Ed Warner: Fear of losing to the Poms may get Australian sport its extra A$2bn
As an English sports fan it’s always fun when others cite your nation as their greatest rivals when they wouldn’t make your own top three. Cricket aside, such is the case with Australia.
Last week a cry from Australia’s sporting hierarchy for more financial backing from politicians caught my eye. The need to beat the Poms remains visceral, it seems.
Trumpeting their performance at Birmingham 2022, Commonwealth Games Australia CEO Craig Phillips said: “The results speak for themselves – a finish atop the medal tally with 178 medals won and a win over our greatest rival England.”
The next Commonwealths are in Victoria in 2026; the Olympics arrive down under in 2032, with Brisbane hosting.
Australia can probably be credited with initiating the investment in home medal success that has been emulated by every major multi-games host since Sydney 2000. Cathy Freeman’s iconic 400m triumph has paid dividends for numerous other athletes on home soil since.
In the same week that Phillips called for more cash to boost their Victoria 2026 medal prospects, his counterpart at the Australian Olympic Committee made an even bolder ask, claiming a A$2bn shortfall in funding over the next 10 years.
“Australian sport will fall off a financial cliff,” said Matt Carroll. “Sports are fighting each other for a share of a cake that gets smaller.”
Many of Australia’s governing bodies are indeed financially stressed, as are so many worldwide. Covid dealt them a major blow, but the enduring threat is the essentially amateur nature of many sports.
It is only the Olympic juggernaut and politicians’ willingness to pursue success in the Games that gives them a veneer of professionalism. They will always be in need of government support if athletes are to be given the chance to train and compete full time – a prerequisite for success if your competitors are doing just that.
I’ve written before here about the real risk that France underperforms – in medal terms – at Paris 2024. Maybe that will be shrugged off in stereotypical Gallic fashion, but I somehow doubt it. Not if British athletes depart on Eurostar with a decent haul of medals.
Australia, however, has an altogether different level of expectations when its teams take to pitch, track or pool. A repeat of the fourth on the Sydney medal table would surely be a minimum acceptable finish in Brisbane. That’s the slot Great Britain filled in Tokyo, with Australia sixth.
I’m betting that A$2bn funding gap gets filled after a suitable period of political lobbying and wrangling.
Obsess to impress
An elite athlete reader of this column asks how I manage to keep across so many sports. The sad answer is an obsessive reading of a wide range of sports media – plus the fun of furious networking.
One website I value highly is insidethegames.biz, which alerted me to the Aussie begging bowl referenced above. I had a couple of feisty ding-dongs with its journalists in my UK Athletics days, but if you want detailed coverage of all things multi-games, especially Olympic sport, I recommend subscribing to its daily newsletter.
Peace for our time?
And so it begins. Wimbledon and the Lawn Tennis Association, pressured by the two elite tennis tours, have conceded the return of Russians and Belarusians.
All the players need do is sign “neutrality agreements” drafted with the help of the UK government. I heard the news and all I could think of was Neville Chamberlain’s infamous piece of paper.
Two tales of a city
Out west last week to spend the day at the Robins High Performance Centre with Phil Alexander, recently installed as Bristol City’s CEO after many years in the same role at Crystal Palace.
The centre has won a design award. It houses City’s men’s and women’s squads as well as all its academy teams in a modern, spacious facility in leafy surrounds. And hugely impressive it is too, right down to the anti-gravity treadmill and cryotherapy chamber.
Two takeaways as I drove home. Firstly, while much is made of the financial gap between Premier League and Championship, I’m increasingly of the view that English football’s real problem is the gulf between the top two tiers and the rest.
City have the infrastructure to stand alongside a string of current top flight sides, as do many of their Championship peers. The re-cutting of the game’s TV monies, currently being thrashed out between the PL and EFL, may only reinforce the trend towards a two division elite that pulls away from those below.
Linked to this is the confirmatory importance of enlightened, wealthy ownership – in Bristol City’s case from a businessman with a multi-sport vision embracing rugby and basketball as well as football.
Just compare the contrasting fortunes of City and Bristol Rovers. It is 22 years since they last met in a league derby (in what is now League One). While City have since made the Championship playoffs, Rovers even spent one season down in the National League.
Rovers have been owned by Wael al-Qadi since 2016. A concerted drive to escape League One would test the depth of the Jordanian’s pockets.
In the two decades prior to that last league derby, the clubs were in the same echelon of English football in 15 seasons. Where once their rivalry was typically played out in the league every year, now it comes down to the luck of a cup draw.
Logan Roy’s kids are united
Fans of Succession will doubtless have enjoyed the opening episode of the new and final season which culminated in a bidding war between tycoon Logan Roy and his estranged children. The takeover price of a media business soared from $6bn to $10bn in TV minutes as greed and egos flamed.
How the Glazers must hope their bankers can engender the same abandonment of logic among the rival bidders for Manchester United. None is yet said to have met the reported asking price for the club of £6bn.
Conventional wisdom is that only trophy asset hunters could justify such a valuation to themselves. For reference, Man Utd’s current market capitalisation on the NYSE is just £3bn, which speaks to market scepticism about the likely eventual outcome.
I wouldn’t rule out a last minute frenzy just yet, though, as it is possible to build some financial scaffolding to support the high asking price. Much comes down to the ways in which major sporting franchises will engage with global fanbases in future. The digital age is still very much in its infancy – certainly when it comes to monetising fandom.
Currently, the disparity between enormous social media followings and actual club revenues is cited as a failing of the football industry, and often dismissed as hard evidence that brand awareness can’t be turned into cash.
But what if, in time, more sophisticated product offerings and marketing techniques prove that this disparity is actually a genuinely exploitable opportunity? What price then for a club whose name is on the lips of Asian taxi drivers, African kids and America’s soccer moms and dads?
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes at sportinc.substack.com