Almanac Footy: The Future of Football (Part 1)

 

 

 

Hi footy fans. This rumination on the future was put together earlier this year and, seeing it deals with such an important subject, we thought we should share it with you. We hope it provides some enlightenment.

 

The late summer just gone was a highly charged time for us here, reclining on the armchair in the dimly lit study. This is a juncture in the year when we look ahead to what may eventuate, not only on the chessboard of the playing field, but also to what changes and developments may arise more broadly in terms of how the game may evolve, as it always has, in its wonderfully unpredictable and convoluted manner. (Perhaps not quite as convoluted as that last sentence).

It’s a time when the players have returned from their off-season during which they were, perhaps, organising importations for the coming winter, maybe chilling in a Balinese massage parlour, or just having a quiet time of it getting a new tattoo or re-inking the existing twisting patterns all over themselves. As the long hot days shorten we sometimes apply our minds to making predictions about how the eighteen clubs will go. But making predictions is difficult, particularly predictions about the future, so at this point we want to consider the implications of other important events that occurred only just recently.

Just around this time in beautiful Adelaide, city of churches, the jewel of the south, we saw once again, writ large, the exciting future of sport. Once more the Saudi Arabian government’s Public Investment Fund’s LIV golf tournament brought the city, from whence the Chappell brothers came, to a standstill. On the golf course itself there were the by now familiar scenes of some of the world’s best second string golfers striding up to the climactic 18th hole and navigating their way around the comatose bodies of fans who had been consuming shoeys of West End beer (uurrk! – but then, some may suggest it tastes better drained from a well-worn Dunlop Volley) since teeing-off time early in the morning. Meanwhile thousands of barely still-upright fans, the heaving crowd (in more ways than one), threatened to spill onto the green, as caddies scooped vomit from the cup so the players could squelch across the grass and complete their putts.

What a spectacle – makes you wish you were there, no? The winner, a very grateful Chilean player recently ranked 70-something in the world (doing OK we suppose when you consider our own Aussie Cam Smith, who has absolutely cleaned up on the LIV circuit, isn’t currently in the top 200 listings), pocketed $4 million and everyone went home happy. Well, apart from those fans who slept it off at various locations around the course, some in a foetal position lying in the rough under a tree, others face down in one of the course’s bunkers, flies buzzing about their spew-spattered surrounds.

However, despite how much fun this all sounds, and despite what a great job the Saudi government is doing in promoting golf (and at the same time a great job in pursuing the development of Green Oil, and the building of a 170 kilometre long linear city, encased in a glass mirror exterior and elevated above the desert, at the estimated cost of only $8 trillion or so), there are critics across the world who accuse it of ‘sportswashing’, of rinsing its somewhat chequered recent history in the purifying soap and suds of good, clean, wholesome sporting competition.

Certainly, the Saudi state does have some public relations problems. It has been chastised for its treatment of women, foreign workers and journalists over recent years for a start. But while sports fans should be mindful of these problems, at the same time the Saudi government, like a host of others around the world, will focus on ‘moving forward’ to a wholly positive future, and many of the fans will inevitably overlook these distasteful aspects as the past quickly blurs in the rear view mirror. Instead, it is much easier to embrace the sort of joyous scenes in Adelaide of a week or so ago, the fun and frivolity of an alcohol-fuelled, heavily publicised big sporting event.

They, the sports fans, will want to watch the recently established Saudi T20 cricket league, and they will support the increasing number of European soccer teams being purchased by the Saudi Investment Fund and by other oil rich Middle Eastern countries. They will attend future Olympics and World Soccer Cups which some believe only the Saudis and its neighbours will have the money, or the inclination, to stage as we move into the later 2030s and beyond. Similarly, with the somewhat surprising increase in the hosting of large scale and even global climate change summits in the oil producing states of the region over recent years, the world is treading a path to this vicinity.

So, can we not see an expanding phenomenon and detect a pattern here – golf, cricket, soccer, boxing too, and so on. You know where this is heading….that’s right – the Saudi Investment Fund AFL Premiership Competition! And, to put it plainly, how do we fuel this exciting futuristic concept so it reaches fruition? Well, it’s going to involve a level of complexity, maybe even some deep group think (that’s not another one of those AI something-or-others, is it?) and we want to get it right, so that the future of footy is assured. And that the broadcasters are happy. And that everybody else is happy.

We’ll attempt to address this important question next time. Cheers.

 

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