In praise of Mark Bullingham's massive balls

Overthinking the sports business, for money

Mark Bullingham’s balls are very underrated

A huge well done to The FA for their new campaign, Made For This Game.

Not just for the thing itself, but also for the timing of it. It would’ve been so easy to not do this, in this moment.

(Nice job too by MSQ Sport and Entertainment, Steve Martin and Jamie Wynn Morgan’s new-ish shop, which made the film).

Women. Women playing football. Worse than that, black women. Women in hijabs. Women on a football pitch, like they own the place. Barely a white man to be seen.

DEI, WTAF?? Thought we were done with this shit.

I’m the first to wince when marketing people talk about bravery.

But this is a campaign that will have consequences, it may in time be seen to be ‘important’.

Because, Context is King.

Not long ago, this film would be seen as unremarkable; The FA being nice but a bit earnest.

Today, not so much.

Beware The Pendulum

You know when your mate breaks up with that tool of a boyfriend, and you go too early with the slagging off, and then she calls round to say they’re back together and you think, shit, what did I say, what will she remember, and the answer is always, every word?

Something similar is happening right now.

We’re in the middle of what Janan Ganesh calls ‘The anti-woke overcorrection’.

As someone who called Peak Woke early, and wasn’t sad to see it go, I’ll say this: The public wants woke disposed of. It doesn’t want to be subjected to an ongoing conversation about the topic. And it certainly never signed up for the geometric opposite of that movement, which is cultural conservatism. The right is overcorrecting…having rejected woke, voters will be increasingly protective of other liberal gains. Misreading this, and high on themselves, conservatives will end up weirding people out in a major way.

Woke was always a trap.

Most people are irritated/bored by the madder fringes. But you’ve got to be really fucking stupid and/or bigoted to be angered by words such as diversity, equality and inclusion.

It’s useful though, the current purge.

Because the cunts can’t help but reveal themselves.

Make sure you keep the receipts.

Revisiting The Woke Trap

I wrote about this in May 2021, during the first few months of Trump 1.0 - Them/Us: How Fox News is creating a culture war around trans sport

This is a sports business newsletter, and sport plays a big role in the story.

Media Matters analysed the channel’s output, showing a massive uptick in coverage, encouraging then presidential hopeful Donald Trump to politicise the issue of trans athletes.

Fox did this because…clicks and money.

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.

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#The Product

There’s such a thing as quality

The often heard critique is that the scroll has reduced attention spans.

So the sporting product is responding to this by shortening: The twenty20fication of everything.

But it’s not just that we’re being encouraged to watch shorter things: We’re being trained to accept worse things.

When virality is the metric, there’s an incentive to start at the end.

Because it’s easier. Quicker. You don't have to do the work, learn the craft of building something valuable, you just have to make it look like something of value.

But it’s hollow. There’s no there there.

As noted by Rory Smith on this week’s podcast:

Sitting down and watching a full football match does take a lot of commitment, and it's something you grow into, but all the major leagues are struggling with it, and not just leagues but broadcasters. I did a thing a few weeks ago on the CBS Champions League Show with Jamie Carragher and Micah Richards and Thierry Henry. That is a TV programme built for virality. It's not designed to be consumed particularly  an actual TV show. They like the metrics They like  being able to say to CBS, ‘We've got four billion social views’. That is as much as a priority getting the viewers onto the streaming service. It's a gateway drug effectively.

I’ve no problem with short form sport.

But it still needs to be hard to create. The work still needs to be done.

Quality exists.

Hear the Ronaldo at 40 podcast here:

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