Sport vs business

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Sport vs business

Written by Kate Walker

Thursday, 02 September 2010 16:52

One of the most popular topics in Formula 1 is the sport versus business debate.

Is motorsport a battle of excellence played out in front of fans around the world, or is it a global marketing opportunity for sponsors and car manufacturers? Or is it both?

For some reason, articles on this topic often assume that Formula 1 is the only sport-cum-business. But these days, nearly all sport is business. As soon as athletes, agents, and promoters start raking in the mega bucks – something that applies to the top tier in sports as diverse as basketball, golf, and tennis – sport becomes a business.

The current match-fixing scandal in cricket is proof of how low we’ve sunk. A sport that was once a byword for the halcyon days of village life, with whites worn on the green as a genteel crowd sipped tea and nibbled on crustless sandwiches has now become one of the greatest money spinners in the Commonwealth. And where money goes, immoral behaviour is sure to follow.

But there was always money in motor racing.

Fans like to look back on the post-war era as the golden days of the privateers, when have-a-go heroes could leap behind the wheel of a nippy sportscar and come away world champion. But that is a view of the past obscured by the world’s thickest rose-tinted spectacles.

Racing was always a rich man’s sport, whether that rich man was behind the wheel of the car or sponsoring the driver. Motorsport is not a game played with cans in back alleys, or on sports fields at the weekend. It is a sport that requires investment from the outset, and then regular injections of cash for spare parts, new rubber, and upgraded pieces of kit.

As the technology behind motor racing improved, the costs increased yet further. Where designing a race car once involved sketching out chalk plans on a garage floor, the process now involves computer modeling, wind tunnels, and the salary of a top aerodynamicist or two. And that’s where the businessmen come in.

While it would be nice to think that everyone involved in motorsport does it for reasons of passion alone, there are still bills to pay and mouths to feed. And according to my bank manager, F1 enthusiasm is not an acceptable form of currency. So sponsors are needed, to pay for the drivers, the cars, and the swanky motorhomes, which are themselves needed to attract more sponsors. It’s a vicious circle.

Sponsorship is hardly a new thing in sport. Football teams compete covered in logos, athletics events are brought to you by someone with trackside advertising, and stadia around the world are named for the corporate behemoths who pay for them. Money makes the world of sport go round.

But while this is seen as par for the course in other sports, fans of motor racing often see the business side of Formula 1 as dirty. It is this perception, this artificial segregation, that leads to the sport vs business debate – all that is good and clean is seen as the sport, while anything else is damned as ‘business’.

Ferrari’s team orders scandal in Hockenheim was a business decision, not a sporting one. Piquet Jr’s infamous Singapore crash came down to a matter of business – the team needed to deliver a win to keep the sponsors and money men back home happy so that the funds would keep rolling in. Anything immoral – or borderline moral – that happens on track is immediately tarred with the brush of business, not sport.

This is a convenient get-out clause for all concerned. After all, by separating the sport from the business, dirty things can happen in the name of business while the sport emerges unscathed. Fans can celebrate the purity of the sport, while the money men get rich off the business. All is sunshine and roses, until the competing interests collide.

But nothing in life is pure good or pure evil, just as nothing in F1 is pure business or pure sport. To assume that sport is entirely unsullied by business interests is wonderfully naïve, but the flip side of that coin is that only an extreme cynic would see business interests influencing all aspects of our beloved sport.

Business and sport are intertwined, symbiotic. There is no versus, only an extremely complicated balancing act. After all, business and sport have much in common – to succeed in either, one must have a sharply honed competitive instinct and the desire to win; one must be able to both work in a team and lead that team when necessary; one must be experienced and prepared enough to be capable of making split-second decisions under pressure; finally, one must be able to win, lose, and start all over again if necessary.

Sport versus business? Sport is business. Kate Walker Girlracer magazine

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