According to the Oxford Dictionary, sport is an activity that you do for pleasure
and that needs physical effort or skill, usually done in a special area and
according to fixed rules. It can be an individual or team activity. Examples of
sports include soccer, rugby, tennis, golf, wrestling, boxing, hunting, and fishing.
This definition may work for amateur level and even the lower levels of semi-pro
sport but over the last 30 years elite level sport has left this idea way behind.
Now business and financial considerations appear to have completely taken over.
Elite sport across the world has undergone enormous change. The process continues
across an ever wider range of sports…think of the current upheavals in cricket
(changing formats, match fixing, illegal betting), golf (endless talk of player led
alternative tours, etc.), rugby (tinkering with the laws for player safety,
premiership clubs going bust), boxing (3 world governing bodies, unification fights,
etc.), football (crazy money, dubious political links), even the Olympics is mired
in controversy. Commercialism and in some cases corruption are changing attitudes
with changing rules and financial models to suit financial and sometimes political
ends. Meantime the fans at the centre of it all are left out of any decision making
process but are still apparently happy to be swept along with all the hype, pay very
high ticket prices and buy endless merchandise.
There are lots of books about this subject including Moneyball by Michael Lewis
(which I think NaBG has read before) but I propose that as a start we read The
Formula by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg available in paperback / Kindle /
Audiobook, published 2024, 279 pages which tells the story of the Formula 1 business
from its creation in 1950 to now.
We’ve covered F1 before (Ian’s choice ‘Drive to Survive’ Netflix series in February
2022). The story told in the book is not unique to F1 and the book gives a
definitive and very readable account of how F1 has become the fastest growing sport
business in the world with principles recognisable in most other global sports
brands…. providing a good starting point for thinking about the problem with elite
sports in general..