THE acquisition of Britain’s Manchester City Football club by the Abu Dhabi United Group for a rumored $58 million and the immediate purchase for virtually the same sum from Real Madrid of the Brazilian star forward Robinho is a startling coup for another overseas investor in the lucrative business of top-flight British football teams.
Manchester City’s new Arab owners promise to match the sort of investment Russian billionaire Aaron Abramovich has made in Chelsea where, in his first year alone, he spent $268 million building a super team. For football fans around the world, this landmark Arab sport investment heralds exciting new times. Similarly the Indian Cricket League (ICL) which has just completed its first season and the rival, officially sanctioned Indian Premier League (IPL) which starts up next April, promise to bring major money to the Twenty20 game and with it, millions more spectators via global television deals.
However, while it is right to celebrate this surge of investment into sport, it is also appropriate to remember that whatever the sums involved, sport is not and can never be, of itself a business. The beauty of sport is that it matches the skill and physical excellence of its participants against each other, whether on the pitch, the athletics track or wherever the contests are staged. Now money can pay for better training, preparation and venues, but it cannot create sporting prowess as such. That comes only from the sportsmen working individually or as a team.
And it is axiomatic that in every sporting contest that there will only ever be one winner. For the losers and their supporters, there will inevitably be disappointment or heartbreak. Yet all too often fans overlook the excellence of the performance, even on the losing side. It has long been one of the tenets of cricket, in its five-day test form, arguably the most engaging and fascinating of competitions, that it is not the winning that matters but the taking part. No cricket team ever takes the field expecting to lose. But certainly at the amateur level, there is still much pleasure to be gained from good rather than simply winning cricket.
That fundamental approach to sport for its own sake does not automatically sit well with the great sums that are being invested in it. The danger is, as match-fixing scandals in cricket and athletics cheats taking performance-enhancing drugs have demonstrated, that big money will impose huge, extra pressures on both players and their managers. In order to obtain a return on their investment, wealthy people who pour money into sporting teams may be tempted to overlook basic sporting values and impose priorities aimed at unrealistic success, whatever the cost. Many investors of course, not least in British football, have made their financial commitment as much for the love of the sport as for any hope of return. But if sport is reduced merely to money, the clear danger is that it will itself lose its important values, not the least of which is the all-important quality of good sportsmanship.
