Are you bothered?
Golf, tennis, cricket & rugby juggle money and meaning
I don’t think I need hurry to pay £69.44 for a ticket for the inaugural Saudi-backed LIV Golf event in St Albans (cunningly rebranded as ‘London’ for 9-11 June - shades of Ryanair and easyJet marketing). My betting is hefty discounts will be available nearer the first shotgun tee time. Either that or rent-a-crowd will be in. I fully intend going though. Why not experience the future of golf, even if Beefeaters as part of the razzmatazz hardly smacks of the 21st century?
Live golf isn’t an easy watch. Along with Formula 1, this must be the ultimate TV sport. You do need a gallery in the background though to help convince armchair viewers of the meaningfulness of the product they are watching. Of my few forays onto a course as a spectator, only two stand out. A handful of shots and then seemingly endless hours in a hospitality tent while rain hammered down at the Ryder Cup in Wales. I slunk back on the train to London before play eventually resumed in the early evening.
The other was a magical day at the 1993 Open at Royal St George’s following Seve Ballesteros, already in the early twilight of his career at only 36, through a full 18 holes. Still fresh in the memory almost three decades on. Sporting genius up close. Coincidentally, that year’s champion was one Greg Norman, the face of LIV Golf.
Norman and his partners clearly need to serve up as many geniuses and egos as possible to give their new venture legs. Never mind if they are a bit long in the tooth. Proximity to big names will have some appeal. Whether the shortened competition time* and team format engage fans is another matter. Yes, the Ryder Cup is a standout competition in the public consciousness, but the teams have international resonance and the event builds every two years on its own rich history.
* only three days plus those shotgun starts (don’t be embarrassed to Google it - I had to)
The Saudis aren’t stinting on the prize money in an attempt to break the resistance of the golf establishment and pull in the stars. $25 million for each event in the series, with more on top for the end-of-season finale and overall individual rankings. $255 million in total.
Rather like boxing, the sport has always relied on swag-bags of money to confect excitement. Can’t blame the players for encouraging prize inflation. But how interested are us fans in the cash on offer in this or any other sport? Does it really give an event meaning?
The lure of The Championships at Wimbledon is in large part its heritage of top quality tennis competition. Underpinned by a chunk of prize money, sure, but it is the trophies that matter. All of which makes the current calls to strip this year’s tournament of ranking points in response to the All England Club’s banning of Russian and Belarusian players rather risible.
I’d argue that the public couldn’t care less about tennis rankings, whose greatest practical purpose is for agents in their negotiations with potential sponsors. If any player is seriously aggrieved at the ban they should boycott Wimbledon, ranking points or none, and that’s not going to happen.
"Would be great if the ATP and WTA kept players informed with decisions regarding the grass season point structure, maybe even had a vote about what players thought. They are players associations after all." Britain’s Liam Broady, 142nd in the world
The four golf majors (plus the Ryder Cup) and the four tennis grand slams are the tent poles holding up these sports. The rest is just a glossy side show, even the ATP end-of-season beano that has been tennis’ attempt to add a fifth event of similar stature to its slams. Frankly, all else is of minor status in the shadow of the biggies, leaving the way wide open for well-funded disruptors like Norman to redraw sport. The tennis establishment is doubtless watching golf with some trepidation.
The cricket and rugby authorities are engaged in their own attempts to redesign their games and their calendars. English cricket is about to enter the difficult ‘second album’ territory for its confection, The Hundred.
And without the band’s lead vocalist too, the ECB announcing this week that its chief executive Tom Harrison is off to pastures unknown as soon as next month.
The website for The Hundred claims tickets are selling fast. At the same time I’m being assailed daily by emails from four counties trying to tempt me to buy T20 Blast tickets. Anecdotally, I hear that counties are struggling more than usual with advance sales for the T20. Is The Hundred killing the Blast’s market? More likely, sales for The Hundred are suffering too without first year novelty and with the whole cricket market saturated.
Test match ticket purchases seem to have held up just fine, in spite of the overload of international cricket this summer. Which reinforces the belief that the public intuitively knows what sport is meaningful.
World Rugby and its constituent nations are deep in discussions (not for the first time!) about sewing together the global calendar to turn the current haphazard string of one-off ‘friendly’ international matches into a new competition.
Money is the big driving force, the assumption being that overall commercial value will be enhanced if every friendly takes on meaning underneath a broad competitive umbrella. Makes a great deal of sense, although whether sufficient sense for all nations to give and take and this time strike a deal remains to be seen. Deadline for agreement is this autumn it seems.
World Rugby is risking the status of its quadrennial World Cup in proposing to add two cycles of the new global championships in every four year cycle. Who will be deemed best team in the world at any one time? Not a unique problem. Athletics, for example, squeezes two world champs around each Olympics - although it doesn’t own the five rings whereas WR will be competing with itself in the commercial marketplace.
Its greater concern should be club rugby. The more international matches there are which are deemed to really count for something other than pride, the greater the strain on the best players to the detriment of their club sides. In England, Premiership attendances have yet to recover fully from the pandemic hit. Reduce the availability of the leading players for their clubs and pump up the focus on internationals and club rugby will suffer. If in doubt, just take a look at the plight of cricket’s counties under the England lash. Ultimately, there’s only so much sport a fan can watch and deem meaningful.
No-one likes them (and boy do they care)
So funny to see Pep Guardiola and Thomas Tuchel wind themselves up in the belief (genuine, faked?) that the British public and media favour Liverpool over their teams. I cant speak for the media, but the two managers must realise that in the tribal world of football fandom it’s about choosing the least worst option when watching any team but your own.
A not-too-politically-correct reply from a Chelsea supporting friend when I pondered the least worst outcome before last Saturday’s FA Cup final encapsulated it neatly:
I imagine it’s like the Iran v Iraq war of the 1980s for you… you want both to lose but you know they can’t.
Casual friend needed
Meanwhile, six tiers below the Premier League, Walton Casuals are on the brink of going out of business. If you fancy owning a team, check out the club’s statement here: Casuals
More on this in next week’s Sport inc. It’s not all Roy of the Rovers stuff…
Is it right that Jack Nicklaus turned down $100m to be the face of Saudi golf, on the grounds that he was a founder of the PGA? Though I suppose he might struggle to spend another $100m.
Tuchel has a point, everyone else DOES hate Chelsea! Well earned.