By Eddie May
In a recent newsletter, Unofficial Partner asked the question ‘What’s the difference between sport and entertainment?’ and this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while amidst all the industry chat about how sport needs to become more of an entertainment proposition, how people don’t watch traditional sport any more, Gen Z has no attention span, will Baller League make it, etc…
From its very origins sport has always been a form of entertainment, or at least a form of distraction.
Think about the ancient Olympic Games or gladiators in the Roman Coliseum: a form of physical contest expressly designed to entertain or distract the masses and create heroes in the process.
Bread and Circuses (a decent name for an agency right there, if it’s not already taken).
The original football clubs in England were also often created by Victorian industrialists keen to provide the workers with a healthy physical outlet and something to occupy them on their day off (besides drinking and gambling, somewhat ironically).
So, sport has always been a form of entertainment, but is it (or should it be) more than that?
There’s no doubt that sport as a product needs to be entertaining, especially given the reality that we all have literally a whole world of other distraction in our pockets at all times, precisely calibrated to keep us fixated and scrolling.
So, entertaining, yes. But I do feel that if sport slides too far towards just being entertainment it risks losing an awful lot of its inherent value.
What do I mean by that?
In the last few years we’ve seen more and more new formats launched and designed to be more entertaining than ‘traditional sport’: TGL, Baller League, Icons Series, Grand Slam Track, The Hundred, LIV Golf etc. Often involving a fusion of sport with celebrities and influencers, in an attempt to appeal to the YouTube demographic.
I have no problem with any of these things and innovation/investment is always welcome. I can watch them and enjoy them, at least for a while. But my feeling is the only ones that will survive in the longer term are the ones that still have, at their core, the best athletes competing against each other for something meaningful (borrowing from Twenty First Group’s Quality/Jeopardy/Connection model).
I’ve quite enjoyed TGL, partly as a result of the novelty of the format and the technology, but also because it does feature a lot of the world’s best players and they seemed genuinely bothered about
winning the thing.
But if we lose that quality and jeopardy element, and move too far towards entertainment/novelty/gimmicks then there’s going to be no real connection, no real meaning. If the
audience doesn’t really care who wins and the whole thing ultimately doesn't ‘matter’ in the way that the best sport, at least in the moment, really does, then we have a problem. It creates very little incentive to watch the next time, or the time after that, let alone become a fully invested,
monetisable fan.
Which raises the question of how sustainable any of these new formats will be in the longer term? It takes years if not decades to build real fandom around a new team or league, so whoever is funding these start ups is likely to need very deep pockets indeed. But everything has to start somewhere
and many established sports don’t exactly have a sustainable commercial model, so fair play to anyone giving it a go.
A lot of this is done in an attempt to engage a younger audience, and all of the above may just be my own perspective as a 50 year old that could happily sit through five days of England v Australia or four rounds of The Masters. As a sample of one, my 14 year old son was a lot more interested in TGL than regular golf, and he was intrigued by Baller League last night (but hadn’t previously heard of it and couldn’t quite work out what it was for).
Looking at some GWI data, sport doesn’t inherently have a problem with younger audiences, at least going down to 16-24s. The drop off in interest tends to be among older cohorts, with one or two exceptions (golf, over 65s and live TV is a match made in heaven).
Where there is a clear trend - and this is hardly breaking news - is that younger audiences really don’t watch a lot of live TV, but head to the likes of YouTube instead. This will be even more pronounced for the current U16 generation.
At an individual event level, it’s a fairly similar picture, with most of the big global sports events doing relatively well with the younger age groups (except for golf, obvs). The Olympics and athletics definitely does have an age problem, so Michael Johnson is probably onto something.
While sport is one of the very few things that *could* draw a 16 year old to watch live on an old- fashioned linear TV channel, the instinct to create new YouTube-friendly properties and formats is the right one. Not necessarily to replace what we currently have, but to be additive to it, and to hopefully keep younger people engaged with sport.
But for long term success, no matter how many influencers and creators are involved and regardless of how much entertainment gloss we add to the product, I believe we need to retain sport’s magic formula of having the best in the world competing with each other and making people care about the outcome. Without that, it’s just a bit of fun, and we can get that anywhere.
Eddie May is a marketing and sponsorship strategy consultant in sport.