I don't know what compels writers to serve up best and worst lists, and I'm not sure what causes readers to eat them up. But I do know the appropriate season for lists is the end of one year or the beginning of the next. So my resolution is to stop chewing on causes and compulsions and to serve up a post-holiday spread as food for thought.
Here's my list of the most important sports-business issues. They are new episodes in the continuing drama of a thriving industry, and will have a huge impact in the coming year. So let's work backwards through the list.
5) Turmoil in college sports: The NCAA started the year with a new president and the promise of a re-energized future. But the NCAA, like the rest of us, became horrified bystanders in a year of college sports dominated by scandal and greed. The headlines screeched of lies, cheating, gambling, amoral conduct and criminal behavior. And that was just the coaches. Then came the backstabbing, commercial power plays and lawsuits resulting from conference realignment. The final irony was a split national football championship at a time that the only redeeming value of the highly criticized BCS was to give us a unified champion.
Pro and amateur sports are inexorably linked in public image and in the marketplace. Saturday heroes become Sunday heroes, and we don't like our heroes tainted. So what's bad for college sports is bad for all sports.
4) Action sports: There is a pervasive snobbery that favors team sports of the stick-and-ball variety. I wrote about it years ago in an early suggestion that NASCAR had taken its place among our top sports. While the industry has reluctantly accepted that and now openly steals ideas from NASCAR, it ignores action sports, where today's thievery should take place.
Action sports marries athletic skill to pure entertainment. Promoters don't need scoring and traditional competition to sell tickets. They use popular music and stage extravaganzas to deliver an ever-growing audience of the demographic that sponsors crave. There is much established sports can learn from newer sports.
3) Television fragmentation: Too many choices, too little time. That issue has dogged the industry for a decade. Ratings slip as choices increase. Until now, the erosion in eyeballs has been a notable phenomenon but not a financial one. But as contracts come up for renewal, rights-fee increases won't match those of the last decade. This, of course, presents challenges for teams and leagues whose margins also have decreased over that decade. Tomorrow's victories will belong to those who maximize revenue from targeted audiences.
2) Not recession-proof: Yesterday's wisdom held that sports provided an escape in times of national distress like wars and recessions. Consequently, the national passion for sports and the diversion it provided made sports a relatively inexpensive way for the nation to forget its woes. But with the increase of corporate involvement, sports no longer exists independent of Wall Street and Madison Avenue. While sponsors' dollars are not the largest source of team and league revenue, they often make the difference between red ink or black. In 2003 we found that when the economy has a cold, the sports industry gets the sniffles.
1) Maturing cable industry: When an emerging cable industry hungered for programming that would drive subscriptions, sports delivered. Now that the entire country is wired and most viewers have made their cable choices, the industry doesn't find sports nearly as valuable. It's an oversimplification to say that the luster is off regional sports networks and that cable maturation is driving leagues to start their own networks. But the sales of the Angels, Hawks, Thrashers and Dodgers were all related to a cable industry that finds less value in sports. And in the absence of eager cable bidders, franchise equity is taking a hit.
John Genzale (jgenzale@nyc.rr.com) is founding editor of SportsBusiness Journal.
