Perhaps the greatest gift of the reality-defying Foxes of Leicester is just that: to momentarily suspend reality and take us back to a more innocent time.
Modern sport is commerce, and the money dictates that stuff like Leicester’s EPL title doesn’t happen. It sure as hell doesn’t happen in the Premier League, which itself exists as a business aimed at exploiting global broadcasting riches.
It’s the ultimate feel-good story, a reviver of faith for those jaded by the dominance of the mega-rich. Evidence that still, even today, anything can happen once the whistle blows.
There’s no doubt fans yearn for it, and feel it. Perhaps Trevor Marshallsea illustrated it best. A world away from the delirium in Leicester, he proudly threw on his LCFC shirt and hit the Sydney CBD, to the embrace of total strangers.
“Over a couple of hours, and conservatively 100 salutations from strangers, something dawned on me. This really was starting to feel like a one-man parade. I stopped grinning for a second, reflected, and gave thanks for my little club, and especially to football, lovely football, and to the best league that attracts the best players in the world’s most popular pastime.
“I had to grasp the specialness, the uniqueness, of this almost bizarre thing that was happening.
“For when else, under what possible circumstances, could an ordinary (non-celebrity) human being take a solo walk among his people and be repeatedly saluted and feel this much warmth?
“It just doesn’t happen. In any walk of life.”
Perhaps then it’s a depressing microcosm of modern sport that Aussie fans of the Premier League were given barely a day to bask in this warm sporting fuzziness before being jolted back into the cold, modern world.
Fans have had concerns since it was announced Optus had carried out a successful raid on the EPL broadcast rights in this country – chief among them the lack of an obvious, reliable platform on which to distribute the vision.
The good football people at Optus chose the immediate after-party of the Leicester miracle to confirm everybody’s worst fears, and more.
The platform for coverage of the world’s most popular football league would indeed be Optus’ notoriously unreliable broadband network. But few had anticipated just how totally the majority of football fans would be shut out of the league next season.
Unless you’re an Optus customer – which the majority of Australians aren’t (for good reason) – you don’t have access to the Premier League in Australia next season. It’s available only to those who switch their home broadband or mobile phone plans to the Optus network.
Of course, we’re talking unrelated products where you’re no doubt already locked into long contracts with other providers. No Premier League for you.
Your employer supplies your phone, hence you don’t choose your carrier? No Premier League for you.
This certainly isn’t the dawning of the rampant commercialisation of sport. Far from it, fans have had to pay to access live games for decades.
What it is, however, is a new level in the hijacking of sport by business: a foul, cynical, repugnant use of fan’s sporting passion to force them into buying inferior services that they have no use for.
At least with current broadcasting options, such as pay TV or internet passes, the sport itself is the product: you want it, you pay for it. Sure, Foxtel makes you purchase their base product to obtain sports content, but it’s still an isolated purchase choice: either buy it or don’t. It doesn’t affect other, unrelated products. You’re not forced into a ransom deal where you have to give up a superior internet and phone product just to have the right to watch sport.
Sport isn’t the product here. It’s merely a hijacking tool to move people onto other products by force.
Speaking of Foxtel, they’ve tried to compensate fans with La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A by including beIN Sport. It’s a reasonable gesture, but nonetheless cold comfort for many fans. Despite the doubtless impact of multiculturalism, England is still the European country we tend to look to in a cultural sense, and our sporting passions follow suit. Very few Australians feel a connection for a continental club as they do for their English club.
Finally, it should be noted that culpable in this disgraceful situation is the Premier League itself, which clearly offloads its matches purely to the highest bidder with precisely zero regard for if or how it will get to the fans.
Australia is obviously but a blip on the league’s global television radar, but that also means extracting every last dollar from us is less significant too. It’s a small but growing market where people love their sport. You would think the Premier League may have commercial concerns with the short-sightedness, in addition to the small matter of looking after its current fans. Clearly not.
So enjoy the feel-good party from the King Power Stadium this weekend. As it stands, there’ll be precious little else to see from England for a good while now.
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