Sport is competition but not always competitive. At the highest level, the hope for most neutrals is to see a contest that gets the pulse to a level above a raised eyebrow. If you can’t at least lean in from an armchair towards the TV, then what’s the point of having bums on seats? Continue Reading…
There are certain things in life that just don’t sit right. How about Steve Smith talking about men’s health while selling mobile phones in his “gap year”. Australian cricket and “elite honesty” are as far apart as Jeremy Corbyn and a decent suit. Continue Reading…
BBC Sports Personality is far from perfect, but that’s what makes it the best award
December 15, 2018Awards shows are weird things. We seem to have reached an impasse of sorts, both desperately competitive and competitively desperate to see our teams, our athletes win. It is a tribalism verging on a spiteful relentlessness. Anything else is a form of failure; calls for sackings and signings, accusations of laziness and incompetence. Arguably, professional sport has never been accompanied with such vitriol in defeat and such joy in victory as now. Continue Reading…
Live sport is responsible for many of our most unforgettable memories, with its jeopardy providing unbeatable experiences that keep us both financially and emotionally invested. As these ever-increasing investments yield incrementally diminishing returns, crippling lethargy is rife within the sports administration merry-go-round. Here are where the problems lie:
Outsourcing the core
Major events are comparatively easy to host because there are far fewer stakeholders, resulting in faster consensus to accommodate much greater flexibility. As a supplier, when dealing with clubs on an individual basis, responsibility for the service you’re providing often already lies somewhere between them and a third party (whether it be talent acquisition, sponsorship, ticketing, CRM, safety, security or catering).
Two things happen when accountability is shared – the feedback channel becomes blurred and each party expects the other to provide resolutions (often resulting in no change). Like any business, directly hiring/seconding the required skills or licensing the right technology is the best way to ensure ownership of these challenges and therefore overcome them. Clubs have a duty to their fans not to outsource the key elements of their business.
Team performance
Cancel out the tightening grip of broadcast rights on professionalism, with the broadly proportional effect they’ve had on player wages and all that’s left of the sports industry is tiny businesses, behind massive brands.
The biggest fallacy of people working in the business of sport is deriving success from what they do in the office, by what happens on the pitch. It needs engraining within club culture that, unless you’re an actual coach, your only contribution to the playing department is the effect your work has on fans. Better work: happier fans, happier fans: more fans, more happy fans: better atmosphere, better atmosphere: bigger reaction from players. This is the only link and making fans happy is an infinite game, even if (especially) problems are masked by constantly selling out – which merely gives the impression of a job well done.
The best clubs have entirely independent, fan-centric business models because they know you cannot win the league every year.
The long grass
As venues evolve into 365-day assets, their requirement to be hubs for conferencing and community events demand a flexible approach and a variety of new technologies. Rights holders simply do not open themselves up to relevant suppliers in the way other industries do, preferring instead to learn only from each other’s experiences.
This stifles innovation, at best perpetuating the adoption of obsolete technologies, long since taken for granted elsewhere. Junior members of staff (who’s enthusiasm is often inversely reflected in their remuneration) are recruited as potential agents of change, end up so under resourced and unempowered, they quickly conform to “how things are done”. Fans deserve much better but should also demand more from their clubs, who in turn need to recognise that one-size-fits-all solutions are rarely the answer.
Only by integrating individual, best-in-class innovations can they hope to prevail.
Patrick McMeekin is the UK Licensee for a platform that enables fans to order food, drinks and merchandise from their smartphone and have it efficiently delivered to their seats. His experiences of dealing with rights holders over the past three years, leaves a lot to be desired…
Leicester’s tragic loss is the mood music for this sporting weekend
November 3, 2018It’s comforting how sport matters so much and then, when real tragedy, strikes, knows when to stop in its tracks and step back. We all need reminding that winning is not life or death. It’s less important than that, to turn a Bill Shankly quote on its head. Continue Reading…
“It’s bullshit” my husband says. He has a way of expressing himself.
I am telling him about a point of view I am thinking of writing about. He agrees with me and he was a professional athlete himself. So maybe I am right in my train of thought? Or maybe not. Should a professional athlete enter a local sportif or race, win (easily as it usually happens) and then stand on the podium? Continue Reading…
Who’s the GOAT? It’s the most popular, but silliest, question asked in all of sport. If Muhammad Ali had been born 50 years later he wouldn’t be telling us that he is greatest, he would announce that he is the GOAT, the Greatest Of All Time, and we would discuss it. The greatest debate doing the rounds now is who is the greatest in whichever sport… who is the GOAT? Continue Reading…
Ugly fallout from McGregor’s defeat reinforces the view that FIFA have got it right
October 12, 2018In the immediate aftermath of Khabib Nurmagomedov’s convincing defeat of Conor McGregor in Las Vegas, the Dubliner lay slumped against the side of the octagon while the Russian removed his gum guard and bellowed the words “talk now” at him. It was a visceral release of anger that even in the throes of their physical combat had seemed to continue to boil within. Continue Reading…
Well, what a fairytale ending it proved to be. Alastair Cook, England’s most prolific run scorer in Test cricket, scored a thunderously acclaimed century in his 161st and final Test match, against India, at The Oval on Monday. And I should know, because I was one of the fortunate people who was there to thunderously acclaim it. Continue Reading…
“Just do it”. Three words, eight characters and, for my money, the best advertising tagline ever.
Penned in 1988 by advertising guru Dan Wieden, the slogan has generated billions of dollars of revenue for Nike and right now it’s going viral on social media all while its products go up in smoke. Continue Reading…