The average year is rarely a clear break from those that come before. Everything has its antecedent in the past. Rock and roll only becomes rock and roll because of jazz, country and blues music before it. The Black Death only becomes the Black Death because of people living in disgusting conditions and trading filth with each other. Every financial crisis builds on years of exuberance from people who either weren’t alive or forgot the last financial crisis. Generals are always fighting the last war. There had to be rocks for flint to be invented.
You blip into existence on this planet, spend two or three decades getting your bearings and then spend the next half century wondering why it hasn’t stayed the same. Then you blip out of existence and the long arcs of history that impacted you and everyone around you, directly and indirectly, obviously and clandestinely, that were there long before you were born, will continue on without you.
It’s trite to say that 2024 saw the continuation of many trends that were in place in 2023. This is true of every year but it does mean that a list of themes guiding the metaphorical hand on the tiller of the sports world looks a lot like the same list would have last year. Identifying these trends in sport becomes a lot easier when you see them rip through other parts of the culture, politics and economy before belatedly arriving at old man sports’ curiously conservative doorstep.
A neo-Columbian exchange in underway, facilitated by the internet and mutual curiousity. The extremely healthy man of Europe, Formula 1, is undergoing radical and rapid transformation at the hands of its American ownership and is perhaps the prime exemplar of this process.
After Bernie Ecclestone turbocharged F1 by getting the sport into a basic sense of order and capitalising on the latent TV value, Liberty Media introduced a cost cap that looks a lot like a salary cap and turned the teams from money pits into financial assets, got several successful events off the ground in the United States (including running the Vegas operation directly) after decades of knocking on the door and found a new audience to replace the geriatrics that made up the hard core. Then, should it pass regulators, they bought MotoGP for a laugh.
Whereas it looked almost certain that the NFL would expand into Europe with a team in London, they seem more content to increase the number of overseas games each year. This avoids a myriad of behind the scenes logistical issues that the NFL has no desire to deal with, opens a new time slot for broadcast in the morning on the US east coast and international fans seem happy enough to arbitrarily pick a team to be their own, in lieu of having local (and likely very poor) representation.
The NBA continues with the in-season tournament. While not a direct rip-off of the FA Cup, itself a tournament losing lustre in a congested calendar and fighting for relevance against domestic league and European club fixtures, it seems to serve a purpose: briefly juicing an otherwise pedestrian part of the broadcast inventory. Wait until the Americans discover international representative sport!
It remains to be seen how European soccer responds to increasing US interest in their leagues. It seems likely that the big leagues will get bigger, enjoying larger contributions from overseas broadcaster to complement the substantial domestic revenue, which will flow on to the clubs, increasing the stratification of clubs into clearer economic classes. Quite where this will make itself felt is unclear - the Super League is clearly a non-starter and it is hard to envisage the Bundesliga having a playoff - but an economic opportunity will come knocking and it will only benefit the few. Infantino and FIFA seem more open to this course but my gut says the UEFA club tier is where the breach will occur. It’s not like Real Madrid needs Auckland City.
With this cross-pollination, we’re testing what appetite the sporting public has for this mass of sludgey sporting nectar. Broadcast rights seemed to have no peak, until they did, and then a few particular properties (NFL, EPL) broke through and made even more money while the rest stagnated or started to slide backwards (e.g. the travails of Ligue 1). How much is too much?
Revenue is directly tied to the quantity of content but surely there’s diminishing returns, as there’s only so many hours and so many fans and so much else to theoretically do, but costs remain proportional to volume. This becomes doubly concerning as the money spigot of pay TV is slowly closed in favour of a streaming future with much lower margins for all but a few lucky behemoths that can straddle the increasingly fractured landscape of western culture (NFL, EPL). Oh and somewhere we’ve got to find some space for women’s sport too.
It is possible the rapid expansion of calendars (expansion of F1 to two dozen races plus sprints, of CFB’s playoff format to four weeks, of FIFA’s World Cup and Club World Cup fields, the Swiss Model, various expanding playoffs in the US and women’s sport basically doubling the available inventory) is throwing as much out there while the tide is still in and when it ebbs, hoping like hell something stays. Until the market crashes, the content must flow.
2024 was the year we discovered that the bastion of sports morality was laid by the Professional Golfers Association. Last year, I wrote about the peace deal supposedly hammered out between LIV Golf and the PGA, bringing an end to hostilities. Except, not really because other than a handful of name plates changing, nothing seems to have happened with the actual sport, other than keeping journalists employed speculating endlessly that this meeting is It.
In that 18 month period, Saudi-sourced (and similar) funding has gone from repugnant to under consideration to actively sought out, bringing the riyals and dihrams to a parity of purity with private equity dollars. If you have an axe to grind within your professional sport, the easiest way to get it sharpened is to get backing from a Gulf sovereign wealth fund with a few billion to blow on soft power and take your plan to “revolutionise” the sport to the authorities and ask them to submit. Failing that, make them with your nicely sharpened blade.
The coup will naturally install yourself as god-emperor but you will mercifully find a place for the former powers, most of whom are just as hollow but after decades of lethargically occupying blazers, didn’t have the hunger to race to the only weaponry that represents true power, preferring to hide behind tradition. They can be left to adjudication and governance and keep their blazers, provided they shut up anytime they’re around someone who might hear them. Tennis and cycling, among others being pitched as the “LIV Golf of x”, are actively exploring this course of action1. The 2034 FIFA World Cup will be held in Saudi Arabia, proving that no one has learned anything from the last decade.
All will ask their fans, to the extent that the actual people who provide the revenue are considered at all, to make a choice: give up something that you shouldn’t have to, so as to maintain a moral compass, or swallow it whole and don’t think about how the sausage got made.
Substitute in “Saudi sports-washing” with “cavalier attitude to head injuries”, repeat the last paragraph, and that’s 2024. We could abstract these further into larger categories - capitalism, post-modernism, globalisation, late American Empire2 and whatever is going on in Silicon Valley - but these become less tangible, albeit no less powerful to our understanding. Notwithstanding, there are other outlets - trans people most frequently, but also widespread social atomisation and loneliness, the ongoing mental health repercussions of the pandemic and society, and don’t forget climate change! - that are a bit off my beat but no less representative of what’s happening in the wider confluence of events.
Or I could hand you over to the excellent Jonathan Liew for a better written, edited and more concise crash course through the lens of cricket:
So: you’re a tiny oil-rich state of less than a million people, with a huge Kremlin-backed dictator at your border rattling pots and pans. You need friends, fast. And above all you need to make a noise for yourself, get seen and heard in the corridors of power, give the investors of the world something they want. Enter cricket.
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The grace, the beauty of sports
Excuse me, sir, have you heard the good news about our lord and saviour, Gout Gout?
One of my Dad things to do at the moment is marvel that my kids are growing up where one of the biggest TV shows in the world, universally popular across their demographic3, is firmly set in their home town4. The Olympics will be here when they’re about 10 and a local lad is going to do the 100/200 double, provided we don’t kill him with the pressure over the next eight years. They’re going to grow up thinking that this is normal. This place was a sheep station not that long ago5.
Speaking of not normal, the last time a newsletter went out without Mondo Duplantis on it, it was March 2023. He’s broken the record again since the last newsletter. He’s ten centimetres clear of the next best ever and 20 clear of any of his current rivals, if that’s what you can call them.
Notes
There will be a second newsletter later in the week that is basically a bunch of links to the best stuff I read this year that would normally fill out this section.
I’m still writing at The Maroon Observer in the unlikely event you are subscribed here but not there
Feels like Christmas stuff came out about three or four weeks earlier than usual. Is this climate change?
I logged 860km of running (including four half marathons, a new calendar record) and over 4000km on the bike (best in a decade) this year, which I am telling you for no reason other I am a bit proud of myself, even if I fell short of my original goals of 1000 and 5000 respectively and didn’t get anywhere near a PB in a distance that matters to me. I should probably spend some of that time with other people.
In trying to predict outcomes of specific theatres of these conflicts, it is important to note which group of stakeholders holds the real power. This terrain is different in every sport. The clubs hold most of the power in the various football codes, the race organisers in cycling but power is less concentrated in the more individually oriented sports: F1 (FOM, drivers, teams and races organisers), tennis and golf (players, the slams, other professional tournament organisers), etc. The broadcasters will likely end up kingmaking by going with whatever they think will appeal most to the fans (i.e. provide best ROI on their ad inventory).
It clicked for me this year that people, including me, have been routinely confusing late capitalism with late America.
Bluey.
Brisbane.
1981.