A New Start

FT: Dressing-room consultations keep Dutch team happy

Dressing-room consultations keep Dutch team happy

By Simon Kuper

Published: June 21 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 21 2008 03:00

Edward, my best friend from primary school, came to Bern to see Holland play Romania. I'm not Dutch but I grew up in a small Dutch town, and 30 years ago Edward and I used to phone each other at half-time during Holland's games for breathless analysis. On Tuesday we sat on the pavement in the Swiss sun, had a beer and swapped news about our mothers. Then Edward said: "Simon, all this is unprecedented."

It's true. These 30 years the Netherlands has generally been the best small football country on earth, but we've never had a fortnight like this. So far at Euro 2008 we have beaten the world champions Italy 3-0 and the runners-up France 4-1, while our reserves have tossed aside Romania 2-0. Whatever happens in tonight's quarter-final against Russia, this feels miraculous.

To try to understand, I've been reading what foreign journalists say about Holland. There is one recurring story: the Dutch always destroy themselves through infighting, but this time they haven't yet. This shoddy half-truth misses the point about Dutch football. Holland are good precisely because our players quarrel about football. And that is particularly true now, because the genesis of the current side was an argument in a hotel room.

The Dutch have quarrelled about the game since about 1970, when Johan Cruyff emerged as the father of Dutch football. He said: "Football is a game you play with your head." Every Dutchman who ever placed a pass - and the country usually has the world's highest density of registered footballers - grew up in this tradition. When I was 12 and playing in a kids' team, half of us would go to the snack bar after matches and debate what had gone wrong over frites .

The English don't have that tradition. Mark Burke had played for various English clubs when in 1995 he joined the Dutch side Fortuna Sittard. "In England if the manager said it, you just did it," Burke told me. "When I went to Fortuna I noticed how much the players talked." During games, team-mates would call to him: "One metre, one metre left!" Training sessions would be interrupted by 15-minute seminars on the relative positioning of the centre-backs. Burke says: "I really started to understand the shape of the field, horizontally and vertically. In England the only time I had training sessions like that was when I went on coaching courses."

Of course the Dutch debates have downsides. Cruyff, who favoured what he called the " conflictmodel " of working relations, quarrelled with the great goalkeeper Jan van Beveren before the 1974 World Cup. Van Beveren didn't go to that World Cup, or the one in 1978. Holland lost both in the final, partly due to goalkeeping errors. The conflictmodel also destroyed Holland at the 1990 World Cup and at Euro 96. This summer, the midfielders Mark van Bommel and Clarence Seedorf have stayed home rather than work with Holland's manager Marco van Basten.

And yet the quarrels over football are now helping Holland. In recent years it had become clear that the traditional Dutch formation with two wingers no longer worked. Last autumn Van Basten asked his captain, Edwin van der Sar, to consult the other players about what to do. Van der Sar called a "group of seven" senior players to his hotel room. They proposed playing with just one forward and five midfielders. Van Basten acquiesced.

It was exactly the sort of consultation that management books would recommend. It was done without conflict, because Dutch football, after passing from an amateur era through the pop-star 1970s, is now as corporate as football everywhere else. And the employees liked being consulted. Before Euro 2008, two friends of mine organised a football quiz for the Dutch squad. Wesley Sneijder won, with cheating. But what struck my friends was how happy a camp it was. When Van der Sar raised his hand to protest that a question was wrong, the entire squad in unison began chanting, "Losers!" (in English) at the quizmasters.

Here in Switzerland the Dutch are even happier. The new formation has worked beautifully. With two defensive midfielders behind them, the creative midfielders are free to create. Nobody is glued to the touchline anymore like a parody of a 1970s winger. Instead of stringing together endless passes, the Dutch now wait until the opposition lose the ball and then break instantly à la Arsenal.

The Dutch could absorb a new system only because they think. Each player is a playmaker, making autonomous decisions on the field. When leading 2-0 against the world champions, left-back Giovanni van Bronckhorst decided to gallop 80 metres forward and score with a header. Meanwhile, another player instantly took over his position, because everyone is thinking, and consulting on the field. When it goes quiet during games here, you hear the Dutch players calling out instructions.

Dutch football is a fragile plant, and we could easily go home tonight. But if Edward and I are lucky enough to have another beer on some foreign pavement at the World Cup 30 years from now, we might conclude that this week was the peak.

Simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Olympics

Olympics chief tells west not to hector China

By Roger Blitz in London and Richard McGregor in Beijing

Published: April 25 2008 09:41 | Last updated: April 26 2008 02:29

The west must stop hectoring China over human rights, the Olympics chief has warned, even as Beijing on Friday showed the first signs of bowing to international protests by saying it would hold talks with aides to the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader.

“You don’t obtain anything in China with a loud voice,” said Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee. This was the “big mistake of people in the west”.

“It took us 200 years to evolve from the French Revolution. China started in 1949,” he said, a time when the UK and other European nations were also colonial powers, “with all the abuse attached to colonial powers”.

“It was only 40 years ago that we gave liberty to the colonies. Let’s be a little bit more modest.”

Mr Rogge was speaking to the Financial Times ahead of Beijing’s announcement on Friday that it would resume talks with representatives of the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese government has previously blamed for triggering last month’s violent protests in Tibet.

Pro-Tibet protests have since overshadowed the Olympic torch relay in Europe, the US, India and Australia, which has in turn provoked a backlash in China against the west and calls to boycott foreign goods.

Xinhua, China’s official news agency, quoted an unnamed official saying the government hoped the Dalai side would “take credible moves to stop activities aimed at splitting China, plotting and inciting violence and disrupting and sabotaging the Beijing Olympic Games”.

The announcement of the talks coincided with a visit to Beijing by a Brussels delegation led by José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, who met Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, on Friday.

Mr Barroso welcomed the news of the talks, as did the White House and other western governments.

Mr Rogge also told the FT the IOC always believed awarding the 2008 Games to Beijing would “open up China”, and that in time this would happen.

“The Games we believe, over time, will have a good influence on social evolution in China, and the Chinese admit it themselves,” he said.

Mr Rogge questioned whether media attention on Tibet would be as strong if the Games were not taking place in Beijing. “I wonder if Tibet would be front page today were it not that the Games are being organised in Beijing. It would probably be page 4 or 5,” he said.

Mr Rogge said China had given significant ground to the IOC by opening access to foreign media for the Olympics, which he expected to be extended beyond 2008 and believed would be a key factor in the social evolution of the country. China had also responded to IOC concerns about pollution in Beijing and child labour, he added.

“We have been able to achieve something. I am not quite sure that heads of government have achieved much more than we have done,” Mr Rogge said.

The Games would continue to be awarded to cities with the best technical bids, and were for the benefit of athletes rather than for international political evolution, but “if at the same time they can bring something for the region of the country, yes, fine”.

South Korea, he pointed out, was a military dictatorship when it was awarded the 1988 Games, and became a vibrant democracy soon after staging them. “The Games played a key role, again by the presence of media people,” he said.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

IOC’s Rogge asks for more time for China

By Roger Blitz in London

Published: April 26 2008 01:31 | Last updated: April 26 2008 01:31

If the International Olympic Committee wants to get the message over that sport should be kept separate from politics, someone had better tell its president.

In the armchair of his Lausanne office, Jacques Rogge is in full flow, discussing Mao, the Cultural Revolution and Europe’s colonial record – even the role of the IOC beyond sport as a force for social change.

Mr Rogge has endured a torrid three weeks since protests on the international torch relay in London set off what he later called a “crisis”, the biggest in his six-year presidency of the IOC.

Struggling to deflect criticism from human rights groups that he had turned a blind eye to China’s crackdown on riots in Tibet, Mr Rogge kept insisting the IOC was a sporting and not a political body.

Now, this Olympic yachtsman appears to be changing tack. Not once mentioning that sport and politics should be kept apart, he concedes in an FT interview that taking politics out of the Olympics was going to be “an eternal difficulty” for the games.

“There will never be a solution whereby the political world or the pressure groups will not try to leverage the games. You cannot stop that because of the prestige of the games and what they represent for mankind,” the president says.

Like most sportsmen, politics barely featured in his upbringing. The 65-year-old Belgian combined a career as an orthopaedic surgeon with an aptitude for yachting that took him to three successive Olympics.

When he was elected IOC president in 2001, three days after the body awarded the 2008 Olympics to China, Jacques Rogge represented for the IOC a clean break from the scandal-plagued regime of his predecessor, Juan Antonio Samaranch.

Olympic events

Berlin 1936
Games used for Nazi Aryan supremacist propaganda. Black US athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals
Mexico 1968
US sprinters expelled for giving black power salute
Munich 1972
Eleven Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian terrorists
Moscow 1980
Boycott over Soviet intervention in Afghanistan
Atlanta 1996
Bomb killed one person and hurt 110

Mr Rogge has steered the IOC through internal reform, cleaning it of corruption and tightening up on doping control.

He has busied himself with more prosaic matters such as a cap on the number of Olympic sports and the setting up of a youth games.

But the torch relay debacle demands a rethink, and the president is sounding more like one of the Sino specialists he consulted in preparation for his talks with the Chinese leadership.

Mr Rogge says while he understands the depth of emotion in the west on China’s human rights record, public expectations about the country’s pace of change are unrealistic.

“It took us 200 years to evolve from the French Revolution. China started in 1949. At that time it was a country of famine, epidemics, floods and civil war. It had no economy, no health care, no education system and there was 600m of them,” he says.

“They had to build that and it was a bumpy road. We all know that there were abuses under Mao and the Cultural Revolution was not a nice period. But gradually, steadily, over 60 years, they evolved, and they were able to introduce a lot of changes.”

Back in 1949, Mr Rogge pointed out, the UK was a colonial power. So too were Belgium, France and Portugal, “with all the abuse attached to colonial powers. It was only 40 years ago that we gave liberty to the colonies. Let’s be a little bit more modest”.

China may not be a role model in the west, Mr Rogge concedes, but “we owe China to give them time”.

Mr Rogge says his relations with Beijing are “excellent”, although “they have their priorities and we have ours”. Sometimes those priorities contradict each other, he admits.

But the relationship has yielded two policy changes by Beijing, the IOC president claims: a media law allowing 25,000 foreign media access during the games, and environmental measures to tackle the city’s chronic pollution problems.

The media law, Mr Rogge contends, will most likely be extended into 2009 – and while there are still loopholes in it, there is little point in bellowing at the hosts for action.

“You don’t obtain anything in China with a loud voice. That is the big mistake of people in the west wanting to add their views. To keep face [in Asia] is of paramount importance. All the Chinese specialists will tell you that only one thing works – respectful, quiet but firm discussion.

“Otherwise, the Chinese will close themselves. That is what is happening today. There is a lot of protest, a lot of very strong verbal power, and the Chinese, they close themselves.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

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FT: 'I love the speed and the noise'

'I love the speed and the noise'

By James Allen

Published: March 15 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 15 2008 02:00

In early March 1986, the dynamic Formula One racing team owner Frank Williams broke his neck in a road accident in the south of France. It left him paralysed from the neck down at the age of 43. As his grief-stricken wife Ginny stood at his bedside, attempting to come to terms with the situation, he told her: "As I see it, I have had 40 years of one sort of life, now I shall have another 40 years of a different kind of life."

Twenty-two years on, Sir Frank Williams's new life is remarkable for how similar it is to his old life. Since 1986, his team, Williams, has won seven constructors' world championships and five drivers' world titles, triumphing in 91 grands prix in the process. His name is still above the door and he is still in charge.

His remarkable achievements, recognised with a knighthood in 1999, are defined not just by the victories he has enjoyed in one of the world's most competitive sports, but also by his personal victory over disability. This season, which starts tomorrow in Melbourne, will be Williams' 30th as a Formula One team boss and will feature his 600th race. It will see him overtake the legendary Enzo Ferrari, who supervised his team from 1950 until his death in 1988.

This is a remarkable feat, not least because the Williams team is one of the last of a vanishing breed in Formula One. Most F1 teams are now owned by car manufacturers and many of Williams' peers, such as Ferrari's Jean Todt, are heading for retirement and being replaced by a younger generation of professional managers. But Williams, now 65, soldiers on. And the signs are that after a three-year spell in the doldrums, his team could be on its way back to the front of the grid with a potent new car and a thrilling driver line-up of Nico Rosberg, the speedy son of former Williams World Champion Keke Rosberg, and the Japanese prospect, Kazuki Nakajima.

Williams' office is quite plain and spartan. The team's headquarters, in Grove near Oxford, used to be the offices of the pharmaceuticals company Jansen, and in the corridors leading to the management offices you feel like it still could be. Only a model of a Williams team car on a plinth betrays the true nature of business here.

Williams sits in the far corner of his office, behind a huge desk. On the wall, there are photos of Margaret Thatcher and the American sprinting legend Michael Johnson. He still takes a close interest in all aspects of his operation, although these days he refers to it as a "company", rather than a team. He wheels himself around every department of the factory, asking questions. He is often in on a Sunday, dropping in on the engineers in the wind tunnel, which works 24 hours a day, pushing them for every tiny improvement in car performance.

"I love what I do, I love F1," he says. "I love the competition. But above all it's the speed and the noise. You can work out for yourself that, driving the way I was driving in France all those years ago, I loved speed but was clearly not competent enough to do it myself. But watching these guys drive on the limit, it's such a turn-on. I am nuts about cars. I still look at a Ferrari road car and think, "Nice car." I would have killed for one when I was 22 and I used to look at them on the King's Road. But I've never owned one."

Frank Williams was born in South Shields, Tyneside, in April 1942. His parents' marriage broke down when he was very young and he attended a Roman Catholic boarding school, St Joseph's College in Dumfries, Scotland. It was an austere childhood and he was often left at school alone during the holidays. He emerged from this seclusion determined to make his mark on the world. His father, Owen, was an RAF officer and his own dream was to be a soldier. "I liked the regimentation, the discipline and the fighting. It all appealed," he says. "But I was rejected by Sandhurst. I love reading about military history, battles fought and lost and why. Wellington is my hero, he never lost, had a brilliant mind, a real gift."

Instead he turned to cars. As a boy, Williams fell in love with racing and would hitch-hike miles to watch events. But his driving career began by accident - literally. In 1961, in search of the fastest road car he could afford, he bought a race-prepared Austin A35. "I went for this car, with no intention of racing it, then I thought, 'This is a real racing car, I could race this.' So I went to Mallory Park [a circuit in Leicestershire] for my first event. It was wet and, on lap four or five, off I rolled into a bank. I climbed out of the back window and a sophisticated voice said: 'I thought you'd be joining me up here. How do you do, my name is Jonathan Williams.'"

Williams's namesake was a driver who took part in Formula Three events around Europe. He knew many of the well-known racing drivers of the time. "I became his helper in F3, went all over Europe, had a fantastic life," Williams recalls.

He progressed to running his own cars - although his early career as a team boss, in the late 1960s, was quite chaotic and he lived from hand to mouth, selling second-hand cars to raise money. At one point he was so broke that he ran his office from a telephone box after having his line disconnected. He became close friends with Piers Courage, heir to the brewing family, and together they moved into Formula One in 1970 in a deal with the De Tomaso car company. Tragically, Courage was killed while racing in the 1970 Dutch Grand Prix.

Williams refused to give up. But he knew that if he was going to succeed, he needed to design and build his own cars. The answer arrived in 1977 when he joined forces with Patrick Head, a young engineer he found working in a garage under a railway arch in London. The two formed Williams Grand Prix Engineering and landed a major sponsorship with Saudi Airlines. In 1979, the cars designed by Head started to win races and the following year the Australian driver Alan Jones won the team's first Formula One World Championship. They followed that with a second world title in 1982, won by the Finn Keke Rosberg. By 1986 the team, now known as Williams-Honda after a deal where the latter supplied engines, was one of the dominant forces in F1, along with Ferrari and McLaren.

By this time Williams, after a long struggle, was financially secure. He lived in a mansion near Newbury in Berkshire, with his wife and three children. Life was good. Then came the accident. He had been at a pre-season test session at Paul Ricard circuit near Marseille and was driving too fast en route to the airport. His rented Ford Sierra left the road and crashed, breaking his neck.

Williams was in hospital in France for 12 weeks. Before the accident, racing had been his obsession. Now it became his reason to live and to fight on. I ask him what - if anything - he misses about his former life.

"Running [he regularly competed in half marathons]," he says. "Going to the tailor - I was a vain little bugger in those days. But not much has changed really. I was out and about more back then, actively looking for money. But our method of looking for money was a lot less sophisticated in the 1970s and 1980s than it became in the 1990s."

And how would he sum up the "different kind of life" he has since experienced? "More sensible, less personal risk in driving too fast. I can't get about so much and I am very focused on the business. I think more deeply now than I did, to some extent. There are a lot of very clever people around me. When you are around people like that it really pushes you and keeps you sharp, you don't want to let the side down or have people thinking behind your back, 'I wish he would leave.'"

The past couple of years have been difficult for the Williams team. BMW, who joined forces with them in 2000, left at the end of 2005 to set up its own team and Williams slid, finishing eighth (out of 10 teams) in the 2006 championship and fourth last year (after the exclusion of McLaren for the espionage scandal). Although key sponsors stayed loyal, they made it clear that only serious improvement would keep them on board.

"It [failure] hurts financially and it weakens you for the following year," Williams says. "We had a bit of a spiral on our hands after BMW left us - it was very difficult. We stopped the slide last year and we will ratchet ourselves up again this year. We had to put our hands in our pockets to shore things up, sold a few assets."

Those assets included Williams' private jet, which made travel tolerable, allowing him to stand up on board in a special frame. Its sale paid for a new wind tunnel. Williams felt the slide keenly. Despite slipping to eighth, the team still had front-of-the-grid standards and aspirations. He is reluctant to talk about past glories, admits to feeling embarrassed that they are in the past and not the present. Familiar with the winning formula, he is determined to re-create it.

The signs from pre-season testing are that Williams has build a fast and reliable car for the coming season, which will allow the team to fight for third place in the championship behind the currently uncatchable McLaren and Ferrari teams. Williams is characteristically cagey about the team's prospects. "Our competitors are just as competitive," he says. "F1 is never easy - it's not supposed to be easy - so to think that we are going to sail into third place in the first few races is pie in the sky." Nevertheless, in Nico Rosberg the team has one of the sport's most highly prized drivers: McLaren were prepared to pay a significant premium to get him as partner to Lewis Hamilton, but he remains at Williams.

Away from the track, last season was notable for the scandal involving one of Ferrari's senior technicians passing secret technical documents to McLaren's chief designer, with whom he was planning to join forces at Honda. After being found guilty of using the material, McLaren were hit with a £50m fine and excluded from the constructors' championship by F1's governing body, the FIA, whose president is Max Mosley. Despite being rivals for more than 25 years, Williams has great sympathy for McLaren boss Ron Dennis, who has lost the most since the controversy.

"I do sympathise," he says. "Ron, to his credit, had the bottle to stand up to Max, but paid the price. I'm not having a go at Max, but Ron took him on and lost. Ron's a man who is very sincere in what he does, works very hard and has raised the standards of preparation and presentation in F1 to a very high level. It's sad it's happened to him."

Does Williams believe the sport has been damaged by the spying scandal? "It must have made some people who were fans of the sport think that it was not a pretty state of affairs," he says. "But I don't think it has derailed the train at all."

His own obsession burns on and shows no signs of dimming, although he is gradually facing up to the inevitable. "My grip loosens every year, I do a bit less and other people do a bit more, but I love it. One day I'll say 'I can't be bothered, tell the boys to go without me.' I don't see it now, but it is coming."

James Allen is the FT's Formula One correspondent and ITV Sport's lead F1 commentator

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: All to play for

All to play for

By Joshua Chaffin

Published: November 19 2007 18:34 | Last updated: November 19 2007 18:34

As vice-president of games at ESPN, Raphael Poplock not only manages the company’s fantasy sports websites, he is also a fantasy player – and a committed one.

During quiet moments on his wedding day three years ago, Mr Poplock found himself sneaking out and logging on to the internet to trade players for his fantasy football team. His honeymoon, it seems, was less a romantic getaway than an exercise in fantasy sports withdrawal. “We went to Greece, and I had an itch the whole time,” Mr Poplock confesses.

The object of his obsession is a game in which ordinary fans have the opportunity to indulge their desire to play manager. Each week, they choose a roster of real world players for their ideal, fantasy team – be it in football, baseball or basketball – and then compete against other fantasy teams based on the real-world statistical performance of those players.

With the help of the internet, fantasy sports has grown from a niche hobby to a widespread phenomenon in recent years, and its growing audience and addictive qualities have drawn the attention of big media and internet companies.

Along with ESPN, the sports division owned by Disney, Yahoo, CBS, Fox, NBC and the major US sports leagues are competing for business from the millions of men in their 20s and 30s who may have turned away from primetime television but happily spend hours each week on fantasy websites, organising their teams and gorging on sports content.

“Fantasy is a big business,” says Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, whose CBS Sportsline operates one of the most popular fantasy football leagues.

The Fantasy Sports Trade Association has estimated the industry’s value at $1bn (€683m, £490m), with roughly 20m players in the US and Canada. One research firm, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, claims that fantasy sports cost US companies as much as $435m a week in lost productivity.

A better measure of fantasy’s value, though, may be its ability to glue sports fans to particular websites for extended periods of time.

This September, for example, as the American football season kicked off, CBSSports.com at-tracted more than 100m visits – an all-time high. Each visitor spent an average of 96 minutes on the site for the month, which was nearly triple the industry average, and something that the company attributes almost entirely to fantasy. “What fantasy does is promote more time spent on the site,” Mr Smith says.

Mr Poplock has witnessed a similar phenomenon at ESPN, where fantasy customers devour more of the company’s content – from its televised sports coverage to its radio broadcasts, magazine articles, mobile phone updates and online features – than other consumers. “Our fantasy fans are the best community of fans we have,” he says.

People played fantasy sports, or a variety of them, long before the internet era. In 1980, Dan Okrent, a sportswriter and editor, created a fantasy baseball league with a group of friends in New York. They called it “Rotisserie Baseball”, naming it after the French restaurant where they gathered.

Rotisserie gained popularity after newspapers such as USA Today began to publish expanded sports statistics and sponsored fantasy leagues. But it truly took off – not unlike day-trading – in the late 1990s, when the internet did away with the paper trail and made it possible to crunch and sort enormous amounts of data in real time. “It just exploded,” says Jeffrey Thomas, president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

The web also allowed players to talk to one another through e-mail and message boards, creating an early example of an internet community. It led Bill Simmons, the ESPN sports columnist, to declare recently: “The internet had a greater impact on fantasy sports than on porn over the past 11 years.”

As it turns out, fantasy may have common ground with another vice: gambling. Many fantasy players wager among themselves, creating pots that run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and several internet companies have sprung up to promote fantasy league gambling.

For big media companies, though, money is made by selling advertising to companies attracted by high traffic. The multi-platform Holy Grail for ESPN, CBS and other media giants is the fan who watches a broadcast of a game on TV while also tracking sports news and fantasy statistics on a laptop opened to their web page, and messaging friends and competitors via their mobile phone or instant-messaging services.

In pursuing these core fans, US media and internet companies have expanded fantasy from its baseball roots to just about any sport that includes data and a passionate fan base, including basketball, hockey and Nascar. They even tried fantasy bass fishing – although that proved short-lived.

They are also pushing into Europe, where the UK has a tradition of fantasy football leagues. The two largest Premiership fantasy leagues – Premiereleague.com and Fantasyleague.com – attracted nearly 2.3m unique users in August, according to ComScore, the internet research company.

“The proportion of time being spent on these sites during office hours is significant,” says Bob Ivins, executive vice-president at ComScore. “On the Friday before the start of the Premiership season alone, over 230,000 office hours were spent on the fantasy football sites.”

Meanwhile, Myfootballclub.co.uk, a website with 20,000 paying subscribers, last week bought Ebbsfleet, a lower division English team. In a fantasy-inspired move, subscribers will vote on transfers, team selection and other matters.

The fantasy king, though, remains American football, which is ideal for the medium because it is laden with player statistics. The biggest operator is Yahoo Sports, with more than 4.3m customers. The internet company built a large audience by offering its product free, although it now charges $124.99 for a premium version. Yahoo also sells sponsorships to companies and brands such as Toyota, Heineken and Viagra.

“It’s a very profitable business for us,” says James Pitaro, vice-president of Yahoo Sports. “These are fans who consume an incredible number of pages on our site. They also consume a lot of video.”

ESPN has been trying to catch up. After dropping the subscription fee for its fantasy football game three years ago, it saw a 10-fold increase in traffic, and has added numerous bells and whistles to draw more users. It hopes to steal a march on competitors by using its cable television network, radio station and other assets to promote its fantasy products. Each Sunday morning, for example, the network airs a one-hour fantasy pre-game show on ESPN News.

A pack of smaller competitors is likely to enter the fray after a US court ruled last month that sports leagues could no longer charge tens of millions of dollars in licensing fees for data about their players – removing a barrier to entry.

But for some media executives, fantasy’s future lies beyond football – or any other sport. At CBS, Mr Smith wants to take the medium and all its interactive possibilities and apply it to a range of subjects that inspire a passionate following. One idea he is considering is a weekly Hollywood-themed contest in which participants would draft celebrities and score points based on how they perform at the box office, whether they become pregnant, enter rehab, or are arrested for driving under the influence. The BBC’s website has run a similar game, Celebdaq, for years.

“What we’ve been asking internally for several months,” Mr Smith says, “is, what is the fantasy for other categories?”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

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FT: Ideas with sporting impact

Ideas with sporting impact

By David Owen

Published: November 12 2007 18:10 | Last updated: November 12 2007 18:10

It is a Sunday morning in May and dozens of men and women are converging on a conference room in British Airways’ Waterside headquarters from nearby Heathrow airport. Some arrive in company shuttle buses and tuck into the buffet breakfast that is laid on before their meeting gets under way. A company photographer is on hand to capture salient moments.

It appears to be just another set of executives putting in extra hours for the benefit of their employer. Except these are not BA staff but representatives of the skiing and snowboarding fraternity. And this is not a BA function but the twice-yearly congress of SnowsportGB, the UK’s governing body for winter sports.

The sports body is using BA’s facilities thanks to a bond forged between the two organisations as part of an innovative scheme devised by the British Olympic Association.

Under pressure to help engineer a big improvement in the performance of British athletes by 2012, when London will host the summer Olympics, the association has come up with the FTSE-BOA Partnership Programme. This aims to help sports governing bodies accelerate their development, not by persuading companies to write large cheques, as under the traditional sponsorship model, but by tapping directly into what should be their core expertise: good management. The BOA believes such a scheme is unique in the world.

So far 11 sports, from boxing to the modern pentathlon, have been paired up with blue-chip companies (see below), with the intention of forging long-term bonds that could push Britain up the medals table.

“We are positioning 2012 as the catalyst, but saying that what we hope will evolve is long-term relationships between the parties,” says Bev Salt, an executive with AstraZeneca, the pharmaceuticals group, who has been seconded to the BOA until next year to act as matchmaker between the two sides. A further set of pairings is expected to be unveiled this year.

BA’s tie-up with SnowsportGB is initially focused on marketing and public relations. Athletes, for example, are brushing up their media-handling skills with the help of BA training courses. But it also has a more down-to-earth side. The airline’s HQ happens to be conveniently located for the sort of gathering, such as the Sunday meeting, that requires people to congregate from widespread locations.

SnowsportGB has taken to holding its quarterly board meetings there as well. “It allows us to convey a degree of professionalism I am keen we should convey,” says Oliver Jones, the body’s chairman. Plus it makes it as easy as possible for different BA specialists to contribute to the body’s deliberations.

Though the nature and scope of the partnerships vary widely, many share common characteristics. For the big companies, the appeal often boils down to employee motivation; for the sports bodies it lies in the ability to gain access to expertise that would normally be out of reach to organisations of their scale.

England Hockey is taking advantage of the energy group Centrica’s IT know-how to install a new customer-relationship management system. “We have literally dozens of databases within the organisation . . . lots of pockets of data but not reading from the same source,” says Philip Kimberley, a former Burmah Castrol executive who has been executive chairman of England Hockey since 2003. “At the end of [this], we will have replaced multitudinous sets of data with one state-of-the-art system managing our contacts.”

Two executives from Land Securities, the property company, have joined the main board of British Volleyball as part of perhaps the widest-ranging partnership developed so far. Joint projects have included an event to showcase beach volleyball in the Land Securities-owned Birmingham Bullring centre. Similar events are expected in Portsmouth and East Kilbride.

The recently revived umbrella body for the sport is also benefiting from Land Securities’ expertise in financial forecasting and risk analysis. Volleyball is not a sport in which Britain has traditionally excelled, so it faces heavy expenditure if standards are to rise sufficiently for the country to mount a credible Olympic challenge in 2012. Yet much government funding earmarked for the sport is performance-related.

“We have got them to focus on costs being covered by revenue and to look at cash flow and [other] sensitivities, such as what happens if they don’t get their full funding in line with their plans,” says David Godden, chief operating officer of Land Securities Trillium, the group’s property partnerships business. “That has raised the obvious point: if they are going to be successful, they are going to need to get more money than they can get from the government. How are they going to do that? That takes you into marketing.”

Richard Callicott, chairman of British Volleyball, says the opportunity to sit down with Duncan Lewis, Land Securities’ group marketing director, and “listen to his common sense” has saved the body “an enormous amount of money”. He believes the partnership is working well partly because “we get on well as people”. This bond was initially forged at an off-site strategy meeting between the two sides in a Wokingham hotel.

The partnership between G4S, the security company, and the British Judo Association has included the provision of executive development and security services at judo events. One G4S executive is helping to assess which of a group of association executives might be earmarked for rapid development.

“A sporting body doesn’t generally have the luxury of that level of consulting,” says Scott McCarthy, the association’s chief executive. He is also hoping G4S might help set up a commercial spin-off for the association in providing self-defence training for corporate clients. All profits would be reinvested in the sport. Mr McCarthy sees the idea as “a tremendous commercial opportunity”.

Another useful attribute of many big multinationals is a presence on the ground in Beijing, host of the 2008 Olympics. Corus, the steel company that is British Triathlon’s partner, provided support services ranging from translation to logistics during visits to China by the British team.

On the corporate side, BA sees winter sports as a way to fill more seats in a period of relatively low demand. G4S, meanwhile, views its association with judo as a possible means of reducing its staff turnover rate. “It is hard to differentiate yourself from another employer,” says Debbie McGrath, communications director. “We have a huge workforce of around half a million people across 115 countries. One of the things we need to do is try to engage [them] in the brand and feel proud of it.”

Of course, the relationships may not be problem-free. The corporate world is volatile and dynamic. Priorities change. Already one company, Corus, has been taken over by India’s Tata Steel, although there seems no reason to think that the change will affect the partnership with triathlon.

Ms Salt anticipates an attrition rate of between 10 and 20 per cent a year, though she is confident of BOA finding replacements when necessary. Ultimately, the test will be the Olympic medals table, but early signs, from Waterside and elsewhere, are encouraging.

Teambuilding partnerships between sport and business

Eleven partnerships between Olympic sports and leading companies have so far been established under the British Olympic Association programme:

● Land Securities and volleyball

● British Airways and snow sports

● G4S and judo

● Corus and triathlon

● Skandia and biathlon

● Centrica and hockey

● GlaxoSmithKline and boxing

● SABMiller and fencing

● Wolseley and gymnastics

● Home Retail Group and badminton

● Marks and Spencer and modern pentathlon

The initiative is expected, in time, to help the 33 summer and winter Olympic sports national governing bodies to accelerate their development. A further set of pairings is expected to be unveiled by the end of the year. The partnerships do not give the companies involved Olympic sponsorship rights, but Bev Salt, an AstraZeneca executive seconded to the BOA, says it has “not been a problem capturing the imagination of companies and getting them to engage”.

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FT: Humbleness of the short-distance runner

Humbleness of the short-distance runner

By Simon Kuper

Published: October 19 2007 18:35 | Last updated: October 19 2007 18:35

In Athens two years ago, finishing a routine 100m race, Asafa Powell looked up at the scoreboard to check his time. “I was very surprised,” he reminisces in his Jamaican brogue. “When I crossed the finishing line and I saw 9.77 [seconds], I was waiting to see if the clock was going to change. And it didn’t.” Powell had just become the world’s fastest man.

Last month in Italy, he sharpened his record to 9.74 seconds. No human has ever run from a lion or starting gun faster than the Jamaican. Yet he seems all wrong for the part: being the world’s fastest man is something primal; the incumbent should be an alpha male, not this quiet, traumatised 24-year-old. Powell seems to have become an athlete without meaning to, yet he could rule next year’s Olympics in Beijing.

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Jamaican towns often have quaint English names that belie the island’s contemporary violence, and Powell grew up the son of two reverends in Linstead. All was still happy then. “There was six boys and my mother and my father,” he tells me over the phone from Jamaica. “Growing up around all those guys was so much fun. My mother and father were always taking me to church. All of us would look out for each other.”

An early indication of greatness came at high school: Powell wrote in the yearbook that he wanted to be the world’s fastest man. “I only did that as a joke,” he corrects. “I wasn’t really looking forward to being a professional athlete. I was more interested in football and engineering and art and stuff like that. When I wrote that, I didn’t know what I was doing. The high school championship was just finished, and I won quite easily, so I got excited.

“I started sprinting, and actually my coach was the one who told me, ‘You can be good at this.’ I thought maybe he’s just trying to make me feel good about myself.” Powell (right) himself favoured football. “I called myself ‘Ronaldo’. That would be my dream.”

Rejecting scholarships to American universities,  he studied in Jamaica. Why? “There are so many things to do in the US, like making  fast money, selling drugs. And all that food up there – getting fat.” Furthermore, Powell didn’t want to be another overworked collegiate sprinter racing in too many disciplines.

Just as he was getting good, in 2002 his brother Michael was murdered in a New York taxi. “When my first brother died,” Powell says evenly, “I wanted to give up. I had the national trials coming up, and it didn’t make any sense. My family motivated me to go. They said it was what my brother would have wanted. The next year, when my other brother died, it hit me.”

Vaughn Powell had collapsed while playing football in Georgia. Powell says: “I wondered if any more of my brothers are going to die. Then I started to work harder for my family, to put a smile on people’s faces.” But could running do that? “It can, but maybe not at the moment. After winning a couple of races, I wasn’t very, very happy.”

Powell has never won gold at an Olympics or world championship. His critics blame nerves, something that he denies.

But nobody doubts Powell’s gift – particularly as he ran his time of 9.74 while slowing down before the finish. “There were two rounds at that track meet,” the athlete explains. “I was running the semi-final. My coach told me to run hard, but not too hard. When I got to 80m, I remembered he had said that. It amazed me how fast I could go. I just want to go faster and faster, and make people see that a human being can run that fast.”

Jamaica exports pace: the sprinters Linford Christie, Donovan Bailey and the disgraced Ben Johnson were all born on the island. Powell’s brother Donovan ran in the 1999 world championship, while the great Bahamian sprinter Derrick Atkins is Powell’s second cousin. But Jamaica embraces Powell. “Everyone wants to know who is this guy, who breaks the world record, and he’s Jamaican. Sometimes I even stay in because people get so excited when they see me. I get very annoyed at it sometimes. I’m trying to be the same person I was before. It’s hard to do. Everyone in Jamaica thinks I’m rich. If I go downtown, or in the ghetto, people want money.”

In fact, great wealth can only come from starring in Beijing. “That’s when I have to peak,” he admits. So how  does he assess his rival, the American Tyson Gay? “I’m a very tall and powerful sprinter. I’m a lot more explosive than him. Being taller is a  big advantage. I make long strides.”  So he has the advantage? “Yes, I would give myself that edge.” Does he know Gay personally? “Not really. Seeing  him, he seems a very nice person. He appears humble.”

“Humble”, pronounced “’umble”, is Powell’s favourite word. Often he applies it to himself: “Everyone really admire me. They come to me and say I’m a good role model for their kids. It’s the way I was brought up, ’umble.”

How does he want to be remembered? “As the greatest athlete ever. Maybe one of the greatest athletes ever who has never taken drugs.” Sometimes it’s hard to stay ’umble.

simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com

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FT: Tennis - Eye on the call

Eye on the call

By Simon Kuper

Published: September 1 2007 03:00 | Last updated: September 1 2007 03:00

Jamea Jackson has never risen higher than 45 in international tennis rankings, which given the sport's faded glory makes her almost a nonentity. Yet one morning in Miami 18 months ago, the girl from Atlanta made history. In the second set, facing Ashley Harkleroad, Jackson hit a forehand that was called out. She asked the umpire for an electronic replay. For the first time in the tennis tour's history, a computer would have the right to overrule a judge's call.

While the man behind me described his career in insurance, the big screen above the court displayed a computer animation of Jackson's shot. The ball was indeed out. You could imagine a quiet "Yes!" of self-congratulation emanating from the line judge. Jackson had known it all along. "I just wanted to be first," she explained later.

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Hawk-Eye, as the machine is known, is tennis's biggest innovation since the tiebreak in 1970. In 18 months the device has conquered the sport. At the US Open in New York this fortnight it will provide arguably more entertainment than most of the players. Almost everyone in the game - except for tennis's king, Roger Federer - agrees Hawk-Eye has made it more fun. Yet its rise owes something to a sad fact: in the western world, tennis is fading. "The glory days of tennis, as we've known them in the US, are in the past," says Jason Bernstein, director of programming and acquisitions for tennis at the broadcaster ESPN.

For most of the last century tennis was a pastime of the idle rich. Only in the 1970s did middle-class neighbourhoods start to acquire courts. Top-level tennis also began to change. In 1968 it had gone fully professional. A crop of ambitious players ran head-on at the Victorians in blazers who administered the sport. Players like Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe lowered their shorts, smashed rackets or bawled out umpires over line-calls.

There were attempts even then to replace the calls of errant humans with machines. At Wimbledon, a machine called Cyclops monitored service-lines. "I don't want to sound paranoid," said McEnroe, "but that machine knows who I am." Nastase knelt before Cyclops, stared it in the "eye" and told it that it was made in Russia. Fans loved these confrontations. The fights made tennis. Sport enjoys controversies.

But tennis eventually brought in professional umpires and introduced sanctions for misbehaving players. And as it became more middle-class, it lost snob appeal. Many tennis players moved to golf, now perceived as the posher sport, according to a recent report from the Dutch Mulier Instituut on European sports participation.

By one measure - attendances at tournaments - tennis is growing. However, many spectators go only once a year, on a day out, when the tour reaches their town. Few are devotees. Stacey Allaster, president of the Women's Tour Association, recalls that when she ran Canada's Rogers Cup, "40 to 45 per cent of our attendees did not play tennis". This becomes obvious when you attend a professional match. Often the fans get most excited when a player juggles a stray ball on his or her foot, or argues with the umpire. In soccer or American football, most spectators will have a view on the tactics or technique; not in tennis.

Worse, there is usually no "home team". Tennis's four "Grand Slam" tournaments are held in the US, UK, France and Australia, but it's four years since a man from any of these countries, Andy Roddick, won a Slam. Today's top six ranked women are a Belgian, two Serbs and three Russians. When they play in Eastbourne, few spectators care who wins. Bernstein says: "Tennis has struggled with tele- ratings over the last few years." He blames "the proliferation of other sports, and fewer big-name tennis players", and grumbles about stars skipping tournaments, or even dropping out.

Tennis needed diversions. That's where Hawk-Eye came in. It had already entertained viewers as a prop on television broadcasts of tennis and cricket. When the fan is invited to guess whether a ball was in or out, he or she is brought into the spectacle. Larry Scott, the WTA's chief executive, said tennis had learned from the rise of reality television. "I look at us as being in the entertainment business," he added. Accuracy, then, was only part of Hawk-Eye's mission.

Starting with Miami last year, tournaments began introducing the system. Each player could appeal to the machine up to a limit of two incorrect challenges per set, and another in a tiebreaker. Hawk-Eye was generally used only on show courts, because of the expense: $100,000 for centre court in Miami. But the system worked. One night in Miami, at a tennis gala around the pool of the Four Seasons hotel, the two young women in town to operate Hawk-Eye were teased about their great responsibility. "No, he's self- sufficient," one laughed.

Roger Federer was less amused. "What is happening is madness, a pure waste of money," he said. The Swiss champion says he was happy with line judges, that Hawk-Eye breaks the game's flow, and that he doesn't trust it. But most players do. The French player Tatiana Golovin reports never having spoken to a player who opposes Hawk- Eye. Allaster says players tend to complain when the system is not used. It's Hawk-Eye's bad luck that its moment in the sun this summer was an atypical one: when Federer, during the Wimbledon final, said the machine was "killing him" and asked that it be turned off.

Surprisingly, line judges and umpires seem as happy as the players. I asked Alison Lang, a chair umpire in women's tour matches, whether it was humiliating for a judge to be overruled by Hawk-Eye. "I don't think it's humiliating at all to be wrong," she said. In fact, Hawk-Eye usually proves the judge right. Hawk-Eye is also eradicating sulks from tennis. Years ago the sulk replaced the tantrum: the athlete, wronged by a line judge's call, crumbles on discovering he is the only pure soul in a world of evil morons. Sulks sometimes changed matches, when players lost concentration. With Hawk-Eye, says Golovin: "You're much more reassured once you see it, because you don't always believe the umpire. You don't think about it afterwards, you don't have regret." Does Lang see many players misbehave? "No. Not at all. It's not something I really think about."

But Hawk-Eye's key constituency is the fans. Bernstein says: "Hawk- Eye creates new storylines." Waiting to see whether a player will challenge a call, and then whether he wins the challenge, has added an element of suspense to matches that can last four hours. Hawk- Eye's British inventor Paul Hawkins, a PhD in artificial intelligence who played cricket for Buckinghamshire, recalls attending a match at last year's US Open. "There were 23,000 people going 'Challenge!' and then 'Oooooh!' And Andre Agassi won the challenge. That was quite a proud moment, that you contributed to that moment of entertainment."

Hawk-Eye is here to stay - or at least some machine like it is, because competitors are coming. Hawkins admits: "One wrong line- call in Toronto and the whole thing would come crashing down." More likely, Hawk-Eye's empire will grow. For a start, why not use it on every ball? Then tennis could stop using line judges. Yet nobody in tennis seems to want this. "Absolutely not," says Golovin. "I think it's still important to have that human feel. It's also part of the game: you don't want to make it too accurate."

Instead, Hawk-Eye's expansion could come in another form. Hawkins was surprised that the machine's biggest contribution to tennis was entertainment, more than accuracy. Next year, he hopes spectators at the US Open will be able to vote electronically from their seats on whether they think a ball was in. And last month, the Premier League tested Hawk-Eye's football system. "In the next couple of years, that will be rolled out in football," says Hawkins. That could end arguments over whether a shot crossed the goal-line - like Geoff Hurst's second "goal" for England in the 1966 World Cup final, which probably bounced the wrong side of the German line.

Tennis is considering more innovations: such as allowing coaching during matches, for instance. Anything to make tennis more interactive, and to distract from the boring sight of players doing their best in matches that matter - at least to them.

But it was tantrums that made tennis great. It's no coincidence that McEnroe, now a television commentator, remains tennis's pre- eminent personality. In Miami last year I watched the Argentine David Nalbandian play on a lesser court without a Hawk-Eye machine - it was like being returned to the 1970s. Argentine emigres filled the stands in Argentine football shirts singing, "Vamos vamos, Argentina", and when the umpire called one of Nalbandian's shots out, they and their hero erupted. Nalbandian uttered an obscenity. The umpire warned him. It was great fun. Not even a computer game could compete.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

FT: ‘Blade Runner’ points to the future

‘Blade Runner’ points to the future

By Pat Butcher

Published: July 13 2007 19:34 | Last updated: July 13 2007 19:34

Sport, like life, is in constant need of regeneration. New talent, fresh personalities and role models are regularly required to augment, and eventually replace, the established order.

So there will be plenty of newcomers alongside the champions at the IAAF Super Grand Prix athletics meeting in Sheffield, northern England, on Sunday. Among the neophytes will be Tyson Gay, the latest US sprinting sensation, who will be joining Olympic gold medallists such as Carolina Klüft, Liu Xiang, Kenenisa Bekele and Jeremy Wariner, as well as British stars Phillips Idowu, Becky Lyne and Marlon Devonish.

But the Paralympic champion and world record holder Oscar Pistorius is the most intriguing entry of all, in what he may presage for the future of athletics.

The 20-year-old South African is a double amputee, who runs on artificial legs or “blades”, shaped like springs. He was originally banned from able- bodied competition by the International Association of Athletics Federations, the sport’s governing organisation, on the grounds that the blades were an “artificial aid”, giving him an advantage.

Pistorius argues that bio-mechanical tests prove that the blades provide no more “return” from the track than legs. Accordingly, IAAF officials have given the runner and themselves a period of grace for reflection, during which time he is being allowed to compete in his first open races outside South Africa.

Pistorius was born without fibulae, or calf bones, and had his legs amputated below the knee before his first birthday. But even as a child he had an active sporting life, competing in water polo and rugby at school in Pretoria. He began running while rehabilitating a knee injury in his early teens, and his athletics career took off from there.

The blades, which cost close to $4,000 each, are made by an Icelandic company. He has used them to good effect, winning the Paralympic 200 metres title at Athens 2004, and setting world records for his category of disability in the 100m, 200m and 400m.

It is at that last distance that he competes, against world and Olympic champion Wariner and Britain’s number one Tim Benjamin among others in Sheffield. Pistorius has long been competing in open competition at home, and recently finished second in the South African 400m championship.

He wants to compete in the forthcoming world championships in Osaka next month, and ultimately the Olympic Games, saying: “If they ever found evidence that I was gaining an advantage, then I would stop running, but I have a dream of competing at the Olympic Games in Beijing next year.”

Athletics has long been riven with examples of artificial aids, most notably drugs, but there are others, some accepted, some not.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but long jumpers in the Ancient Olympics reached further distances by carrying small weights in their hands, which propelled them forward in mid-air when they swung their hands back. And who other than a mechanical engineering student, Dick Fosbury, would have even considered, let alone perfected, the art of going backwards over a high-jump bar? No elite jumper nowadays uses anything other than the “Fosbury Flop”.

Implements, too, are regularly modified. The most recent example was the men’s javelin in the mid-1980s, following East German Uwe Hohn’s 104.80m throw, which not only took the world record into the stratosphere, but threatened to take spectators into another world too. On safety grounds, the fulcrum of the spear was moved forward, to induce it to dip earlier. Even so, the incomparable Jan Zelezny of the Czech Republic got the record back up to 98.48m. That’s what top athletes do – they push back the barriers.

While applauding Pistorius’s achievements and commitment, Benjamin is one athlete who thinks the South African should not be competing in Sheffield. “It is a good message, and I really hope he does well,” says Benjamin. “But, with his personal best, he should not be in the race, because he is not fast enough.”

And thereby, for the time being, lies the escape route for the IAAF. Pistorius has run 46.34sec for 400m, compared, for example with Wariner’s best of 43.62sec. His times in his other distances are about 10 per cent down on the (able-bodied) world records. As long as Pistorius does not threaten either the world record or first place in a major championship, perhaps he should remain in open competition.

But Pistorius is still a novice. If or when he improves his general strength, those times will fall. In five years, he could be threatening the world records.

Who knows, however, what may be happening by then? Experiments with genetic implants on mice have already produced massive muscle growth, and it is only a matter of time before such (perfected) experiments will be enacted on humans.

Precedent suggests that sports competitors will be the first to try them. Power-to-weight ratios will then go haywire, and world records could be reduced by 10 per cent. And who will know? It is difficult enough at present to test for an excess of naturally occurring body chemicals, such as testosterone.

With respect to Pistorius’s evident humanity, whoever nicknamed him “Blade Runner” was unwittingly suggesting a dystopian future that the film of Philip K. Dick’s novel was describing.

World leader ... Oscar Pistorius, pictured centre while competing at the World Paralympic World Cup in Manchester in May, had both legs amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old
Photo: Getty Images

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

FT: The World Cup has never done more for its hosts

However, the change in Germany’s image should prove durable. That is because Germany’s image before the World Cup was in some ways 60 years out of date. As Sonntag says, since the event Germans are no longer seen as “xenophobic neo-Nazis”. The new image should stick precisely because it is obviously true. By contrast, France in 1998 had not suddenly become a colour-blind paradise. Perhaps the German World Cup is best understood as a global party of reconciliation for the second world war, which is why it had to end in Berlin.

This suggests that future hosts of big events cannot emulate Germany’s transformation. But talking to South African officials, who are preparing to host the World Cup in 2010, I found they did expect to emulate it. They hope it will change South Africa’s image as a crime-ridden country with poverty and disease. The problem is that that image is correct.

==

The World Cup has never done more for its hosts

By Simon Kuper

Published: June 8 2007 17:49 | Last updated: June 8 2007 17:49

One day during last year’s football World Cup, I found the street where I used to live in Berlin. In my memory, it was a dull-brown place where nobody ever spoke to anyone. Coming back 15 years later, it took me a while to be sure it was the same street. Flags were flying on every house – German flags made in China, but also flags of many other nations – and children were playing everywhere even though Germans had supposedly stopped having them. The World Cup seemed to have made the country happy.

Now, a year to the day after one of the biggest media events in history began, there seems to be lots of evidence to show this was true. Possibly no World Cup ever did more for its hosts. Here are three effects the tournament had on Germany.

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A possible effect: more babies. This has been overhyped, but it does seem the World Cup inspired Germans to have kids – an astonishing feat given that last year their birth-rate hit its lowest point since the second world war. The average German woman had just 1.36 children.

But last summer something happened. In Berlin, for instance, 20 per cent more babies were born in March 2007 than in March 2006. It’s hard to disentangle the effects of nights of celebration from Germany’s economic recovery or the incentives being paid to new parents.

Admittedly the birth rate had begun soaring even before March. Most experts say the new fertility has nothing to do with the World Cup. Perhaps even the parents aren’t sure.

A tiny effect: Germany’s economy received a small boost. A team led by Holger Preuss, professor of sport economy at the University of Mainz, surveyed 9,456 visitors to the World Cup about their spending. It concluded that visitor income boosted German gross domestic product last year by €3.2bn. That equals just 0.13 per cent of GDP, less than the German state spent preparing for the event. Remarkably, more than a third of visitor income came from people who never got inside a stadium but merely watched the games on giant screens in public places.

A massive effect: Germany’s brand improved, probably for the long term. The German foreign ministry has put together a triumphant slide-show to demonstrate this. In January 2006, the Anholt GMI Nation Brands index ranked Germany sixth out of 35 countries. In September, just after the World Cup, the same index ranked Germany joint top with the UK. The 25,900 consumers polled in the 35 countries had among other things raised Germany’s ratings for its “people”, “culture” and “tourism”.

Also in September 2006, the German Marshall Fund surveyed people around the world and found that they rated Germany second out of 12 countries mentioned. Only Spain scored higher.

But even more significant than Germany’s improved image among foreigners is its improved image among Germans. In the Pew Global Attitudes survey of June 2006, at the start of the World Cup, people around the world were asked for their opinions of several countries, including their own. Almost invariably, they rated their own countries much higher than foreigners did. In the cases of China and the US, this gap was very large. It was only one country about which foreigners were more positive than the inhabitants themselves: Germany in 2005. Judging by last summer’s unprecedented show of flags, the World Cup made Germans like themselves more.

But is the new brand durable? Sebastian Turner, the advertising man who ran Germany’s image campaign for the World Cup, told me before the tournament that the campaign could only succeed if it lasted for years. Nothing changes more slowly than images of nations, he said. Albrecht Sonntag, a German sociologist at the Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Commerciales at Angers in France, cautions that Germany’s new brand might be a “midsummer night’s dream” that fades, leaving nothing behind. The same thing happened to France when it hosted and won the World Cup in 1998, Sonntag notes. The multicoloured French team had seemed to represent a multicoloured France at ease with itself. Even before the multicoloured suburbs rioted in 2005, almost nothing was left of that image.

However, the change in Germany’s image should prove durable. That is because Germany’s image before the World Cup was in some ways 60 years out of date. As Sonntag says, since the event Germans are no longer seen as “xenophobic neo-Nazis”. The new image should stick precisely because it is obviously true. By contrast, France in 1998 had not suddenly become a colour-blind paradise. Perhaps the German World Cup is best understood as a global party of reconciliation for the second world war, which is why it had to end in Berlin.

This suggests that future hosts of big events cannot emulate Germany’s transformation. But talking to South African officials, who are preparing to host the World Cup in 2010, I found they did expect to emulate it. They hope it will change South Africa’s image as a crime-ridden country with poverty and disease. The problem is that that image is correct.

Simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

FT: Super Bowl becomes Soul Bowl as black coaches triumph

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Super Bowl becomes Soul Bowl as black coaches triumph

By Ben White in New York

Published: February 2 2007 18:56 | Last updated: February 2 2007 18:56

In most years, the Super Bowl is simply the biggest media event of the sporting year in the US, a chance for big advertisers to roll out their grandest campaigns to a domestic audience of 90m. Popular culture trends are set and millions of dollars are spent on parties across the nation.

This year, the game means much more, even to many who care little about the ­outcome.

Until now, no African-American head coach had ever led a team into the Super Bowl. This year, both teams vying on Sunday for the National Football League title – the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears – have black head coaches. For advocates of equal opportunity, the Soul Bowl, as some are calling it, is long overdue.

“I think it’s equivalent to other major breakthroughs in sports, including Jackie Robinson in baseball,” says Floyd Keith, executive director of the Black Coaches Association (BCA), referring to the first black major league baseball player of the modern era. “This quickens the pace of the race and that is really important.”

However, Mr Keith acknowledged that the pace so far has been glacial and much work remains. Black players have been a dominant force in the NFL for decades and now make up two thirds of league. But until 1990, there had been no black head coaches in the modern era.

In the early 1990s, Tony Dungy, who will lead out the Colts on Sunday, almost gave up hope of landing a top job after more than a decade as an assistant. He led the best defence in the league in Minnesota yet could not even get an interview for a head coaching slot.

He finally broke through in 1995 as head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and quickly turned one of the worst franchises in the league into a playoff contender that won the Super Bowl the year after he left.

Among the many black assistants Mr Dungy hired and mentored was Lovie Smith, now head coach of the Bears and one of Mr Dungy’s closest friends.

Despite Mr Dungy’s success in Tampa Bay, by 2002 there were still just two black head coaches. Threatened with a lawsuit over the disparity, the NFL responded with the Rooney rule, named after Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, head of the league’s diversity committee.

The rule requires that teams with a head coaching vacancy interview at least one minority candidate if they are not promoting one of their assistants. There are now six black head coaches

However, beyond the head coaching job, the senior management ranks in the NFL are still dominated by whites. Of 32 teams, only three have black general managers. There are no black majority-owners.

Things are even worse in college football. According to the BCA, only seven of 117 coaches in the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the feeder to the NFL, are black.

Mr Keith hopes Sunday’s game will bring fresh attention to these issues. “It will just magnify the scope of the problem we’ve been trying to address for decades,” he said.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007