Friday, 10 July 2009

Take away my breakaway?

As F1 teams (through FOTA) again aparrently threaten to walk away from the official FIA World Championship for the 2010 season, and as new Real Madrid President Florentino Perez breaks the cover of his next grand project - to work on creating a European football super-league, does this mean that the next decade of the 21st Century will be a period that changes sport forever? Will we see the most powerful organisations in sport starting to plan for their own individual futures, rather than a collective future, meaning that as we get well into the 21st Century, the ties to the 19th and 20th Century heritages of many sports will be severed? Will 2010 - 2019 become the breakaway decade in which the rich get richer and the rest are left to do what they can to survive? Has the balance of power in the world sport network finally and decisively shifted in favour of individual teams/clubs, and media corporations? Is 2010 therefore the tipping point, when we will wave goodbye to sport as we have known it for the last 100 years or so? If breakaway is to be the prevailing phenomenon over the next decade, what will sport look like in 2019? Are we heading for the large-scale corporatisation of sport, or is this an excessively negative view of what is going to happen? If these corporates do emerge and dominate, what will be left elsewhere? Will the rest of sport look something like a network of cottage industries and micro-breweries, populated by organisations and sports that retain some popularity but lack mass appeal? Perhaps this is what we have already? Could it be however that, given the history, organisation and effectiveness of many governing bodies, the repossession of sports by the clubs that are engaged in creating and delivering it is the best thing that can happen? In which case, would this mean that sport sees the market as being the most appropriate stimulus for organising and managing its activities? Will the market, rather than the central coordination of, say, a governing body, thus come to deliver the signals that determine what happens in sport? If the new era does therefore emerge, will it be characterised by an approximation of a completely free market in sport?

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