7 Hot Trends for '23; ChatGPT is the new NFT; Fun with moral panic; Now Fans beat New Fans; The Hypocrisy of Big Sport; Only good when it suits; A stupid idea amnesty; The return of phone calls;
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What is sport for, and other big questions for 2023.
This week’s podcast is with human rights lawyer Kat Craig.
Kat is at the sharp end of sport’s biggest promise: that it is a genuine platform from which to deliver social change.
This promise is central to the sports economy, part of the sales story to commercial partners, opening up marketing budgets and government funding for events big and small.
Two quotes from Kat Craig worth pausing on; one talks to hypocrisy and the other to transparency. These two words are linked.
My major bug bear with sport is the hypocrisy, or the inconsistency. That when it suits sport, it will trade off social good. It will seek to financially prosper off its claim to be a community serving industry. But when you look at how much of its phenomenal wealth really is converted into real change for people on the ground who need it most, who could really benefit from it, I think that is inadequate.
Then, sport’s really clever trick.
Sport as a industry, as a sector from its governance perspective pulled off a really clever, but I think really damaging trick, which was that it persuaded everybody else that it was so unique that it should be able to govern itself without any external interference.
And I can tell you from my long career in human rights, the one thing that will guarantee things to go horribly wrong is a lack of accountability, where people just sit in their small spaces with people who look and sound like them. And whether it's intentional or unintentional, they validate the same views and opinions, and that's what sport has become.
The follow up has been active on Linkedin.
Here’s a flavour.
You can join the conversation here.
Hot 2023 trends to watch
ChatGPT is this year’s NFT.
2022 Hot Opinion: Web3 will render you irrelevant, taking your job and self worth.
The buzzwords of ‘22 - Web3, crypto, NFT - have gone to ground.
So OpenAI and ChatGPT are where we can focus this year’s moral panic.
The year of the Panic Masters
A Panic Masters is a degree course that suddenly looks attractive to third year students and middle class kidults seeking a bridge to the other side of a recession.
The Panic Masters is promoted by money grabbing Business Schools marketing themselves as a safe haven in the coming storm.
Health insurance sponsorship replaces crypto
The Tories have two years to finally kill off the NHS for good.
Sport is a key platform in the race to build private health brands for insurance firms backed by private equity vulture funds, with marketing campaigns that go hard on cutesy kindness, aspiration and the fear of painful and lonely death.
Now Fans > Next Fans
A feature of the boom years has been an existential angst about sport’s aging fan base and the need to capture the hearts and minds of Gen Z and their younger siblings.
But that aspiration collides with 2023’s rapidly shortening planning horizons in which future fans start to look like a luxury good (see also, global fans and Crawley supporters “stretching from West Sussex to anywhere in the world with an internet connection”).
By comparison, Now Fans have one thing in their favour: they actually exist.
To hard up sports commercial teams, these so-called real people bring with them other potentially useful characteristics: They buy things, for themselves and their children. Now. Today. With actual money, the real stuff not drug lord shitcoins.
For much of the last decade, clubs have behaved to their core fans like banks and mobile phone networks to their most loyal customers: that is, to patronise and ignore them, obsessing over investor-wowing growth charts rather than focusing on the tedious day to day of giving value for money and focusing on quality of service.
A welcome hiatus from stupid ideas
Inflation may bring a fall in shit ideas for new sports.
The cheap money era has led to the weird phenomena - new sports properties that appear to have no fans that you’d recognise in the usual sense of that term, and instead exist only as a brand platform for sponsors, and which seem to have been created in the last five minutes of a Tuesday afternoon Venture Capital brainstorm.
Say what you like about rugby, darts and cricket, but people watch them. Talk about them. Care about them. Today.
2023 will see a boom in euphemisms for failure
‘In retrospect, we were too early.’
‘Something, something…historical silos’.
The tail end of 2022 saw the FAANGs cut their losses on a whole array of projects. This piece shows just how ruthlessly.
The return of phone calls.
Enough’s enough. Let’s all take a step back from Death by Zoom Schedule. No more self-aggrandising ‘I’ve got ten minutes three weeks next Tuesday’. Nobody’s that fucking busy. Pick up the phone. Talk to each other. We don’t need to turn everything in to an experience. Talk and walk, you’ll be happier.
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