Sovereign Series reveals the ignorance of business in sport

General / Andrew Hughes / 04 July 2008 / Leave a Comment

Establishing a new competition takes a long time, says Andrew Hughes

In recent years, the ethos of business has crept over sport like blanket weed. Whether it is the Premier League dabbling with playing fixtures abroad or the ECB taking an axe to the county championship, sport these days seems to be about grabbing as much cash as you can in the short term, whilst uttering pious words to suggest you are doing it for the good of the game.

Racing is no stranger to the cold dead hand of business culture so the latest proposals from the racecourses via their television channel, RUK, should not come as a surprise. The Sovereign Series is a concept as pointless as it is flawed. In order to give 'structure' to the flat season, ten Group One races will be lassoed together into a fictitious series, with points for wins and a hefty pile of cash to connections of the horse that scores the most points.

You see, business types don't like the way our flat season is laid out. It doesn't make marketing sense. If only there were some kind of order to it, they complain, then people would flock to the sport in droves. Now I don't know about you, but when I ask non-racing folk why they don't like the sport, they tend to talk about such things as cruelty to animals, corruption, tweedy elitism and John McCririck. The lack of a convincing 'promotional narrative' tends not to come up.

Of course, it is perfectly true that the flat racing season is illogical. That's part of its charm. Guineas weekend, the May meetings, Epsom, Ascot, Goodwood: each is inextricably entwined with a certain time of year, a peak of racing excellence that should be marketed as a stand alone event, a piece of our sporting heritage. They don't need dressing up with gimmicks.

And anyway, how seriously can we take a quest to find the season's best horse that excludes fillies, sprinters and stayers? Or a competition that encompasses the Lockinge, whilst omitting such illustrious contests as the Queen Anne, the Coronation Cup, the St Leger? To make the racing calendar fit the demands of this arbitrary series, meetings will have to be moved, midweek races switched to Saturdays and to what purpose? Why would non-racing folk who have remained immune to the charms of Derby Day and Royal Ascot be seduced by the Sovereign Series?

Simon Bazalgette, executive chairman of RUK, is convinced that they will. His 'vision' is that within five years the Sovereign Series will rival the likes of Wimbledon and the British Open. This reveals a businessman's complete ignorance about what makes a successful sporting event. Establishing a new competition is not like launching a new television programme or a chain of fast food outlets. It takes time. A long time. How many decades was it before Wimbledon and the Open became established in the public affections?

Bazalgette and his cronies might do better to consider the fate of the Emirates International Series, a similar scheme conceived to incorporate some of the world's racing events. It was scrapped in 2005 due to a lack of public interest that meant Emirates Airlines could no longer justify their investment.

And the Sovereign Series is likely to face a similar fate. Funding is expected to come entirely from television revenue. The assumption is that terrestrial channels will be desperate to bid for this event come contract renewal time in 2009. But that is quite an assumption. Channel Four's continued racing coverage is only sustained by sponsorship from within the racing world. The BBC already pumps in a seven-figure sum and is under constant pressure to justify how it spends the licence fee. Channel 5 and ITV have shown no interest in the sport. If racing makes the Sovereign Series an inseparable part of the TV rights package with a hefty price tag attached, who's to say that any terrestrial channel will want to bid at all? The end result could be that racing slips quietly from our screens and into the same obscurity as boxing. And that's quite a vision, isn't it.