December 2008 'First Quarterly'

Blankers-Koen and Jumpers for Goal Posts versus Big Bucks and The Cowardly Sponsor


Our decision to leave England for Holland had much to do with money. A few years earlier, consumer groups had coined the phrase ‘rip-off Britain’. We were thoroughly sick of being fleeced and it gave us some comfort to think that the injustice of paying more for products than in other rich countries had been formally identified and labelled. Things like cars, electrical goods and houses were and still are more expensive in Britain than in other EU countries.
Now I’m less pissed off. The pricing issue was not so simple as the emotive slogan portrayed it to be. Factors like the strong pound and high fixed costs played their role and away from London I feel things less personally. It has been more than seven years since we left, so the rows with mini cab firms and angry exchanges of letters with estate agents and property managers are so much water under the bridge that they’ve flowed into the sea of Bigger Picture.
Now there is a real chance the UK is going to be very hard hit by recession in the wake of the credit crisis. Perhaps London should host a second ‘Austerity Olympics’. The next games may cost 10 billion pounds. That is a good deal less than the bill for Beijing but many would argue it is still unreasonably high given the current state of the economy. The 1948 London Olympics were held during the post-World War II period of national austerity, with rationing still in effect and many areas of the city still bombed-out ruins. Only £760,000 were spent on the games, which were, against the odds, hugely successful. Competitors were taken to venues on buses and underground trains, American athletes shared food with their British counterparts and some of the latter even sewed their own kit. A spirit of fair play and shared values prevailed and Dutch housewife and mother Fanny Blankers-Koen became a legend for her time.
With each games there is so much at stake; there are the corporate interests, there is the legacy, the stimulus to the economy and of course the sporting performances and national pride. Each Olympics has to exceed the last one, be bigger, grander and more inspiring. Yet the Olympic Games are much like Christmas; both are magnificent, pompous and in thrall to commerce. What’s more, despite the profits made by some, they both lead to debt. With the exception of Los Angeles, no Olympic Games has ever made money. Christmas leaves millions of people in the red.
Ok, but at the heart of both, lies something pure, doesn’t it? For Christmas, goodwill and giving, for the Olympics, brotherhood and the spirit of competition. Isn’t that what counts? Well, the purity of Christmas has long been sullied and sport lost its innocence ages ago. Take football. At one end of the spectrum is park football (with jumpers for goalposts, naturally). At the other, there is corporate football, where millions are made from TV rights, ticket prices and replica team shirts. Currently, the average price of a season ticket in the UK premier division is just over £600. A season’s worth of Arsenal matches costs £1,355. We’re back in ‘rip-off Britain’ territory.
Money needs sport and sport needs money. Schools need money for equipment and facilities. Athletes need financial support and sponsoring. Grassroots schemes to get inner city kids involved in sport need big injections of cash. More of the profits made in professional sport should go towards these worthy recipients, rather than line the pockets of shareholders.
Football is ailing but not terminally ill; it has just been rather spoilt. However, in 1999, a group of exasperated English supporters, fed up with the commercialization of the sport, pronounced football ‘dead’ and laid a wreath to commemorate the event. A similar sporting demise was announced by newspaper France Soir at the height of the Michael Rasmussen scandal in 2007. The paper regretfully announced the death at age 104 years, and following a long illness, of the Tour de France. A succession of doping scandals had taken its toll on the Tour. Rasmussen was never found guilty of doping and his sponsors Rabobank dumped him on less convincing gounds, because he had allegedly lied about his whereabouts at the time of a training session. At the time, I lost respect for Rabobank. I thought they were cowardly and should have stuck by their man. Obviously, the bank was making an understandable, hard-headed business decision. The Danish cyclist was clearly going to damage their brand. For my part, I felt retroactively vindicated in our decision to ditch the bank for another mortgage provider earlier that year, though I guess the eternally smug Rabobank won’t miss me much.