A long time ago, I used to teach at the University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center and as part of my academic packet, I would give students interesting articles to read. One of those assignments involved dissecting a 1991 Sports Illustrated article by William Oscar Johnson that attempted to predict the 2001 sports landscape at the dawn of the new century. Johnson had fun creating the future and cleverly suggested that by 2001 American TV networks would have stopped televising live sport, the NFL would feature 40 teams (including 10 overseas) and the USA Today High School Final Four would be more important than the NCAA’s Final Four.
The point of this column isn’t to mock Johnson for getting anything wrong but to acknowledge the difficulty any of us face in predicting societal change and fan sport consumption. It’s not easy. In fact, I’ve long told my classes at Syracuse the live TV sports rights fee market will surely correct, football concussions are bad for ratings, baseball is dying on the vine and esports is the future.
Yup, I’ve been wrong almost every time. Rights fees keep going up, the NFL’s ratings remain strong, MLB has issues but just gave Mike Trout $425m over 12 years and esports is increasingly meaningful but nowhere near replacing the NBA as live nightly sport entertainment.
So how should we think about the future? Executives are paid large sums to forecast when and how much to invest. Or who to partner with on sponsorships and supplies. Or when to expand based on long-term sustainability and investor profitability demands. The future is their livelihood.
To that end, it seems logical suggesting every commissioner, team owner, network chief, super-agent, sponsor chief executive and mega-event promoter must excel at “skating to where the puck is going”. But maybe they’re not. Maybe they are so busy with the present, there’s little time for assessing the future.
It reminds me of the Moneyball video clip (below) featuring Brad Pitt playing Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane during the moment when he says to his old-school scouts, “you guys are talking like this is business as usual. It’s not.” A moment later, when his chief scout counters by snidely commenting they’re trying to solve a problem, Pitt’s Beane says, “You’re not even looking at the problem.”
For Americans, playing in a strong economy, the temptation is surely real to believe there are no problems. And if prognosticators like myself are often wrong with our seat-of-the-pants predictions, perhaps the people in charge will be just fine. I doubt it…but maybe.
Still, it’s worth mentioning that stock markets frequently correct. Bears replace bulls. That when the music stops, less nimble players are left without chairs. I can’t tell you the future. Or even make great predictions. But I sense global technology and digital data management are about to catch a few folks napping.
What that means for people in charge of sports properties and sponsor investments is an ongoing need to focus on tomorrow and make sure current financial models will weather a few major upheavals.
By 2021, we’ll have witnessed the technologically-superior Tokyo Summer Olympics and the renewal of the NFL’s broadcast packages. The Americans will have held a Presidential election. Global warming will have brought on a new wave of tragedies.
Hoping sports (as a business) will remain constant is fine. But if I were you, I’d hire a good analyst to read your tea leaves. The past and present are already gone. The future is all you have left.