Let’s get one thing out of the way first and foremost: I don’t like Football.
Watching the artificial turf in my back yard not grow is more exciting to me than sitting through a collection of overpaid prima donnas kicking a ball around slowly before ultimately ending up in a nil-all draw.
It’s not my thing.
Having said that, as someone who does love the business of sport, the events of the last week in the Football world were quite startling and caused me to consume more content about the sport in a week than I have in my life.
Just in case you’ve been living under a rock; a group of heavyweight clubs from Europe and the United Kingdom decided to establish their own ‘Super League’ for inter-club competition between British-based and European teams.
The tipping point for a legion of fans, however, was the fact that not only did it completely cut out the chances of smaller or minor clubs from providing an upset result and knocking off one of the big players in The World Game, it ruled them out completely.
The reasons became clear quickly; each participating club would receive an enormous financial benefit – it was quite obviously a cash grab for clubs not exactly scratching around for pennies behind the couch.
What the teams involved didn’t expect was the weight of comment the announcement would draw; and the fact almost to a person the commentary was utterly negative.
The backlash was severe; fan groups of various team threatened to walk. Noted broadcasters, legends of the game, stirringly used their media platforms to speak out about the damage this new competition would do to the game. One actress from a 1990s Sci Fi show I follow on twitter vowed and declared she’d have a tattoo of her favorite team removed should they follow through with plans to join the league.
In the perfect use of the only Football-related cliché I know, they quite literally kicked an own goal.
So why mention this on a website dedicated to motor racing?
I think it is something of a warning, because our sport is not averse to making idiotic decisions that have set the sport on a pathway to self-destruction.
My favorite form of motorsport is IndyCar racing, but as good as the 2021-spec series is, the sport as a whole remains a shadow of what it possibly could have been had it not been for ‘The split’ in the 1990s.
Tony George’s decision to split the Indy 500 and the Indy Racing League away from CART – and the inability of the latter group to find compromise with the Indianapolis boss – decimated what at the time was a series close to rivalling Formula One for popularity, in the process allowing NASCAR to dominate the airwaves and the market in the ‘states.
There’s often been breakaway threats in Formula One land; the constant battling between the teams and the governing body has been a factory for the entire history of the sport, peaking of course in the 1980s when several teams sat out races in protest of FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre’s policies.
Those politics have rumbled on for years and it’s only since Liberty Media purchased the series from Bernie that – at least on the outside – the teams, the series and the governing body all seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet when it comes to the long-term future of F1.
Of course, we’re not immune to it here either. The war for Bathurst between Super Touring and Super Cars was only beneficial to the fans, who got two 1000km races on the Mountain to watch at home, instead of one. And while Supercars emerged the dominant force, the conflict was damaging to the sport and confusing to fans.
New Zealand has been well versed in racing politics lately, too; the NZ SuperTourer / NZV8 dramas of a few years back seemingly ending with no one the winner at all and the sport much worse off. That’s a shame.
I suppose this is something of a cautionary tale. Sport at any level – be it a billion dollar football club in Europe or a local club racing competition – is rife with politics and rife with cashed-up people with big egos wanting to make their mark and do things their way for no other reason other than that they disagree with how things are run.
Like it or loathe it, football is one of the biggest sports in the world and yet the events of the last week have proved it is as vulnerable as the next sport for making bloody stupid decisions and putting their future at risk.
Here’s hoping our slightly smaller corner of the sporting world can be more immune to such decisions of unparalleled idiocy.
Comments