Ban may help reduce ills of sponsorship

THE THREAT, now changed to a promise, that the new British government will introduce legislation to ban the sponsorship of events by tobacco firms has caused much concern in a number of sports organisations. That is only to be expected.

For many years, sports such as motor racing, cricket, snooker, golf and others have accepted huge sums of money from tobacco firms by way of sponsorship and, like the users of tobacco itself, may have become dependent upon the weed.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the whole argument about the use of tobacco, it can be argued that some sports bodies became lethargic and complacent about their own welfare in the belief that such sponsorship would always come to the rescue whenever the rainy day came along.

What can be certain is that once tobacco sponsorship has been picked out in this way, alcohol will soon follow. Anything else would be illogical. And, if alcohol follows, there is certain to be fall-out in other areas of sports sponsorship. The situation of sportswear itself has come under pressure within the last week.

Those of us who expressed concern many years ago when sponsorship became a buzzword were scoffed at as being old-fashioned fuddy-duddies. This was the way to go, the pundits of the day told us. Sport was not in a position strong enough to generate its own finance either in the professional sports or in the amateur games. Sponsorship, we were told, would be the lifeblood of sport.

They had a valid point. The unfortunate thing was that, instead of providing badly-needed financial support for sports of many kinds, the sponsors began to call the shots and many of the sporting bodies found themselves being dictated to by the sponsors.

Without going into the moralistic reasons for the banning of sponsorship by makers of certain products, we should look at the whole idea of sponsorship. Forget, for the moment at least, about whether smoking or drinking damages your health or whether car manufacturers contribute to death on the roads or whether sportswear manufacturers exploit child labour in the Third World, let us concentrate on the whole idea of sponsorship.

It would be far too naive to imagine that a company answerable to its shareholders would hand over lots of money to any outside body without looking for something in return. The fact is that, once an arrangement is made with a company, contracts will be entered into and the company will insist on certain conditions.

They will want the logo of their company plastered on everything in sight, particularly on anything which might be picked up by a television camera. As has happened in many cases, the name of the competition being sponsored will be changed to incorporate the name of the sponsoring firm and so on.

What followed on directly from that was that, when moguls such as Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer decided that they could make vast fortunes out of television, they began to call the shots themselves to the extent that it has now reached a stage where television companies actually own all rights to certain sporting events.

Worse still, these moguls can now ensure that they have the power to charge television viewers directly if they want to see a particular event.

Some efforts are being made at government and European Union level to protect certain big, traditional, sporting events but it is anybody's guess as to how long the pass can be guarded successfully.

Needless to say, the realisation that enormous amounts of money were being made by sponsors and television companies alerted sportsmen and women to the fact that their skills were being exploited and they stepped in with their own demands.

Appearance money became the catch-word. "I won't play in your (tennis, golf, snooker, darts) tournament unless you pay me x pounds or dollars to show up" became a popular reply when players were invited to take part in some of the top sporting events of year.

Any organisation which might have had the courage to tell the player to jump in a lake, was immediately set aside by sponsors, who were anxious to have the player compete and by the television companies which might threaten to pull out if such and such a competitor wasn't willing to take part.

In that way the organising bodies lost overall control of their own games and the signs are that things will get worse and worse - though the threatened action by the British government to ban tobacco sponsorship may be a step in the right direction.