The Roar
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Money, loyalty and sport as a boredom-killing business

Roar Pro
22nd January, 2014
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The Storm suffered big time post-Origin. (AAP Image/Dean Lewins)
Roar Pro
22nd January, 2014
20
1170 Reads

There’s a blunt quote from the film Network that sums up how many a businessman would view loyalty in global sport.

“You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.

“Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, euros, yen, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet.

“The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.”

There is no loyalty, there is no real national pride, sport like anything else is just business – the boredom-killing business. Let go and give in to the tidal forces of the free market.

In terms of sporting loyalty, Australia is still a little antiquated.

We still have a large number of sporting teams where the players were born and raised in the area that their team represents, playing juniors, raising their families, some even refusing bigger money to stay settled in the area they grew up in.

This isn’t to say that we aren’t highly professionalised, but  many our sports have a mixture of racehorse trading professionalism with a touch of local heritage and pride.

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In Australia, however, people still have a great deal of pride based on where a player is from.

They will argue to the ends of the earth about where someone played juniors, whether they are a Kiwi or an Aussie, which state can rightly claim that they the ‘produced’ the player in question.

This is partly because Australia sports are more of a religious ideology. Because of this people are clannish and feel uneasy with those who lack loyalty or cross codes. They are met with skepticism and their character is often questioned.

When Australians (and New Zealanders and South Africans) look at English Premier League and American sports, they will either see sports that have lost their way or they might see the future.

They are sports that focus on nothing but the best players and athletes no matter where they are from – nothing more, nothing less.

If we were to look at a spectrum, many antipodean sports hold strong values on tradition and loyalty, and that there is a level of commercialisation that devalues sport.

European premier grade football or French Top 14 rugby hold strong traditions and rich histories, but the idea of the importance of players from the local area, or even from the country itself, is an antiquated concept.

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Many are private business often owned by foreign billionaires who trade players like highly prized racehorses and will search the globe to attract players with huge sums of money.

American sports – predominantly baseball, basketball and American football – are either looked at as highly financially innovative and superior, or they are derisively mocked.

The opening of the movie BASEketball sets up a premise of a dystopian American sporting future based on continuing over-commercialisation, declining sportsmanship and grandstanding, mercenary professionalism, teams moving from city to city and cheap money-grubbing events that eventually turn the public off them all together.

It’s a great piece of satire because it isn’t that far from reality, and perhaps adds a little food for thought for Australians who want Australian sports to emulate America.

Now let’s jump back to where it all began.

The first football to which all footballs originate, ‘mob football’, was a game played between neighbouring towns and villages.

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It involved an unlimited number of players on opposing teams who would clash in a heaving mass of people, struggling to drag an inflated pig’s bladder by any means possible to markers at each end of a town.

It was literally a way of saying “my town is stronger and better than your town”.

Even to this day, despite all the changes of professional football, this basic primordial concept is at the heart of every major sporting event or rivalry.

Football in those days became popular because a town could have pride in victory, because they were involved in it.

From there football became games of talented amateurs and gentleman and the concept of professional sport was abhorrent and reprehensible, while the common man would look at football as a way out of the horrible drudgery of working class or peasant life.

This legacy is why we have two rugbys.

For a common person to be physically better than a wealthy gentleman with all their monetary advantages would have been a great revelation and burgeoned all of the different footballs’ popularity.

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Sports since then have had an obsession with ‘rags to riches’ romantic fairy tales and the belief that an underdog could defeat a favourite through sheer determination.

People want to live vicariously through players and imagine themselves in their place, and these romantic stories give that to them.

As fans, a small part of us wants to think we contributed to our team’s victory, however ridiculous that may seem. We want to think that it was something to do with our city, our state or our country more than just money that made our team win.

The State of Origin concept is the representation of this.

Origin shows that no matter how professional sport becomes that the antiquated concept of that players should play for and represent the place that they were born and raised can still unleash an amazing amount of pride and financial popularity.

There is also incredible anger when the concept is devalued.

In Australia we have many sporting myths that are often implicit – about our outdoors lifestyle, climate, our toughness, skill, athleticism, our winning sporting culture or our never say die ‘Aussie spirit’.

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Our opponents will often have the very same ideas in reverse with a slightly different twist.

In reality, we have more than likely paid for the best players, the best coaches, built the best facilities, and so on.

We think this because we want to believe our athletes are a bit more Rocky, a bit less Ivan Drago.

All products in a free market, and sport in particular, rely on brand loyalty. Damage to brand loyalty, image and integrity can devastate any business.

In professional sport, if we step back it can be a bizarre concept.

Everybody has a different idea of loyalty, and loyalty between players and clubs is often very shallow.

With fans some will blow with the wind, some can have many sporting loyalties and others can follow a team their entire life in one sport, love and hate players like they were their best mates or worst enemies.

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When I lived in London for six months helping to set up events I worked with a global mixture of Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Polish, Portuguese, French, Africans, Indians and maybe the odd Englishman or Irishmen.

I learnt that the most common topic of conversation was soccer/football; that everybody, no matter what, followed a team with serious passion (and you had to call it football).

The Australians I lived with, born and raised in Adelaide, were diehard Arsenal supporters. Other friends I was surrounded by from Melbourne supported a mixture of Newcastle FC, Chelsea, Fulham and Everton.

I felt this whole thing was a bit bizarre. I ‘picked’ a mixture of those teams but, not being enamoured with the game, I didn’t want to fight with someone pointlessly over something about which I had no real passion.

I couldn’t really get into it, but I did try.

While, I understand that Premier League teams and NFL teams are global brands – less about geography, more about the brilliance of the teams – I personally struggle to manufacture such disconnected, yet diehard loyalty.

“Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify,” Jerry Seinfeld said. “Because the players are always changing, the team could move to another city… you’re actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it.

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“You’re standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to another team, they’ll boo him.

“This is the same human being in a different shirt, they hate him now! Boo! Different shirt! Boo…”

Now when it comes to the free market, following a sports team is not exactly the same as going to the shop and buying milk – it can take a lot of passion, hardship and cost.

Sports still have to motivate people to get off their bums and pay for an expensive non-essential purchase to exist.

Sports are driven by consumer demand and  the most loyal fans are like gold. They are shareholders that require only an emotional dividend rather than a financial return.

Memberships have become a vital component of modern Australian sporting teams and building this loyalty. Sports marketing is getting more and more intricate to build a solid financial base for sporting teams.

But in return they feel that they should have a say on the decisions and the directions the sport and clubs take.

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There is nothing that says people have to put up with any decision the sport they love makes, and the costs are severe if they feel that it devalues why they like the game in the first place.

The decisions teams and competitions must make with a free market must still be mindful in alienating the core fan-base of a team or sport can have dire financial consequences.

Although perhaps I am overestimating the consumer, like most consumers they are easily led.

Do they really care that much? Maybe they aren’t so savvy and like a mob “just follow the clothes”.

Sport is, after all, in the boredom-killing business.

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