One thing to start: The FT holds its third annual Business of Football Summit on February 17-18. Next year’s virtual event features Manchester United striker and food poverty campaigner Marcus Rashford, Fifa general secretary Fatma Samoura, player super-agent Jonathan Barnett, and many more. Check out the speakers and agenda here.
In a bumper final edition of Scoreboard this year, we want to share the best of our coverage in 2020 with plenty of stories to keep you busy over the festive period. We will be taking a two-week break, returning on January 9 and with huge plans for 2021. Thank you for reading.
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1. Coronavirus decimated the global sports industry
The pandemic shuttered global sport. North America’s National Basketball Association, Europe’s football leagues and the Indian Premier League cricket tournament were postponed during spring lockdowns. The Wimbledon tennis championships was among the big events to be cancelled altogether.
Even as the action returned, matches were played in front of empty or partially full stadiums. Broadcasters and sponsors demanded rebates due to lost matches. Even if a vaccine leads to a return to normality in 2021, sports groups still have huge revenue shortfalls to plug. The financial crisis will shake the sports industry for years to come.
Go deeper with the FT’s Big Read on how the pandemic hit global sport here.
2. The pandemic crushed Shinzo Abe’s Olympic dreams
The Covid-19 pandemic didn’t merely force the unprecedented postponement of the Tokyo Olympics: it threatened the very economic legacy of now-retired Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe himself.
For an ageing Japan, the Games were “a national act of economic messaging” fuelling growth. With Tokyo 2020 now tentatively scheduled for 2021, corporate backers pouring $3.1bn into the most heavily-sponsored Games ever are crossing their fingers for a return on their investment.
Go deeper with the FT Big Read on how coronavirus crashed Japan’s Olympic party here.
3. The growing financialisation of football
Europe’s top football leagues need new liquidity due to the pandemic. Italy’s Serie A, Germany’s Bundesliga and Spain’s La Liga are engaged in talks on potential deals with private equity groups such as CVC Capital Partners.
The financial crisis also explains why some of the continent’s biggest clubs want to launch a breakaway “super league”. That move is driven by institutional investors, particularly from the US, seeking financial returns over emotional ones. Even if reform of the elite Champions League tournament is the likelier outcome, the endgame is the same: more money-spinning ties between heavyweight sides.
Go deeper with the Big Read on European football’s super league talks here.
4. Naomi Osaka, Black Lives Matter and sport got political
Activism by athletes has existed for decades but 2020 was among the most impactful years for sports stars affecting change. Hastened by police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, athletes from the NBA and NFL helped the Black Lives Matter movement go global.
The protests by tennis player Naomi Osaka caused a ripple effect through the sports marketing industry from New York to Tokyo. And staffers at Nike and Adidas also held their respective employers’ feet to the fire on diversity shortcomings.
Go deeper with the Big Read on sport, politics and Naomi Osaka’s value in speaking out here.
5. Disney and sport’s streaming future
After months of virtually no games played live, sports crowded television schedules during autumn as networks scrambled to make up for their losses. This laid bare a conundrum facing the global sports business: as entertainment moves online, what will happen to live sports?
Disney owns ESPN, the biggest sports channel in the US. The world’s largest media company has pulled off a feat unlike any other traditional media group by convincing Wall Street that it will still be dominant in a Netflix world. But ESPN, which years ago made up half of Disney’s profits, remains largely tethered to cable television, a dying format.
Read a deep dive on Disney’s plans for ESPN and other channels here.
6. Baseball’s takeover saga: Steve Cohen acquired the New York Mets
In a stroke of irony, the New York Mets — a baseball club synonymous with misery — was the recipient of the greatest good fortune in 2020. After months of bidding in the year’s highest-profile club transaction, hedge fund titan Steve Cohen paid a North American record $2.4bn for the Amazins.
The deal symbolised the enduring appeal of big city clubs, as well as the scarcity of deep-pocketed suitors with sufficient liquidity to buy franchises at modern valuations.
Read a deep dive into the New York A-listers who chased the Mets here.
7. The problem of elite pay in tennis
Serena Williams and Roger Federer are among the richest athletes on Earth. But for the vast majority of tennis players below them, the prize money earned on an expensive international tour is not enough to make ends meet.
A quarter of professional female players make less than $25,000 a year, while a quarter of male players make less than $40,000. This doesn’t factor in costs like travel, coaching, equipment, or the devastating financial hit of an injury. A larger rethink of the sport’s inequalities is required.
Read the data analysis of tennis player pay here.
8. A culture war at cricket’s most exclusive club
Marylebone Cricket Club is the 233-year-old institution that runs Lord’s, the London venue known as the “Home of Cricket”. To plug the revenue shortfall created by the pandemic, MCC allowed some to pay £45,000 to jump its 29-year waiting list to join the club. Members gain the privilege of watching England test matches from the ornate Lord’s pavilion.
The decision sparked a culture war within the club’s mainly white, old and privately-educated membership. The divide is between the super-rich and the merely affluent, revealing how societal inequalities have shaken one of sport’s grandest institutions.
Read the full story on the battle inside MCC here.
9. The crisis in US collegiate sports
US college sports watchers expected this year to be transformational for the more than $8bn industry. But they couldn’t have predicted just how much.
The pandemic cancelled the National Collegiate Athletic Association‘s overwhelming revenue driver, the March Madness basketball tournament, leaving the governing body and member universities scrambling, just as plans to reconfigure amateurism got under way. January 2021 is the self-imposed deadline for “name, image, and likeness” reforms, for which we’ll be watching.
Read our deep dive into the financial troubles at US collegiate sports programmes here.
10. Wenger, Rodchenkov and Hearn — the best FT sports interviews
Throughout the year, we profiled some of the biggest names in sport. FT journalists had lunch with; Marcus Rashford, the footballer turned scourge of the UK government; Grigory Rodchenkov, mastermind-turned-whistleblower of Russia’s state sponsored doping regime; Moeen Ali, the cricketer whose Islamic faith makes him an outsized figure in British sport; and Eddie Hearn, the biggest promoter in boxing.
Also, FT Weekend Magazine scored interviews with; Arsène Wenger on life after Arsenal, Frankie de Jong, FC Barcelona’s new heir to Johann Cruff; Max Whitlock, Britain’s greatest gymnast; Gary Lineker, the Match of the Day presenter reflecting on his playing days; Sabrina Ionescu, the breakout star of women’s basketball, and surfer Maya Gabeira on riding the wave of a lifetime.
Enjoy reading them over the holiday season.
This week’s highlights
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Russia’s 4-year ban from global sports was halved. While it means the country’s flag and anthem are banned from the next two Olympics and the 2022 football World Cup, clean sport campaigners were angry that the word “Russia” can still feature on uniforms of the nation’s athletes who can still compete as neutrals.
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Another huge story this year was the collapse of a Saudi-led £300m takeover of Newcastle United. This week, the English football club cast a futile vote against the Premier League’s $500m new TV deal with beIN Sports, the Qatari broadcaster which lobbied against the Saudi-Newcastle takeover on piracy grounds.
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Chemicals group Ineos owned by billionaire Jim Ratcliffe has become a joint owner of the Mercedes F1 team, alongside German carmakers Daimler and team principal Toto Wolff. Financial terms for the transaction were not disclosed.
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The Cleveland Indians became the second US pro-sport franchise this year to decide to change their name out of respect for indigenous groups. Following the renamed Washington Football Team, the Major League Baseball club said it will stick with ‘Indians’ until a new moniker is chosen.
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Adidas’s largest shareholder Groupe Bruxelles Lambert is banking on a global cycling boom with an €800m deal to take a controlling stake in fast-growing premium brand Canyon Bicycles.
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The Australian Open, the first tennis Grand Slam of next year, has been delayed by three weeks due to coronavirus. The new dates for the tournament are February 8-21.
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Berlin-based OneFootball acquired Dugout, an internet group formed by 10 of Europe’s biggest football clubs, in a combination of online services that seek to give fans behind the scenes access to teams. Bloomberg reported that OneFootball raised €50m to finance the deal.
Transfer Market
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Nick Kelly joins Major League Soccer‘s Charlotte FC as club president, after six years as vice-president of partnerships, beer culture, and community at Anheuser-Busch. Kelly will be responsible for operations of the North Carolina club owned by billionaire hedge fund manager David Tepper.
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Claudia Arney is stepping down as a board director at the English Premier League at the end of January, as she takes on a new role as chair of online food delivery group Deliveroo.
Final Whistle
Perhaps the greatest contest of 2020 was the one taking place in labs around the world: the development of Covid-19 vaccines. So it is only fitting that, when inoculations finally began shipping this month, people began scoring footage of their arrival with iconic sporting broadcast tunes.
Time will tell if we’ve truly reached the finals of the pandemic, but until then, enjoy the Champions League Vaccine. Or the NBA on NBC Vaccine. Or the NFL on Fox Vaccine. Cheers to a happier, healthier 2021.
Scoreboard is written by Samuel Agini, Murad Ahmed and Arash Massoudi in London, Sara Germano, James Fontanella-Khan, and Anna Nicolaou in New York, with contributions from the team that produce the Due Diligence newsletter, the FT’s global network of correspondents and data visualisation team.