10 reasons to watch The Hundred; Biden's climate revolution; Legacy fans v Big Eventers; Do sponsor boycotts ever work; Sky, Avram Glazer and Alanis Morissette; Fox News wages trans sport culture war
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10 Reasons The Hundred is the most interesting new sports property despite, or because, nothing’s happened yet
(Hear this week’s UP podcast with Tom Harrison, CEO of the ECB.)
The Hundred has been created in a vacuum. There’s been no cricket, so we’re just left with the idea. This makes it particularly vulnerable to piss taking. See Patrick Kidd in The Times this week:
2. Women’s sport needs premium team brands. The ECB’s gender equality approach offers an important testing ground for the women’s game. The followership patterns around women’s sport are uneven, veering between big audiences for the major quadrennial events and fame of individual superstar athletes. The Hundred’s women’s teams are the necessary unit of affiliation that can drive the weekly narrative that’s culturally and commercially essential if women’s sport is to grow sustainably.
3. The Hundred franchises need fans not Big Eventers. Big Eventers are defined as people who have an abnormally high regard for fireworks and genuinely enjoy a ride on the Samsung Slider (see below). They’re fine for one off events, not for building teams allegiances.
Some millennials enjoying themselves instead of watching rugby. Note their famously short attention spans. Can The Hundred skip a generation? The IPL doesn’t talk about Cricketainment much anymore. It was a concept borne of a lack of confidence among marketers for the game itself. Today the IPL is about high quality performance and is the hub of the game’s great strategic thinkers. A question for the ECB is whether The Hundred needs to go through a ‘sportainment phase’ before arriving at where the IPL is now. We can but hope.
The Hundred is a reaction to the failures of a previous ECB regime. Twenty20 was a hit for the ECB - in 2003. The failure to capitalise on this opportunity defines the Giles Clarke, David Collier era, as chairman and chief executive of the ECB respectively, and led directly to the Stanford debacle.
Metaphor alert: Lords 2009 and then-ECB Chairman Giles Clarke looks over the shoulder of soon-to-be-convicted fraudster Allen Stanford at a perspex box of fake cash brought to the Home of Cricket in a rented helicopter. Rights holders have become more business-like, but not more entrepreneurial. This is more than semantics, and relates to Tom Harrison’s job of overcoming the ECB’s institutional memory when it comes to launching a big new product. Across the industry, media money has made Big Sport very corporate – swish offices, legions of corporate comms people, five year plans, new brand logos etc etc. But these are ornaments. There is very little evidence of entrepreneurship from within governing bodies - turning an idea in to money for its stakeholders.
To work properly, Virat Kohli has to play. But he won’t. Yet.
Will Manoj Badale buy a team? We’re using the Rajasthan Royals co-founder as a proxy for all IPL and other sports franchise owners, because there’s a Super League question lurking below The Hundred, but it needs the boring admin to be in place first.
There are two futures being glimpsed. 1) The Hundred as a pale, gimmicky standalone imitation of the IPL featuring English county players wearing crisp packet uniforms. Or, 2) it’s part of a joined-up, genuinely global franchise model featuring the greatest talent in the game. Extend this thought and you get to something far bigger in ambition. This would give the IPL and other franchise ownership the chance to grow beyond the IPL’s four-week window, creating a year round calendar of brilliant short form cricket. To do this, the ECB had to create new team identities separate from the counties in terms of ownership. (btw, Manoj Badale has form when it comes to trying to extend the Royals franchise - hear Badale on UP Pod #125 here).
Would a global cricket Super League sit within the ICC? Maybe. Maybe not.
Punishment tropes, pt 2
(Cont’d from last week’s newsletter: 16 punishment tropes).
More Super League reparations. This time it’s fans doing the attempted punishing.
‘Your sponsorship money will be used for debt servicing and dividends’ is up there with ‘Just Do It’ and ‘Eat Football, Sleep Football, Drink Coca-Cola’.
Question to the WhatsUP Group. Do fans sponsor boycotts ever work?
Ricardo Fort: No. Never. No sponsor rich enough to sponsor ManU relies on ManU fans to keep their profits up. Not even adidas. There’s simply no scale among fans that would hurt their businesses. This works well as propaganda but is harmless to the companies.”
Tim Crow: The question is who it would actually hit. And the answer is of course the licensee above all ie in United’s case Adidas. They and their peers take all the risk via the upfront annual fee. The clubs’ royalties would be hit but they are relatively small - less than 10% in most cases.
Sky to Glazer: ‘Are fans just customers to you?’
It’s getting hard to tell the difference between sports marketing data strategy and hostile media questions to billionaire Super League owners.
This week Sky News US correspondent Sally Lockwood chased Avram Glazer around a Florida car park, asking if United fans were "just customers to you".
Full credit for the effort. But rather than act like a fugitive in an ITV drama, Glazer might’ve asked the Sky reporter the same question. Sky Sports have won awards for treating football fans as customers.
Nice threads
Biden’s Green Marshall Plan will define major events
President Biden has made a fast start. And if his First 100 days is anything to go by, real and deep implications lie ahead for sport.
‘Sleepy Joe’ has launched a $1.9trillion Keynesian boost to infrastructure, jobs and economic growth which purposely recalls Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s and the post-war Marshall Plan.
This time however, there’s an additional objective: climate change.
At the recent summit of world leaders, Biden pledged America would decarbonise its economy by 2050, and reduce emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030. Every policy initiative will be run through a green lens.
President Biden: ‘When I think about climate change, I think jobs’.
The relevance to sport is obvious. North America hosts the two biggest global sports events of the next decade: The 2026 FIFA World Cup (with Canada and Mexico) and the 2028 LA Olympics. All those fan journeys, infrastructure commitments, ostentatious new stadia builds...
Second, climate change is now central to sport’s events, not a tick box add-on. Biden’s unprecedented green agenda is designed as a post-Trump statement: America is back to take a leadership position on the global stage. To meet those targets requires sport to do more than signal its societal purpose.
And if policy from the top doesn’t work, there’s a whole movement of young people ready to keep the IOC, FIFA et al in line.
Joe Biden and Greta Thunberg are a powerful partnership.
Them/Us: How Fox News is creating a culture war around trans sport
Media Matters has analysed the channel’s coverage, showing a massive uptick in coverage, encouraging president hopeful Donald Trump to politicise the issue of transexual athletes.
Fox News aired at least 126 discussions about transgender athletes from January 2019 through March 2021, including 72 discussions that aired in the first three months of this year alone -- more than twice as many as in 2019 and 2020 combined. Throughout all of those discussions, Fox hosts and guests could point to only nine trans women athletes, one of whom was not even allowed to compete and none of whom were dominating their sport -- as states around the country consider banning them from competing.
Fox anchors, hosts, and guests also cited trans athletes in at least 58 passing mentions during this time, often listing them among examples of supposedly “extreme” Democratic policies.
Fox’s obsession with trans athletes is a key component of the right’s vitriolic campaign to make them into a political and cultural wedge issue while putting trans kids and families in danger in the process. During this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, former President Donald Trump notably mentioned trans athletes, who he has rarely commented on, after right-wing groups and figures had campaigned in the previous two years for Trump to embrace anti-trans issues.
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