Are the best decisions in sports administration and governance made by people who don’t really care about the sport? To grow your a particular sport, should you ignore the fanatics?
It has long been a source of great interest to me why some businesses struggle and why others succeed. For example, how did Apple soar so high while Sony have sunk so low? This is especially interesting when you look at the sporting world. Why have some sports struggled, and others gone through enormous growth?
One of the interesting features of successful sports is that they are often run by people who don’t love the sport and are happy to ignore the fans.
Love may seem like a strong expression, but there is no mistake here. If you think carefully about your favourite sport, you are basically in love with it. Think about it…
Your sport has been with you through the bad times and given you many dizzy highs. It may get you angry every now and then but you can’t imagine life without it. You have spent a fortune on your sport already and would happily spend it again. The times you spend with your sport are some of the most joyous and precious times of your entire life.
Substitute your partner’s name in there and you have a wedding speech!
As a side note, I can recall American comic Dave Barry describing the phenomena of young women flummoxed that their boyfriends of five years can’t settle down with them, even though they are willing to devote their entire life to him, especially when he is doggedly honouring an iron clad commitment to support the luckless Chicago Cubs he made when eight years old!
When you love someone or some thing, it does many crazy things, but for the purpose of this, let’s restrict it to devotion and love induced myopia
The devotion of love is when you are committed, until death do you part. Through good times and bad times, your love stays true and you will not tolerate a word against them. “Yes he drinks too much every weekend, but he is my husband and he is great around the house”, “yes she nags me but by gar she sure can cook!”
This is a great quality in a relationship, but it is a bad thing in for sports administration. It stops you from looking at the sport objectively and making tough decisions. An example of this was last month, when the A-League ended with a piece of play that looked pretty dodgy. Indeed it was only a flailing Italian striker away from confirming every negative stereotype about the sport.
So football fans and administrators united. In support of the play! An attack against one aspect of the game was treated as a frontal assault on the code. Their devotion to the sport precluded them considering how unpleasant the incident was for so many people.
Similarly, but much more humorously, there is love induced myopia where your entire sense of perspective is shot to hell.
In the longest marriages, the seventy year commitments, the couples are not only blinded to each other flaws, but deluded about their good points too. She is not just a good cook, she is best cook. Ever. He is not just funny. He. Is. Hilarious!
This is the strongest form of love, a complete short sightedness on how things actually are.
In a sporting perspective, you can easily see this on The Roar, when supporters of different codes argue. It is like watching a Spaniard and Englishman argue about who has the better language. All the evidence in the world, be it empirical, anecdotal, statistical, whatever, will never convince you that the other person is correct.
It is an entirely emotional decision, not that there is anything wrong with that!
That is, unless you are trying to run a sport. A person who is blindly devoted to a sport and unable to see it has both pros and cons is going to wildly overestimate how good it is.
Recently on The Roar, an article was written about how hard it is to attract fans to rugby with the sometimes confusing rules and number of penalty goals. The rugby fans who responded were outraged, they loved rugby and were extremely happy watching it every week.
Who on earth were they to criticise?
When acting, as opposed to reacting, it still skews the thought process when you are blinded by love. Indeed, any expansion of a sport into new territories is based on the slightly condescending notion that their sport is so totally awesome that once you get a chance to watch it, you will be hooked forever, forgetting the trash you use to think was good.
And so rugby league thought it would be a good idea to set up teams in Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne, The AFL in New South Wales and Queensland, ice hockey into southern and western USA. None of which have been as popular or financially strong as the teams they play, despite great on-field/rink success.
All because the sports were being led by people who could not understand how anyone could not like it as much as they do.
So how do they make good decisions?
Interestingly, some of the best decisions in sport recently have been made by administrators who have ignored their fans.
The hatred traditional Cricket fans have for T20 cricket is intense. It is not real cricket, manufactured, soft, popcorn, etc, etc. However, competitions such as the Big Bash have become enormously popular because the cricket administrators took a gamble.
When setting up the short short version of the game, they knew that they could attract casual or new fans who think cricket is slow and boring, and at the same time, keep their core supporters who hate T20 but will still watch it.
They will ‘pretend’ to hate it, they will write angry letters and declare that they will ‘give the game away’ or ‘not watch a ball of it’ but this is like the hysterical screams of a teenager in the midst of a lovers tiff. They can’t help themselves and will eventually be back, because of love.
Smart sports administrators know that they can take their hardcore fans for granted, go after attracting more casual fans and make more money to strengthen their game.
In the case of Formula One, Blind Freddy could tell you that it had been incredibly boring for about a fifteen year period. The cars just didn’t overtake, but drove around like a procession.
However, the purists still loved it, because they were blinded and hated hearing bad things about their beloved broom brooms. Fortunately the sport is run by cynical Brit Bernie Ecclestone who gave the cars a boost and drag reduce button so they could sling past each other.
The purists wailed, and are still wailing now at this outrage, but of course, they are still watching, and the closer action on the track is attracting many more casual fans through the gate and onto the box.
What do you think Roarers? Is the key to good sports admin decisions not actually caring that much about the sport?
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