With a few hours to kill until dinner, it was a simple matter of hooking into any sports fix that was going. Little did we know what lay in store. We have seen the future and we are still recovering.

Just after 8 p.m. Eastern time, NBC underwent a dramatic transformation from a television station with connections to something resembling the real world to a larger than life, cartoon-inspired sporting pantomime. The cameras were in Chicago for a football game between the Enforcers and the New York/New Jersey Hitmen. Welcome to the XFL.

For anybody who may have missed this brave new dawn, the XFL is Xtreme Football League, and is "America's newest and most exciting sport". It is another pawn in the US television ratings war for hearts, minds and advertising dollars.

The "sport" claims to be a reversion to American football as it was 30 or 40 years ago, with less protection for the quarter-back, but in reality it is the product of an alliance between the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) and NBC. The unfathomable success of the WWF over the past decade, with its staged fights and gaudy histrionics, has had American sports schedulers and merchandisers drooling.

NBC had slipped to third place in the market among the key 18-49 year old male age-group and the WWF was also seeking to move beyond its traditional parameters and the two chose as a vehicle the American football league, a breakaway from the NFL.

The league was launched in a blizzard of hype at the start of this month and everyone involved believed they had hit on the perfect formula. "This is the ultimate TV reality show within a real game," said XFL chairman, Vince McMahon. The prize pot for the winners of each game is $100,000, with $1 million on offer for the final match of the season. And if that is not enough to chill the blood of any old-fashioned Corinthians out there, watching the game itself would finish off the job.

This was television coverage that makes Sky Sports seem positively restrained and a game so manufactured it makes Belfast Giants ice hockey matches look like organic, wholesome occasions soaked in generations of history and tradition. The players on the opposing Enforcers and Hitmen sides squared up to each other like, well, WWF wrestlers and their general demeanour was everything you might expect from teams apparently named after gangs in a science fiction comic.

Every time there was a break in the play (and this occurred every 30 seconds) television cameramen swarmed on to the field from every direction to deliver in-your-face shots of the pumped-up main participants. All this was accompanied by blustering commentary pitched at least two octaves higher than the way any normal human being speaks.

And despite the persistent driving, freezing rain, the entire occasion was played out against sideline "entertainment" which consisted of some 20 girls dressed only in bikinis and holding strategically placed pom-pom balls. None of this would, at first glance, appear to have particular pertinence or relevance here. American sport and its associated media have travelled much further down the road of commercialism and have much more experience in the world of "strategic alliances". But there are already signs that we may just be starting to play the same sort of games, only for significantly lower stakes.

Just now it is the GAA that looks most ripe for picking. The reform and expansion of the championship format means a significant increase in the number of games and it looks increasingly unlikely that the established terrestrial broadcasters will be able to devote the resources or the air-time to cover them as extensively as previously.

Which is where the satellite and cable groupings come in. As the technology improves and its penetration of the market continues, these new television media will become increasingly attractive to a GAA keen to increase its audience and reap the financial benefits which will accompany that. But the cable guys will obviously want something in return and are likely to focus in particular on the issue of scheduling.

The playing of three or four high-profile games on the same Sunday afternoon is anathema to their brash new scheduling world and they are likely to insist that games are switched to Saturdays and perhaps even to midweek evenings under floodlights.

The attractions for the GAA are obvious, not least the opening up of a source of revenue that would go a long way to paying the bills for the new Croke Park. But it would also do well to be aware of the Faustian elements of any pact. What if the television people want to tinker with the rules and the structures as they have done to disastrous effect in the XFL? Will the increased emphasis on individual players create a two-tier system comprising the very best and the rest?

When you dance with the money men, they call the tune.