Intro [Skit]
Thirteen months ago, sport was robbed from us. More accurately, life in its totality was put on hold, but somehow the loss of sport seemed a particularly cruel consequence of the lockdown. Taking part in sport has its own multitude of merits, but spectating sport has a wonderfully distracting quality. It is the best way to do nothing when there is nothing to do, or when you simply cannot summon the will to do anything. Even in moments of immense misery and disappointment, we are still living vicariously through highly talented, driven and occasionally inspired young, healthy men and women, right until we turn off the television.
So when broadcast sport came back last summer, the euphoria was palpable. ‘Hallelujah’ we ululated. For the first time in my life, I paid to watch sport on a screen, having never previously done so due to penury and a naïve belief that sport should be freely accessible to all. Televised sport became a crutch, a concrete event in a schedule abyss.
The people who benefit financially from major televised sport seem to have taken this euphoria as carte blanche to tinker. Those of us already ensnared by sport’s siren song are clearly so hooked we could not be lost. There was now no downside to chasing those peskily fickle American/Asian/Middle Eastern/Millenial/Zoomer [select as applicable] fans.
Thus cricket pitched 100 ball innings and teams with names like ‘Oval Invincibles’ (will they be rechristened when they lose?) and ‘Northern Superchargers’ (an interestingly 20th century technological reference for a format supposedly of the 21st). Wickets are now to be ‘outs’, as in baseball.
Australian rugby union bosses decided last year to use laws designed to reduce scrummaging and the tactical sophistication of kicking. Now Welsh, Irish, Scottish and Italian clubs will be playing to these same laws. It’s all starting to look a little like rugby league.
Liberty Media, the American company who run the commercial side of Formula 1, went for a double whammy going into 2021. It was announced that, to accommodate our vanishing attention spans, we were now to have ‘sprint races’ in F1. This of course increases the number of races there are, increasing the purported value of TV rights. It does bring up the interesting semantic issue of what is a ‘Grand Prix’ – traditionally the single race on a weekend is the ‘big prize’. Is the sprint race a ‘petit prix’? This has not been addressed. For a series that has extensively marketed its 1000th race, its 70th anniversary and all other forms of heritage, it is perplexing that they should play so fast and loose with its historical terminology. I suppose it won’t be long before we talk of ‘quarters’ in an F1 race – they’ve already been split in half. The prestige of the climactic race must sacrifice itself at the altar of more content. Similarly, the endless profit motive takes the Grand Prix circus to plutocracies new. Formula 1 has long held races in countries with ethically repugnant regimes so long as they were willing to pay but announcing a race in Saudi Arabia was nevertheless a forthright reminder that filthy lucre matters more than journalists dismembered and women oppressed and gay people murdered. ‘We race as one’.
Formula 1 is not alone in decamping to Saudi Arabia. Spanish domestic football has been prostituting itself for 40 million euros per annum since 2019, concocting a grotesquely intricate Super Cup tournament hosted in Saudi Arabia to guarantee a Barcelona-Real Madrid game.
This guarantee of a big match-up under the ephemeral illusion of meritocracy was very much in vogue until two days ago. UEFA adopted a new ‘Swiss’ seeding system to replace its existing Champions League format – which was universally popular – in order that big teams like Manchester City (never won a European Cup) and Paris Saint-Germain (also never won a European Cup) need never play the likes of Red Star Belgrade (one European Cup), Benfica (two European Cups) or PSV Eindhoven (one European Cup), but only ever one another. The system also had the convenient side effect of granting qualification to the Champions League for up to two of these ‘big clubs’ should they have a poor domestic season. Under the system, Leeds would have been in the Champions League and the second tier of English football in the early noughties. Equally, it makes it almost impossible that they might ever return to the tournament. UEFA must have hoped to adopt a system so convoluted fans would not catch on that the vast majority of Europe’s delightfully diverse ecosystem were being shafted.
To their credit, twelve of these ‘big clubs’ ditched this rather amateur public relations technique. Instead, they have decided to quite directly tell everybody that the only football that really matters is the football they play. Football isn’t about establishing the better team after 90 minutes. It’s now about seeing Messi play Ronaldo every week. Why else would [insert target market other than adult European] tune in? And that is the end goal – everybody must tune in.
All these boardroom decisions are motivated by an unquenchable thirst for viewers. It is not enough to have hundreds of thousands watching. Millions? Pitiful. Hundreds of millions across Europe and South America? Why stop there? Presumably once all eight billion of us are turning our eyes square watching sport, we will be told to simultaneously procreate at a frankly irresponsible rate to feed the commercial sport machine more viewers.
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Of course, as these executives tweak their sport’s laws in line with the focus group recommendations of people who do not like sport but potentially could by virtue of being human, as they create ever more content to drag our eyeballs back to our pixels, the sport watcher’s schedule is going to become rather cramped. Even with multiple screens, catching every sporting event we are being exhorted to watch might get difficult.
Worry not, however! As the ideal sports consumer, I can picture very clearly where this all leads. Come 2050, there will be only one sport. The executives will have figured out the perfect sport format. An innings of one ball per team. There is one way to score: a boundary is worth 50 points – six runs was deemed insufficient. Said boundary is now ten meters away, to ensure more of them. The wicket has been replaced by a goal, the posts of which are a meter in diameter. An ‘out’ is achieved only by hitting the crossbar (it was found that people experienced a rush of dopamine when a goal was scored against the woodwork). The ball may be whatever size, shape, material and construction the bowler wishes and may be projected by any means – drop-kicked, pitched, headed, hurled. Batsmen may equally use whatever instrument they wish: tennis racquet, riot shield, their penis. Both teams always have three players on the field and no more (now every team can be just an acronymic front three. Son, Haaland and Thomas Muller might combine to create SHT). Those not projecting and hitting the ball are engaged in full-contact grappling to stop their opposing numbers otherwise influencing the game. Football executives realised in the early 2030s that they were losing potential viewers due to a lack of explicit violence. If the game is tied (0-0 or 50-50) after both sides have had their one ball, overtime is a 5m dash in an amphibious, ear-splittingly loud electric vehicle designed by former motorsport and America’s Cup engineers recruited to one of the 30 remaining sport franchises. All athletes must have plastic surgery to look more cartoonishly handsome. This was apparently crucial in attracting a female audience and massively augmented social media interaction. Women athletes were quietly banned to ensure no hurt feelings among Sheikhs and Emirs. In any case, lots of men seemed to dislike them anyway. Cheerleaders remain.
These 30 franchises are mergers of sport’s biggest teams, with huge sponsorship revenue. A typical day will commence with me, avid sports consumer, watching the 3-hour pre-game coverage for the fixture between the HSBC Mercedes All Blacks United and the Oracle New York Knickerbotspurs Knight Riders brought to you by Belarus Tourism: ‘Hospitality without borders’ (and country without free and fair elections), followed by the 2 minute match itself, and then 3 more hours of post-match analysis.
The co-ordination of sport for maximum cultural penetration means there are no scheduling conflicts, but also no let-up. So this process repeats itself ad infinitum. Next up, the ArmaLite Charlottesville Killer Hornets play Google Real Rams City. Etc.
The only interruptions to the coverage are 20-minute advert breaks that somehow retain my attention even though I can no longer concentrate on a sporting event that lasts longer than it takes for me to wolf my Big Mac. I buy it because it was being advertised. You can now get them with your favourite player’s face grilled into the bun. The faces are all identical after the surgery, but it’s a nice thought. I’ll buy it again.
I’m paying for this meal, as well as everything sponsoring these events and subscriptions to Sky Sports, BT Sport, Amazon Prime, beIN, Netflix, Hulu, Eurosport and Pornhub (who diversified into sport broadcasting when it became clear nobody had time to wank anymore, such was their appetite for the one sport) from betting winnings, the only form of income generation of which I’m aware. The fun never stops, so I never stop. In any case, every time I lose, I need to bet again to win it back. It is now accepted practice to count a 50-1 placed bet of £100 as an asset worth £5,100. I cannot get a job because that would require not watching sport. Those with particularly bad luck resort to payday loans. Nobody lives long enough to suffer the consequences of crippling debt. Life expectancy has been slashed. Nobody ever sleeps anymore due to Red Bull-induced non-stop sport viewing. Everyone is obese from sitting on their sofa all day.
Even with all my gambling winnings I could never afford to watch these events live. Tickets are all worth five-figure sums, and the few that are available are snapped up by influencers. The vast majority of tickets are given to commercial partners, who bring along guests to network. The crowd does not cheer, only discussing business in a homogeneous murmur. ‘Atmosphere’ is generated by playing the latest U2 or Coldplay single through the Tannoy.
Some Luddite ‘legacy fans’ attempted to continue playing their separate codes of sport at a local amateur level, but the International Olympic Corporation took them to court for endangering the commercial viability of their product by drawing people away from their screens.
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If, like me, your life marches to sport’s drum, you can join me in propping up this billionaire’s utopia. If, however, you have some self-restraint and self-respect, perhaps a sense of perspective, some sense that sport relies on diversity not only amongst its participants but in its codes, on integrity borne of rewarding the best and not the richest or most famous, if sport to you means participating as well as spectating, coming together with peers to achieve a common goal or discovering new reserves of willpower within oneself, then maybe you might avoid this future.
Some might prioritise having friends or a family, maybe a job. Some might want to travel. Some might want to read, play and listen to music, consume different visual media. But this will represent failure, and hence room to grow and markets to penetrate, to sport executives. If you do not succumb, you ensure that sport will continue to evolve into shorter, lower stakes, more showbized and more ubiquitous commercial events. It is inevitable. You might die before saturation point, but saturation point will be reached.
I, for one, cannot wait to spend every hour of my existence until cremation consuming the Franken-sport, however generic and ersatz, constructed to appeal to adolescent atavism. My life’s purpose will be to support the corporations and individuals for whom a lot of money is never enough money. I invite you all cordially to my funeral (I shall have lost contact with other real humans by the time an invitation would be more appropriate). I hope to at least receive a social media tribute from the International Olympic Corporation. This might seem uncharacteristically gracious, but publicising and honouring my life’s mission would encourage others to follow suit, generating more revenue. It would be my pleasure, in life as in death, to perpetuate the stream of wealth to those who already have the ocean.
In the meantime, I hope there is not another pandemic for which humanity is totally unprepared. It might interrupt sport-watching. I have already spent far too long writing this unconscionable twaddle and away from sports coverage. I’d better get back to it.