Sport Spent 2020 Discovering It Was a Media Business
The year removed the crowd and left the cameras. What remained still generated most of the money — and that fact will shape governance decisions for a decade.
Photograph: Federico Candoni · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Every industry has a story it tells about itself, and sport’s has been unusually consistent: the game belongs to the people who watch it in person, and everything else — television, sponsorship, merchandising — is a secondary trade built on that foundation. It has been a good story. It has also, for at least twenty years, been factually wrong, and 2020 is the year the gap became impossible to paper over.
When the crowds were removed, the competitions continued. The broadcasts went out. The sponsors activated, awkwardly but effectively. The revenue arrived, reduced but not transformed. And the supporters who had been told for a century that they were the essential element discovered that the product could be manufactured, distributed and monetised without them in the building.
What the proof enables
It would be comforting to treat this as a temporary distortion. It will not be treated that way by anyone making strategic decisions. A structural argument that could previously only be made hypothetically has now been demonstrated empirically: the marginal supporter in the stadium is not, in strict revenue terms, load-bearing.
That demonstration does not merely inform future decisions. It removes a defence. For decades, proposals that would have damaged the matchgoing experience — fixtures moved to accommodate distant time zones, ticket allocations reduced for travelling support, competition formats reshaped for broadcast convenience — could be resisted on commercial as well as cultural grounds. One could argue that a hollowed-out atmosphere would eventually degrade the televised product and therefore the revenue.
The crowd’s commercial defence has been removed. What remains is a cultural argument, and cultural arguments lose.Cordelia Bellweather
The synthesised tell
There is a detail from this year that captures the position precisely. Faced with empty stadiums, broadcasters did not transmit the silence. They generated a crowd — sampled, layered, triggered by an operator — and audiences preferred it to the real thing. The atmosphere was reproduced as a production element, and the reproduction tested better than the original.
One can take that as a charming technical footnote. I would take it as the year’s central fact. The supporter’s contribution to the broadcast product has been unbundled from the supporter, and it turns out to be reproducible. Whatever remains of the case for protecting matchgoing interests will have to be made without appealing to the revenue, because the revenue no longer requires it.
Where power settles
If the product is fundamentally a media product, then the parties with leverage are the ones that control distribution and the ones that control the intellectual property. Everyone else — supporters, host cities, smaller clubs whose participation supplies competitive texture rather than audience — occupies a weaker position than the rhetoric of the sport suggests.
This is not a prediction of collapse. Media businesses can be excellent businesses and sport will remain one. But media businesses are governed differently from civic institutions. They optimise for distribution, they consolidate toward the assets with the largest audiences, and they treat the parts of the operation that do not contribute directly to revenue as costs to be managed. Anyone who has watched what happened to regional newspapers knows the shape of this.
The argument that has to be made now
The task for the next decade is to construct a defence of matchgoing that does not rest on a commercial claim that has now been falsified. That means being honest: protecting the crowd is a choice about what the sport is for, not a revenue optimisation. It is a decision to accept slightly less money in exchange for something the balance sheet cannot record.
Institutions make that trade all the time, when they are governed by people who believe they are custodians rather than operators. The question 2020 has posed, and not answered, is how many such people remain in the rooms where these decisions are taken.