03-29-2024, 10:01 AM
I agree, but whilst also maintaining that some sports drift too far away from the sports side of it to get closer to the entertainment. There are sports that need sexing up to be appealing to the masses, sports that are hugely enjoyable to play in but not that great to watch, which need to do more. But there are others that having been appealing to the masses for decades, or even over a century, that just don't need to do it.
Take football (soccer) for example. It's been huge in Europe since the 1800s, along with the traffic, it's the go-to topic of conversation in England when two male strangers meet. Millions of people instinctively think you're a bit weird if you say "I don't like football". And yet they won't just leave it alone. They keep refusing to just let it be a sport, it's now all about brands and corporate entities whoring themselves out to billionaires so that they can be the team who pays the highest wages and therefore win the most trophies. It's in the governing bodies gifts to stop all that, but they won't, because they want it to happen. Rich clubs paying the most money attract the biggest name player which attract the bigger audiences. And it's not the English audiences they are after, they've got them sewn up, they're after the foreign markets. But then that just ruins the domestic leagues in those countries. The English Premier League is more popular in some countries than the country's own league.
Just bin it all off, introduce a salary cap, make following the sport cheaper and who cares if people in Estonia go back to watching Estonia football, or if people in Lagos, Nigeria stop wearing Man Utd and Liverpool shirts? It didn't matter in the 20th century, it shouldn't matter now.
Take football (soccer) for example. It's been huge in Europe since the 1800s, along with the traffic, it's the go-to topic of conversation in England when two male strangers meet. Millions of people instinctively think you're a bit weird if you say "I don't like football". And yet they won't just leave it alone. They keep refusing to just let it be a sport, it's now all about brands and corporate entities whoring themselves out to billionaires so that they can be the team who pays the highest wages and therefore win the most trophies. It's in the governing bodies gifts to stop all that, but they won't, because they want it to happen. Rich clubs paying the most money attract the biggest name player which attract the bigger audiences. And it's not the English audiences they are after, they've got them sewn up, they're after the foreign markets. But then that just ruins the domestic leagues in those countries. The English Premier League is more popular in some countries than the country's own league.
Just bin it all off, introduce a salary cap, make following the sport cheaper and who cares if people in Estonia go back to watching Estonia football, or if people in Lagos, Nigeria stop wearing Man Utd and Liverpool shirts? It didn't matter in the 20th century, it shouldn't matter now.