Knife to a gunfight, pt2; Sport's liberal delusion; Pharma, Food and Sun Tzu; Trickle downer; Fat kids and stupid people; When Amazon comes knocking; Overheard in Texas; Indy sportswashing
Overthinking the sports business, for money
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Sport brings a knife to a gunfight, pt2
(A build on last week’s newsletter)
So, Trump won.
Nobody needs me to get in to that.
But there’s an echo, to something worth noting before we all move on to whatever comes next.
The sport conversation is a microcosm of other, bigger realms, most notably business and politics.
The sports lobby, if there is such a thing, shares a problem with the liberal side of the political divide.
In many ways, it’s the liberal delusion, to assume you’re one of the good guys: that you’re self-evidently on the right side of history.
This is the big strategic weakness.
And it leaves the sport for good constituency vulnerable to exploitation by more organised, more focused, more cynical vested interests with access to policy makers.
As Dame Tracey Crouch put it to me this week, ‘there is no societal problem to which sport doesn’t have an answer’. She’s right, of course. And I’m with her 100%. But that’s a million miles away from saying that sport’s solutions will make it the level of government policy.
I would say this wouldn’t I, but listen to the podcast. It’s fascinating on the realpolitik of what happens to sport’s argument when it hits Westminster.
(NB The Athletic/New York Times picked up the podcast here - and in the very same week the publication made a profit. Coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidence…).
Anyhow, back to the thread:
Crouch talks about lobbying and what it’s like to be lobbied.
(Note: Former boss David Cameron once called lobbying ‘the next big scandal’, before he quit as Prime Minister and took it up as a career, hassling then Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak in 2020 to change rules in order to allow Greensill to join the Covid Corporate Financing Facility, a government loan scheme. Panorama put the fee for this work at around £7million for Cameron).
The point is, for all the sports marketing industry’s talk of purpose, it lacks a coherent political position, which is odd given its prominence in public life.
Let’s take one of those societal problems Tracey Crouch references.
Spoiler: Those fat kids ain’t getting any thinner
You step out your front door and you see what I see: Fat, unhappy kids waddling along with their massive, unhappy, angry parents.
And because you have a hammer, everything looks like a sports shaped nail.
Organised badminton is the solution, if only we could get those stupid, fat people to listen.
Cue a tax payer funded Olympic Games backed by Coke and McDonalds, with the sales story of an inspired next generation, sports version of trickle down economics.
The stupid, fat people can’t afford to get in, and/or are moved to accommodate a new shopping centre and aspirational (aka expensive) housing.
So no, they’re not inspired. They’re angry. And sport is part of the problem not the solution, working for them not us, just another face on the telly.
Big Pharma doesn’t suffer this liberal delusion. Nor does Big Food.
They see those fat kids and frame them as a market for their sugar and pills.
They have their own answer to Crouch’s rallying cry: ‘there is no societal problem to which sport doesn’t have an answer’.
Obesity? Anxiety? Depression?
Free of ideology, the food and pharma lobbies start from a different place.
They assume there will be opposition to their story within government, the media and the general public.
So they act accordingly. Over time. Years, decades. The hard labour of shifting Joseph Overton’s window their way.
How else do we get to the situation we’re in now, where about two thirds of the British population is overweight, and - WRITE THIS DOWN - 90% of policy makers think it’s their own fault.
Years of sugar and pill lobbying has framed obesity as a moral failing rather than a societal one. It’s done the same with poverty, via the spurious argument that we live in a meritocracy - you’re poor because you don’t work hard enough.
These positions don’t happen on their own. They are planned. They need biddable scientists and useful idiots. They need money and people in positions of power who crave it.
That’s what sport is up against.
It’s failing at a strategic level.
As Sun Tzu nearly said: Know your enemy - and maybe stop using your massive marketing platform to plug what they’re selling.
(If you’re interested in the issues raised in the above thread, we’ll be revisiting the subjects covered for an upcoming podcast series in collaboration with our friends at Redtorch - get in touch if you have a view).
See also:
I often ask on Other People’s Money, how the source of investment impacts decisions taken by the management. This is a good example:
Millionaire still can’t fathom where the money came from
Hugo Lloris has written a laugh out loud memoir.
Here’s the bit on the discontent at the Spurs training ground when the Amazon documentary team turned up.
He really does think his £5.2m a year salary was linked to his ability as a goalkeeper rather than say, an outcome of competition in the TV rights marketplace.
Expected Goals on THAT Sky WSL deal
I often steal Maggie Murphy’s views and pass them off as my own. As Dame Tracey Crouch said on our podcast, ‘I wouldn’t go up against Maggie…’
Btw, Maggie will be appearing alongside other sport luminaries in our next event.
Is television doing women’s sport wrong?
Nice provocation innit.
It’s our working title for an upcoming evening at BAFTA with HBS, to celebrate the company’s 25th Anniversary and the opening of their UK business, under the leadership of Jamie Aitchison, who himself has an actual BAFTA, which is a bit intimidating tbh.
It’s in a couple of weeks time.
You can’t come because it’s invite-only, so this is purely a FOMO accumulation exercise.
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