For almost half a century, the BBC’s broadcast schedule on a Saturday afternoon was both startlingly simple and comfortably unchanging. It amounted, in fact, to just a single word, one that somehow conveyed everything while telling viewers absolutely nothing. That word was Grandstand.
As anyone who has ever tried explaining the idea of a landline telephone to a teenager will know, the speed with which technology has shifted has rendered certain concepts not just redundant but somehow alien to generations who did not directly experience them.
The program “Grandstand” falls squarely into that category. From the moment it first appeared in 1958, it was a cornerstone of British broadcasting, a national institution, its bright, jolly theme song burned into the country’s consciousness. Its timings were consistent: “Grandstand” was on (almost) every Saturday, from midday until a little after 5 p.m.
Its content, though, was not. “Grandstand” was bookmarked by two soccer-related elements: “Football Focus,” a magazine-style preview of the weekend’s games, and “Final Score,” in which the host and a phalanx of reporters tracked the results live as they happened.
What happened in the middle was a sort of sporting potpourri, the exact opposite of on-demand television. Some weekends might contain international rugby or live tennis from Wimbledon or a Formula 1 grand prix. Others, a little thinner, might bring you hot badminton action from Kuala Lumpur, a few frames of snooker or some lawn bowling. (American readers of a certain age are probably flashing back to “Wide World of Sports” at this point, so here’s its famous intro.)
In 2001, the BBC made a slight tweak to the format, sluicing off “Football Focus” and “Final Score” as separate, identifiable entities. The Grandstand brand — beloved, but hemorrhaging viewers to satellite and cable broadcasters who had, by that stage, bought the television rights to anything anyone wanted to watch — would now apply only to the filling.
The obvious consequence was the show’s eventual demise. In 2007, “Grandstand” went off the air for good. “Football Focus” and “Final Score” remain, but the rest of Saturday afternoons on BBC One, the channel to which most British televisions are automatically tuned, is now reserved for repeats of property and home improvement shows.
More significant, though, might have been the psychological impact. It has been proposed — possibly by Marcus Stead but also possibly by someone else*; there’s a note on sourcing below — that hiving off Grandstand’s soccer-related elements represented a shift in how we, as a country, understood soccer.
It was, from that point on, not a part of the broader sporting landscape, just another ingredient in that mix, not inherently any different to rugby league or MotoGP or the World Rally Championship. It was now something distinct. Soccer was a cultural artifact, a branch of entertainment, a lifestyle choice. Sports was everything else.
That distinction has only become more pronounced in the years since. The major leagues in the major sports — the Premier League, the Champions League, the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. — are now year-round entertainment. They are awash with money. Their stars are among the most famous people on the planet.
Almost every other sport, by contrast, seems to be struggling to find its place. That is never more clear than during the Olympics, that quadrennial spectacle in which most of us find ourselves captivated by swimming or track and field or volleyball for 17 days and pledge to watch more of it, to embrace a healthier and more varied sporting diet.
And then, of course, we find ourselves drawn back into our old habits, intrigued to see how that new midfielder will do, dazzled by the bright lights, appalled and thrilled by the vulgarity and the absurdity of it all. (The new European season has not yet started and the sentence “Mikel Arteta employed a team of professional pickpockets” has already appeared.)
As a rule, this is treated as a problem for everyone else to solve. Soccer is held up as an paradigm of what a sport can become if only it tries hard enough. Its competitors, all those mere games it has left behind, are encouraged to find ways to make up ground, to be more creative, more open to ideas, more receptive to investment. It is, they are told, a Darwinian, dog-eat-dog world, and if they cannot keep up, they deserve to be left behind.
That is why, at the Paris Games, the pole vault posts light up green when a jumper clears the bar, and red when they fail. (It is a tremendous shame that nobody has yet thought of a glowing, flashing discus, but that idea is available to rent at a cost.) It is why cricket authorities have experimented with various new formats in a game that cherishes its tradition like few others.
That reading of the situation, though, that belief that it is up to everyone else to make themselves more compelling, ignores what may well be the most salient factor: the scale of soccer itself.
“Grandstand,” like “Wide World of Sports,” feels like an anachronism; in an on-demand world, the idea of devoting four hours of airtime to an essentially random mix of sports seems ridiculous. (And besides, the general conviction of anyone and everyone in the television industry is very much that nobody watches linear television any more.)
But in one sense the show, or something like it, is more necessary than ever. Not all of these sports are natural television spectacles, as the Australian comedian Jimmy Rees has skewered so perfectly during the Paris Games. Some are deeply arcane, or undeniably elitist. A handful are probably best left as niche pursuits.
Many, though, would be significantly more popular — and therefore more financially viable — if only they had the one thing they lack: exposure. “Grandstand” offered that, in its admittedly strange and unwieldy form, before it was rendered irrelevant by the satellite broadcasters.
Those same networks, though, now commit so much of their budgets and their resources to covering soccer that they are not really sports broadcasters at all. For much of the year, they are essentially soccer-specific. (Sky Sports, a few years ago, rebranded its various channels according to sports lines, another signpost that may have had more significance than was initially appreciated.)
Other than during the Olympics almost every sport — even track and swimming, sports for which there is a ready-made audience and which work perfectly on TV — is condemned to playing out silently, able to reach only the already converted, transmitted only on relatively obscure platforms that viewers must search to find.
It is why so many of them have, ultimately, given up. Netflix and Prime Video and all the streaming platforms are now full of fly-on-the-wall documentaries, all hoping to do for their disciplines what “Drive to Survive” did for Formula 1. This is both a form of creative thinking and an admission of defeat. There is no way to compete with soccer for attention as a sport. That battle has been lost. All that is left is to try to rebrand as a form of content.
That comes, of course, at a cost: It breaks the relationship between reward and results. The stars that emerge from those shows are not necessarily the best athletes, but the most magnetic personalities. At the same time it entrenches soccer, and its counterparts in the United States, as the only real show in town.
It does not have to be this way. Léon Marchand and Noah Lyles and Mondo Duplantis do not have to spend the next four years in relative obscurity, before emerging once again at Los Angeles in 2028 to a public that is primed to adore them. All they need, all their sports need, is a chance to be seen. But for that to happen, soccer — the soccer-industrial complex, anyway — has to be willing to cede a little bit of ground, to accept that no matter how big it has become, it is still just a sport.
*A note on sourcing: I read this theory on how soccer became separated from the rest of sports somewhere at some undefined point in the past. I have tried really hard to find it, so as to offer the author the credit that is their due, but I have drawn a blank. If it is you, please get in touch. I’d be more than happy to name it after you.
The Old and the New
There was genuine emotion in the voices of Trinity Rodman and Sophia Smith this week, before the United States faces Brazil in the Olympic women’s soccer final, as they contemplated the prospect of a world in which Marta — still going, for now, roughly two geological eons since starting her career — was no longer an active international soccer player.
“She’s the player I looked up to the most,” Smith said. “Whenever I watched highlights with my dad, it was always Marta. To play against her in a game of this magnitude is so special.” Rodman, too, wanted to stress how much the 38-year-old Marta had “changed the game of soccer around the world; she’s a great player, and a great human.”
In order to celebrate this, both players plan to make her cry on Saturday.
That might, in fairness, be a little bit harsh, but there is a genuine air of purpose around the United States women’s team right now. Its Olympic campaign has not always been thrilling, and it has, at times, ridden its luck just a little. But it stands, now, on the cusp of starting Emma Hayes’s tenure with an Olympic gold medal, and its players are not about to let sentimentality get in the way of that ambition.
“Emma has worked every day to build our trust,” forward Mallory Swanson said. “She’s showed she cares about us as players and as people, and that goes a long way for us, because we are more than just athletes. She knows what to say and when to say it. We’re a really different team, and a lot of the credit for that goes to Emma.”
Given how little time Hayes had with her players — she traveled to the United States only at the end of May, giving her about eight weeks before the Olympics to cast the team in her image — that may, in fact, be underselling it. The Olympic final may well be the final act of Marta’s international career. But it feels like it could well be the beginning of an entirely different era for her opponents.
Correspondence
Like me, John McDermott has clearly been touched by the sight of some of France’s sporting great and good just being really into the Olympics. But he is keen to point out that it is not just Antoine Griezmann.
“It’s been fun to see Zinedine Zidane turning up at all manner of events and just enjoying being there as a normal fan, taking it all in,” he wrote. “He seems to be having a great time.” I would also be having a great time if I was Zinedine Zidane, John. And not just at the Olympics.
That’s enough positivity. The Olympics are nearly over. It’s time for the rancor and the hostility and the interminable moral compromise of soccer again. That’s what we’re all in it for, right? This brings us neatly to Michael Simmons.
“If you could make a single change to the Premier League business model to create more competitive balance, what would it be? Capping roster numbers? Enforcing a salary cap? Enforcing financial fair play, fairly? No nation state owners?”
The problem here is that it is just so hard to choose, Michael. I would like to do all of those things. But if we were to be realistic, I wonder if the lowest-hanging fruit would be to limit the number of players a team can have under contract. Or to introduce a rule that any player who did not play a certain number of minutes over the course of one season was available for sale for a pre-agreed price.
And, just to reinforce the message, Michael Fallon has spent his spare time, it would seem, reading Saudi Arabia’s bid proposal for the 2034 World Cup, the one it has already been awarded and therefore does not really need to bid for, and the one for which it is currently planning on building a stadium in the sky.
“I couldn’t find any indication in the document as to what time of year they propose playing the tournament,” he wrote. “With July temperatures going as high as 43°C (109.4°F), a summer World Cup in Saudi Arabia seems unlikely to me. Should fans expect another winter World Cup in 2034?”
I noticed that, too, Michael, though I did wonder if perhaps I just missed it because of all the stadium-in-the-clouds stuff. My assumption has always been that it will have to be in the winter, and that it will be less controversial than last time, just because it has happened before. And, as a reminder: It will be a summer World Cup for half the planet. As long as the Saudis tell everyone, very clearly, when it will be, I don’t have a problem with that.
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