Chapter 11 : THE ‘Business’ OF SPORT

The secret? Marketing. Pitch the game to the right audience, wrap it up as family entertainment rather than simply sport, throw in some merchandising and watch the turnstiles tick over.

I'll tell you what I worry about in regard to money and sport. I worry about the guy you need in the team, the guy who is not a super star, yet his contribution is just as great. You know the super star, he's always going to be courted but not the guy who might have missed out on a bit of grace but no grit.

As a sportsman, Greg Norman, winner of two British Opens, isn't in the class of Peter Thomson, who won five. He isn't remotely in the class of Betty Cuthbert, who won four Olympic gold medals, or Bart Cummings, who has trained 10 of the last 32 Melbourne Cup winners. Yet, by contemporary values, Norman's bigger than these three and dozens of others. He looks tanned and healthy, successful and sort of Californian. He tells people he's focussed, even though if he is, it's clearly not on a small white ball. He endorses products, so he must be important. He's just bought a large private jet, so he must be rich. Norman is very much the story of modern sport.

Pre-1960s, sport was very much a masculine ritual, but that has changed with its Americanisation and globalisation. Traditional reasons for going to a sporting game have weakened with what could be called the feminisation of the game ... it is marketed to a wider audience now. More and more of it is being marketed as family entertainment.

Sporting culture has greatly expanded in the television era, in terms of both media time and audience size. Sport has become a highly marketable commodity and big business has sought even more direct investment in it than before.

- Richard Cashman in the Paradise of Sport: the rise of organised sport in Australia (1995). Control is an important issue in Australian sport. Most sport involves battles between participants and administrators, entrepreneurs and associations, state and federal organisers along with struggles over selection policies, administrative change, sponsorship arrangements and media coverage.

If you couldn't kick a ball

Or you couldn't hold a bat

Then you wouldn't be an Aussie

You wouldn't be true blue.

Football, kangaroos, meat-pies and Holden cars.

Traditional reasons for going to a sporting game have weakened with what could be called the feminisation of the game ... it is marketed to a wider audience now. More and more of it is being marketed as family entertainment.

- Dr Jim McKay, a Queensland sociologist specialising in mass media and sport (1980s). It is apparent that a ll the image making in the world will not sell a sport to an unwilling public.

Modern marketing of televised sport is turning Australian males into a nation of sports opera voyeurs. Sports fans who watch televised matches become consumed by the action, suspend disbelief, overreact to twists in the fortunes of participants and become emotional at the result. One-day cricket provided the perfect analogy to soap opera, because each match was self-contained, with drama, sudden good fortunes, tragic errors, and the result frequently not certain until the last moment.

The media's commitment to sport has educated us, it has persuaded us to appreciate the super-human effort it takes to achieve supremacy. It is inspiring our children to play and compete, and dream dreams of becoming future Olympians or sporting heroes.

Our knowledge of sport, along with our attitudes about and concern for it, has been derived largely from newspapers and magazine, radio, and television.

Australian sportswomen are virtually invisible in all the mainstream media forums. Women's sport attracts less than 5 percent of the sports coverage in our metropolitan and regional newspapers, while men's coverage constitutes more than 80 percent. … This virtual absence of media coverage of women's sport directly discriminates against our Australian sportswomen, leaving them all too often starved of community support, denied recognition of their achievements and without adequate sponsorship.

I think the sports passion is a product of urban western societies, where there is a fairly well-developed media. Certainly I think there is a lot of interest in sport in Australia , because sport was around when important cultural institutions developed, when cities emerged, suburbs, groups and clubs. More than religion or ethnic identification sport was the thing that bound people together.

The media plays a crucial role in generating and creating the narratives and dialogues that contribute to transforming the ordinary sporting identity into a celebrity. Celebrity status involves the presentation of common collective narratives that celebrate and highlight certain values and attitudes in order to unify and rally a community.

- Peter Kell in Good Sports (2000). Some sportspersons are ready made stars and the media can boost some personalities to larger than life proportions. Often there is a big difference between the public image and reality.

… the mindless, numbing fatuity of a Melbourne football weekend, from the first drooling over selection of teams to the final clutch of clichés on Monday morning.

The lifestyle of Australians has increasingly been altered by television so that the sporting obsession attracts more watchers than participants in the major sports.

- Ex-patriot United States of America academic David Mosler in Australia, the Recreational Society (2002). Sports now rely on the armchair spectators and the television networks and advertisers. The challenge is to keep spectators at the ground and the number of television spectators up.

1. Uncle Toby's 56% 2. Nike 34% 3. Ford 33% 4. Adidas 28% 5. Foster's 27% 6. Nutrigrain 4% 7. Kellogg's 23% 8. Holden 22% 9. Speedo 21% 10. Coca-Cola 20%

- Most recognised sports sponsors, Sweeney Sports Report (2001).

So often the sponsor men and the television men neither know, love, respect nor care about the games they show.

- Colin Tatz in commenting on how sponsors have caused the rules of many games to be changed and thus contributed to a decline in the quality of play.

A savage downturn in sports sponsorship has forced Australian athletes, coaches and administrators to rethink their traditional attitude to sponsors as benefactors whose cash they bank at the beginning of the year and whom they leave thankless at the end. … Declining gate revenue, particularly in the football codes, together with a monopolistic pay TV market, have accentuated the importance of sponsorship as an alternative source of revenue.

It was quite a spectacle, but spoilt by the players going out of sight in the dark patches.

Despite the very public ‘scientification' of a number of sports in Australia, such as rowing, sailing, swimming and endurance running, the most popular spectator sports, Australian Rules football, rugby league, basketball and netball, have appeared to be either unaffected by or on the fringes of performance science. The winning edge in these contests might well be attributed to sports psychologists and physiologists, but as far as the fans are concerned, it is only the players who kick goals or shoot baskets. It seems that these ball sports have provided what most fans are looking for: dramatic and often unpredictable forms of entertainment, and a sense of vicarious achievement by association with a winning team. And it is this belief in sport as theatre, not as science, that ensures its continuing popularity.