Posts filed under 'sport'
Learning to be a city
London Freewheel rolls down the Mall
Andrew Curry writes:
It was European Mobility Week last week, and London marked it with its second ‘Freewheel‘ event on Sunday. Quite a large area of the city centre (St James’ Park and the Embankment from Charing Cross to Tower Hill) was closed to motor vehicles; there were marshalled rides from feeder points around the city; and Sky Sports provided free hi-viz vests to anyone who wanted one. And during the course of the day around 50,000 cyclists turned out, helped by fine weather.
It brought to mind the idea that successful cities have to be both ‘magnets and glue’ (the phrase is Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s). Magnets are the events and buildings which make a city prominent; glue is what makes people stay there. The first is high profile, the second more about locality and liveability (good parks, good schools). The first tends towards the spectacular, the second towards the participatory.
What’s interesting is the way in which London has used cycling to promote both. There have been the magnet events such as the stages of the Tour of Britain and the Grand Depart of the Tour de France. Freewheel, in contrast, is glue - a social day out. But it turns out that a lot of the skills which are needed overlap. The roads closed off last Sunday were almost the same as for the first stage of the Tour of Britain earlier this month. The marshalling skills are similar.
As well as wanting to stage events such as this, cities have to learn how to do it. London has scaled up over time (the first time it closed off city centre roads for cycling it shut down a small area around Whitehall). It’s part of a successful pro-cycling strategy which has seen cyclist commuter numbers double in the capital over the last five years.
Freewheel photos (c) Peter Curry 2008
1 comment 26 September 2008
Buying viewers’ attention
Andrew Curry writes:
The combination of the FA Cup Final - the last for a while on the BBC - and the epically overhyped Champions’ League final on ITV sent me to some recent interesting data (above) from BMRB Sport. They measure both the total interested audience for sport on TV, and also a “passion index” which captures the quality of the audience, assessed by their level of interest in the sport. The passion index seems to me to be a reasonable proxy for ‘attention’ - that increasingly important, but often elusive, quality sought by traditional media owners.
Broadly, the passion index is higher for football, and doesn’t correlate strongly with overall audiences, which leads to the thought that commercial terrestrial broadcasters need both scale and passion to make their rights investment pay off, in terms of advertising and sponsorship revenues, whereas a public service broadcaster can justify its investment by the breadth of the audience. And with next season’s rights to Formula 1 moving to the BBC (ITV couldn’t afford both F1 and the FA Cup), the BBC’s sports properties, if you include the Premiership highlights on Match of the Day, now include five of the top seven sports by breadth of audience, but only one (those Premiership highlights again) by ‘quality’ or interest levels.
And there is some good news for the BBC here. According to BMRB, Formula 1 has climbed steadily in the popularity rankings over the last year, from seventh to fourth, on back of Lewis Hamilton’s successes.
Add comment 23 May 2008
What the Premiership learnt from Formula One
Andrew Curry writes:
I hope I’m not too late to note a fine article [not currently available on the Guardian's own site] by the Guardian’s Richard Williams on how England’s footballing Premiership has, in its plan for overseas league games, followed a global marketing blueprint first laid down by Formula One. Williams suggests the three steps to sporting franchise heaven go like this:
- Step One: Secure the commercial rights to the sport, including the right to sell broadcasting licences, income from which will dwarf the sale of tickets and perimeter advertising.
- Step Two: Use the television ratings to encourage the acquisition of teams by people more interested in global brands and markets than in the sport’s traditional audiences.
- Step Three: Clear out the traditional schedule to create new opportunities in new markets, if necessary by threatening to remove existing events completely.
Williams also suggests that there’s a fourth lesson that the Premiership’s Richard Scudamore has learnt as well:
“Saying the unsayable out loud is more than halfway to actually getting it done, as long as you have the money on your side and are prepared to take no prisoners.”
Given the money at stake, the current crowd of owners, and the track record of the Premiership over the last fifteen years, you wouldn’t bet against it pushing the plan through. But there are a couple of differences: formula one is still about individuals (we remember great drivers like Senna and Fangio), whereas football is about teams and their history. And football is far more rooted in place than motor racing ever was.
1 comment 15 February 2008
