COMMENT | RICHARD GILLIS
Growing the game is a challenge in all sports, not just golf
The rate at which sports must evolve to become more popular creates tensions that are rarely easy to reconcile and often pits long-term participants against those who are new to that sport
EVERY sport’s governing body is asking the same question: How do we grow the game? Spoiler: It’s really difficult.
Not least because first you must define growth. What form does it take? Are we talking about participation? More people playing your sport.
Or are we talking about viewership? More people watching your sport.
There is often assumed to be a causal link between these two numbers: We watch and then we are inspired to go and play – let’s call that The Inspiration Strategy. But that’s not always true. In fact, statistically it’s seldom true.
Many, many more people watch football on TV than play the game. You could argue that rather than inspire people to play football, televised football encourages us to watch more TV.
This summer, billions of people around the world will be glued to their televisions and mobile phones to watch the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, cheering athletes from sports they will not think about for another four years.
How many will be inspired to go out and run? Recent history suggests it will be a very small number.
You’ll recall the core marketing message of the London 2012 Olympic Games was ‘Inspire a Generation’. When asked, 10 years later, only 13% of sports leaders thought the strategy had worked.
Billions of pounds has been spent on the inspiration story. Since 1996 (when the UK won just one gold medal), National Lottery funding has been directed upwards, away from grass roots facilities and participation schemes and toward elite athletes, funding high-performance institutes and expensive training camps, all in the aim of winning medals. It worked brilliantly. Team GB became a medal winning machine.
But: The participation of Olympic sports in the UK has remained stubbornly flat and downwards.
The Olympics is a fantastic party. I’m a massive fan. But to freight it with the job of creating ‘a healthier nation’ is unrealistic.
Or, more accurately, it’s unfair to expect an Olympic Games or Wimbledon or the Premier League to do all of the jobs required to ‘grow the game’, whatever that game happens to be.
There are many barriers to participation, many of which are common to most sports, and these barriers can be external and internal.
For example, when it comes to attracting the next generation, everyone is fighting TikTok, Netflix and Call of Duty – there are just far more things to do with our time than play tennis, football or even, whisper it, golf.
That’s before you get to the internal barriers, which again many sports struggle to overcome.
Cost, difficulty, culture; they’re the big ones.
Each can and are being tackled by smarter and harder-working people than me.
There is no one single roadmap to growth. But it can be helpful to review the success stories of the last 20years; sports initiatives that have bucked the market by growing participation.
What are they?
My list would include the following: Parkrun; Six-a-side football; Women’s football; CrossFit. Each has shown real growth in numbers. So what links them? There are a couple of answers, one obvious, one less so.
Let’s use Parkrun as our example. It was founded in Teddington by Paul Sinton-Hewitt in 2004, when he and 13 mates started a regular time trial around Bushy Park. He now runs the group that manages the growth of Parkrun around the world.
“Parkrun's simple concept should – and really can – exist in every town in the world," he says: "No-one should ever have to pay to go running in their community regularly, safely and for fun."
That’s why the activities are never more than 5km – as it's a distance that anyone can complete.
And, it’s why the format of Parkruns is so simple: register once, then turn up and take part wherever you want, whenever you want.
So, two of our three barriers to entry are removed – cost and difficulty. That leaves the third one: culture.
This is worth considering, because there’s something that links each of the growth sports properties I listed above: each were, initially at least, viewed as the enemy by the official governing body of their respective sports.
Famously, The FA, the governing body for football, banned the women’s game. And, decades later, tried to undermine the success of six-a-side, which grew rapidly via privately owned and run midweek leagues.
CrossFit was created by a Californian ex-Marine who posted a WOD (Workout of the Day) online every day. It went viral and disrupted the sleepy world of Olympic weightlifting, who saw it as ’not proper sport'.
Even the sainted Parkrun was viewed, initially at least, as the enemy by UK Athletics, the official governing body.
Why? Culture. Culture is just a word for ‘this is how we do things here’ and there is a divide that runs through every sport between conservatives and radicals, ‘the establishment’ and the barbarians at the gate, those who cherish the game’s core values and those who seek to make changes under the banner of ‘growing the game’.
Today, The FA’s current leadership wants everyone to play football, anywhere anyhow. Its mantra is ‘For All’.
The CEO of UK Athletics told me he wants to create a ‘Glastonbury of Athletics’, where people come to enjoy themselves while watching other people running and jumping and throwing.
Attitudes evolve. New ideas come to feel normal. Like me, you will have a view on what it is you love about golf, and what it is about the sport you want to preserve.
But it’s worth noting that what you prize as a core value might be seen by someone else as a barrier to their enjoyment.
The lesson from across sport is that culture is biggest determinant of success and failure, and if tackled, the past and the future can live side by side.
Richard Gillis hosts the Unofficial Partner sports business podcast. His new golf business series called Wedge Issues is out now.
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