A question of sport in the 21st century

20silkcut

I have been mulling over this topic in my head for a good amount of time over the last few years and maybe this is not the appropriate forum but I do think this is very much a current affair and something that has really accelerated as the 21st century progresses. 

The number of teams that are successful in competitive sport are distilling down to a fewer and fewer amount of teams as time moves forward. 

The two competitive sports that I am casually most familiar with are soccer and GAA.  Anyway to start with an interesting fact: 

In 1979 Dundalk managed to get further ,in the champions league equivalent of that time, than Liverpool and reached a stage where they were two ties away from reaching the champions league (cup) final that year. They were eventually eliminated by Celtic in the last 16. Absolute fantasy stuff in todays world.

That was of course down to the luck of the draw and the fact that such competitions were much more egalitarian at that time and the champions of one country were deemed equal to the champions of another country. That competition has been engineered to within an inch of its life since to ensure anomalies like that never occur again. Of course there are massive financial reasons to bolster arguments why that should be the case. But a competition is a competition. Why should it be distorted and contorted into such a skewed format that favours a handful of competitors? It is a European wide competition. Why should every team who takes part not have an equal chance and start on an equal footing?

If every team that takes part does not have an equal chance is it a proper competition? Since the format has changed and constantly been tweaked, the variety of winners has being getting incredibly fewer and fewer. Does that matter? Do people like seeing the same teams winning every season?? 

In terms of the GAA similar anomalies are at play but for vastly different reasons. Obviously a certain amount of it is financially driven but light years away from what drives such changes in soccer. The provincial dividing of inter county teams effectively introduces a quasi seeding system that suits certain teams and shields them from certain challenges that other teams have to face. Certain stadiums are difficult to play in whether it be a poor playing surface , intimidating atmosphere , unpleasant dressing rooms or just a difficult awkward location to access.

But if that stadium is not in your province you will never have to worry about it. Likewise certain provinces have epic local rivalries that require enormous amounts of energy to negotiate while other provinces have little rivalry between teams and much more sedate pace of action. This has been accentuated by format tweaks where teams can now choose which games to prioritise especially when facing teams they have little hope of beating and little reward for beating in earlier rounds. The old system of lose one game and your out produced a wider variety of champions.

This gives stronger teams an advantage in that they are not getting full blooded challenges until late in the season. While teams in other provinces are tearing into each other from day one and expanding huge amounts of energy just to stay in the championship. Anyway the outcome of this is that even the GAA which is not driven by anything like the same turbo charged financial machine as Soccer has ended up with a successful honours list that is every bit as lob sided and concentrated into the hands of as few teams as it’s Soccer equivalent.

And like soccer this has only become more pronounced in the 21st century.  Certain lifestyle changes could be feeding into this phenomenon. Life is more complex now than it was 30/40 years ago. Jobs are more demanding. Technology is more attention draining. People are expected to do many things at once. The cost of just surviving has skyrocketed. Ease of travel etc has only increased expectations of one being in two places at one time. As sport evolves the levels of fitness and commitment have exponentially increased.

If success is not a prospect for more and more  counties less people in those counties are willing to make those commitments?? While the opposite is the case in the successful counties? Either way in January 2024 it will be much more easier to predict who will be in the final mix up in nearly every major sporting competition than it was to make the same predictions in January 1994 or 1984. All in all in my opinion that makes for an incredibly dull sporting world that is supposed to escape us out of the crushing reality of similar phenomena in the real everyday world. What is the point of sport if it just demonstrates that the rich get richer and those with advantage just get more advantage. The attraction of sport ,besides wanting your team to do well , is surely the unpredictability of whether your team actually does well or not.

As I said maybe this is not the forum for this topic but it is too general an observation for any particular sporting forum and it does rhyme with a general drift of success and resources into the hands of fewer and fewer people in a wide variety of fields in life in general in the 21st century.

ZookeeperDub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058309635/a-question-of-sport-in-the-21st-century

Sorry but that's too hard to read without paragraphs.

In terms of soccer it is money. The top clubs have the most money and can pay for most for the best players. So the days of Celtic with a largely home grown team winning in Europe will no longer happen because if they do develop good young players they will be bought out.

In terms of Ireland and LOI. Well we have a huge population who would prefer to spend millions every year going to England and supporting English clubs than local clubs. Until that changes then nothing else will.

The GAA was too hard to read but I guess the point you are making is the changes now suit counties that might have got knocked out in the past? well that is money as well. The back door etc was brought in because a county might spend an entire 12 months preparing for the ALl Ireland to get knocked out in first round, then have nothing else till the league. So getting a few games in with bigger crowds will mean more money to support the game.

20silkcut

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120989171#Comment_120989171

Apologies for the lack of paragraphs typing off a phone. Essentially what I’m saying is that in soccer the format changes were blatantly making a competition more favourable to bigger clubs and that has inevitably produced fewer variety of champions.

This makes the competition incredibly predictable and therefore dull in my opinion. It still produces exciting games but amongst the same constant selection of teams.

In GAA the accidental provincial system creates inherent biases that have produced the same blandness in variety of champions which has gotten worse in the last 20 years for whatever reasons. Of course certain counties were targeted as growth areas by the GAA and targeted with funding so a certain amount is down to money. But even as an amateur sport it has produced the same concentrated handful of teams with all the success.

ZookeeperDub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120989349#Comment_120989349

The changes haven't made the competition more favourable to the bigger teams. The money the bigger teams have over the smaller ones is the issue. Just look at the millions in debt the likes of Real Madrid/Barca/man Utd hold. The likes of Man City spending billions on players with no income to provide for it.

In terms of the GAA, it is what it is.

Jack Daw

Soccer is dead.I like watching the games but the competitions are tedious, it's like reading a book where individual passages are excellent but the overall story is crap.

Money and Greed of the top clubs is a large part of the reason and the unwillingness to do something about it is really dreadful for the sport, none of the people involved care anymore and even the fans don't really care.The big clubs fans are from all over the world and the game panders to the world wide fan base of the big teams rather than the local fans. This means there is no incentive to fix the competitiveness issue because the big clubs make huge money from so called fans all over the world who just support the team to make themselves feel like they are successful themselves so any reduction in the success of the big clubs by making it mire competitive means they lose these fake fans and therefore their money.

There is no sense of achievement in the sport anymore, you just buy all your rivals best player and then beat them, what the hell kind of achievement is that, it's like Usian Bolt winning because he shot his competitors in the leg just before the start of the race.

Also I'd argue the way the game is played makes it less competitive, every team has basically the same tactics, pass the ball form the back, press from the front every team plays a short passing game these days which reduces the smaller teams chances as how can you beat a team with better players when you essentially mirror their tactics. Usually strategy in sport was you do something different to compensate for your flaws not play into your opponents hands by essentially playing the same style they do.

I still love watching the sport but I don;t think it's anywhere near as entertaining on a game by game basis as it was 25 years ago and it's obviously way less competitive than it was back then.Back in the 90's and earlier playing Rosenberg, Gothenberg,Dinamo Kiev for example in the champions league was considered a really tough game nowadays clubs like that haven't a hope of competing.

PS: Mods please leave this topic on After ours, this could be a very interesting discussion, don;t move it to some other sport form where it will just die off.

Jack Daw

GAA is less competitive because it's too professional now.When everyone made a relatively half assed effort (by todays standards) in the 80's and 90's it meant the standard was lower and so it was easier for all teams to get to the top.

Now that the game is more professional it means he standards are higher which means it's much more difficult to get to the top and as a result extremely difficult for the smaller counties to do so.This mans the incentive to play and try to win for your county has reduced as why bother when you know you have no hope of success.

20silkcut

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120989776#Comment_120989776

In relation to the champions league the clamour for change reached deafening proportions in the late 1980’s after the likes of steua Bucharest, PSV Eindhoven and FC Porto won the competition in successive years. Ever since then it’s been a spiral of changes and tweaks to ensure the big clubs stay in the competition as long as possible and smaller clubs become more disadvantaged.

As the poster above says it’s like a sprinter shooting his competitors in the legs before they are out of the blocks. It’s literally that obscene and blatant.

20silkcut

To be a competitive inter county GAA player in todays world you have to specialise and commit to a training regime that is very intrusive to your life.

imagine trying to convince a young person in a county like Longford or Leitrim to make such commitments where the chances of success are minimal and the only exposure maybe a few minutes on a highlight reel on the Sunday game. It’s just not going to happen. I know some people in those counties do make such commitments but it must be getting fewer and fewer with each passing year and that is showing in the results.

randd1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120990365#Comment_120990365

To be honest, I think the soccer fix to improve competitiveness is easy enough in theory, but would never happen. Create and enforce money caps is the way to go.

Salary caps of 250m per club per year.

Salary cap of 20m per year for a player.

Players receive 10% of all transfer fees, and have to pay their agents themselves.

Transfer fees limited to 25m, and limited to 125m per year per club.

Any club that breaches the salary rules has their salary slashed by 25% for two seasons. Any club that breaches the transfer rules would be banned for bringing in players for two years. A second warning breach within 3 years of the first would see clubs automatically relegated from their respective league for the following season, and their salary cap reduced to 50%.

Players would still be free to pursue endorsements outside the basic wage packet and external sources of revenue the player earns would not be counted towards the salary cap. Bonuses (scoring bonuses/trophy bonuses/clean sheet bonuses) would not count towards the salary cap.

Clubs supplementing player wages through third party avenues would see the player banned for one year, and the clubs salary cap reduced by 25%. A second breach within 3 years would see clubs automatically relegated from their respective league for the following season, and their salary cap reduced to 50%.

Clubs that first register a player as professional at 16 would received 20% of all transfer fees up until the age of 23.

All competition prize money to be distributed in such a way as the winning team does not receive more than 65% the lowest team receives.

And all clubs have to start 5 players form their home country in all competitions.

Pure fantasy, but could solve a lot of soccer's problems.