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    Is There Too Much Sport, or is it What People Want?

    Full On Fella Posted on

    There is barely a day in the calendar in which you won’t be able to turn on a sport channel and see some live sport taking place somewhere. That doesn’t just mean that you’ll be able to watch the Eskimo United team taking on a side made up of seals. Instead, we’re talking high-end sporting events that are happening almost every day, which will be seen as a good thing by a lot of sports fans.

    The problem is, there is a risk that such a huge amount of sport taking place might just be diluting the quality that we’re able to watch, but is that something that the majority of sports-lovers think is actually something they’d say is a problem?

    Some Sports Were Invented to Fill the Gap For Others

    If you’re talking about how much sport there is taking place at any given moment then it is important to acknowledge that some sports were actually invented in order to fill the time between others.

    In the case of professional football, for example, there is an argument that the only reason that it exists is that cricket teams were looking for something to do in the winter when they couldn’t play Test matches or even friendly games in the colder and wetter months. Rugby emerged from football when the two disciplines began to go their separate ways, meaning that it was always going to interfere with the days and times football would be played.

    In days gone by, people loved to watch as much sport as they could, largely because they were doing so in person. That is to say, you wouldn’t be able to see football, golf, cricket or tennis on the television, so you would need to get out of the house and go to your local clubs in order to see the games that were being played.

    That escape from home life was important for many people, which is why sports began to become so popular in the first place. Certainly during the formative years there was no real desire to see countless different sports taking place at every time of day and night, but that was the natural development.

    The Proliferation of Sports Channels Changed Everything

    If you want to get a sense of just why so much sport takes place nowadays, you need look no further than the proliferation of sports channels. At the start it was just Sky Sports, launching at the same time as the Premier League, the two products helped each other to go astronomical.

    Then it was decided that Sky Sports needed some competition, with countless different channels taking on the behemoth over the years. Nowadays we have Sky Sports, Amazon Sports, EuroSport and TNT Sport to name but a few. Sky Sports alone has a myriad of different channels, from Sky Sports Football to Sky Sports F1 and so on.

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    What all of that means is that there is a need for these channels to have as much as sport to show as they possibly can. It isn’t that the audience is demanding it so much as it is that an audience is being asked to pay large sums of money so something needs to be done to justify it.

    The thing that is done is that there is more and more sport, with football expanding, cricket offering different versions of itself and new races added to the F1 calendar. Next time you think there’s too much sport, remember that you’re encouraging the development of as much sport as possible the second you decide to pay your money for your sports subscriptions.

    We Love It

    There is a reality that we have to admit to in all of this, which is that we generally love it. When the tickets are announced for the English cricket team to play a Test match, they sell out almost immediately. The T20 and The Hundred were invented in order to attract people to the sport that might struggle with the five-day format, but they have since become popular enough to mean that we will turn up to watch them in person and tune in to watch at home in our thousands.

    If you look at football’s pre-season period 30 years ago, no one even knew who most teams were playing, but no friendlies sellout in different countries as well as here.

    Whether you’re looking at the PGA Tour or the Formula One, you will find organisations that know that they can sell tickets to fans no matter how many events they put on during a season. The Champions League format was changed ahead of the 2024-2025 season because UEFA knew that they could sell extra games, even if not to the traditional football fan.

    Hosting such events costs money, so football clubs, golf organisations and tennis professionals wouldn’t be willing to offer them if they didn’t know that the money spent in putting on a match wouldn’t be made back several fold by an adoring public.

    The Quality is Being Diluted

    The problem that virtually every single sport has to face up to is that more and more sport being played is slowly diluting the quality. The launch of LIV Golf was ostensibly done in order to help Saudi Arabia sports wash its reputation on the global scale, but it also caused a rift in the sport.

    Not only that but many of the players taking part on the LIV tour are not up to the standard necessary to take on a Major when they role around, on account of the fact that LIV Golf is only played over 54-holes rather than the traditional 72. Footballers have complained that they’re being asked to play too much and that something will have to give.

    Although the sports broadcasters need as much sport as they can find in order to keep people paying their bills, the reality is that adding more and more sport to the calendar will eventually start to turn people off.

    There is very little appeal in which a group of tired footballers run around a pitch, or seeing golfers unable to make it past the Cut in the Majors because they instead chose to help a murderous regime improve its reputation through sport. Tennis players getting injured will see many of the best ones missing the likes of Wimbledon. American sport is often criticised, but perhaps we need to take a leaf out of their book when it comes to more regimented seasons.

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