There was a time when sport was allowed to breathe. When a Test match could meander through five days of sunburn and subtlety, when a football game could end 0-0 and still be considered a masterpiece of tactical tension. When the crowd was not a demographic, but a congregation. Now, sport is being reconfigured – chopped, diced, and algorithmically seasoned – for a new audience that doesn’t so much watch as scroll past.
Welcome to the age of sportainment, where the game itself is merely the scaffolding for the content it produces. The Hundred, the proposed rugby R360, sevens, LIV golf, each a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from the limbs of tradition and the torso of TikTok. The goal? To seduce the elusive 80 percent: the younger, non-committal fans who don’t know the offside rule but know how to swipe. (I borrowed this percentage from Prof Ross Tucker, whose instincts are razor-sharp).
The modern athlete is no longer just a competitor; they’re a content creator, a brand ambassador, a walking highlight reel. Their job is not merely to win, but to be clippable. A friggin’ content machine. A 40m screamer, a backflip celebration, a mic’d-up moment of faux authenticity. The game is the backdrop; the moment is the currency.
This is not evolution. It’s erosion.
The Hundred didn’t arrive to solve a problem in cricket, it arrived to solve a problem in marketing. SA20 isn’t a celebration of South African cricketing depth; it’s a billboard with boundary ropes. Rugby sevens? A sport that once offered Olympic legitimacy now feels like speed-dating with studs. And athletics, once the cathedral of human achievement, now resembles a YouTube playlist of “Top 10 Fastest Finishes.” Talking about you, Michael Johnson.
We’re told this is innovation. That sport must adapt or die. That the younger generation has the attention span of a goldfish and the loyalty of a Tinder swipe. But this is a false binary. Sport doesn’t need to be faster, it needs to be better. It needs to be meaningful.
The problem isn’t the length of the game. It’s the lack of narrative. The absence of stakes. The erasure of context. A six in a T20 match means nothing if it’s the 14th of the day in a match already decided by the coin toss. A try in rugby sevens is thrilling, yes, but without the slow burn of build-up, it’s just fireworks without a fuse.
We are creating a sport that is all climax and no foreplay.
Here lies the central paradox: in chasing the 80 percent – the casuals, the passersby, the dopamine junkies – we risk alienating the 20 percent who actually care. The ones who buy season tickets, who know the young prospects, who can recite the 1995 Rugby World Cup squad in their sleep. These are the fans who give sport its soul. And they are being treated like legacy software: still functional, but no longer sexy.
The danger is not just that we lose them. It’s that we lose the meaning they bring. Because sport without context is just movement. It’s choreography without story. It’s a TikTok dance.
The modern fan is no longer a participant in a shared experience, they’re a data point. Every click, every swipe, every pause is fed into the machine. The result? A sport designed not for joy, but for engagement metrics. Not for drama, but for dopamine.
This is how we end up with cricket matches that have fireworks before the toss. With rugby games that feel like halftime shows. With athletics meetings that resemble nightclub openings. The sport is not the product, it’s the bait.
And the audience? Less a crowd, more a focus group.
In this brave new world, nuance is the first casualty. There’s no room for the slow burn, the tactical chess match, the psychological warfare. Everything must be immediate, obvious, and ideally, viral. Magic land, no less.
But sport is not supposed to be obvious. It’s supposed to be layered. It’s supposed to reward patience, knowledge, and emotional investment. It’s supposed to make you feel something after the moment, not just during it.
We are replacing depth with dopamine. And the result is a sport that feels like junk food . . . satisfying in the moment, but ultimately hollow.
The XFL tried to reinvent American football twice. First in 2001, with Vince McMahon’s WWE-infused spectacle with no fair catches, locker room cameras, and a “scramble” instead of a coin toss. It was sport as theatre, and it bombed spectacularly. The 2020 reboot, led by McMahon and later The Rock, was more serious but still folded under financial strain. Turns out, fans want authenticity, not gimmicks.
The Hundred in cricket is another cautionary tale. A 100-ball format designed to woo families and festival-goers, it simplified rules and sidelined tradition. While it drew new eyes, it also alienated purists and disrupted the County Championship. It’s cricket, yes, but cricket with its soul removed.
The European Super League was perhaps the most brazen attempt to rewire football’s DNA. A closed shop for elite clubs, it promised guaranteed revenue and no relegation. Fans revolted. The idea collapsed in 48 hours. Meritocracy, it turns out, still matters.
Even the Olympics aren’t immune. Tug-of-war and polo out, skateboarding, breakdancing and sport climbing in. Tennis flirted with Fast4, golf with LIV and GolfSixes, netball with Fast5, chasing speed and spectacle. Few stuck. Most stumbled.
So what’s the solution? It’s not to reject innovation, but to reframe it. To ask not “How can we make this shorter?” but “How can we make this matter?” To build formats that respect the intelligence of the audience, rather than pander to its impulses.
It means investing in storytelling. In context. In history. It means treating fans not as consumers, but as custodians. It means remembering that sport is not just entertainment, it’s culture.
And culture cannot be rushed.
Sport is not broken. It’s being broken. By suits who think engagement is the same as emotion. By marketers who believe virality is the same as value. By algorithms that know everything about our habits and nothing about our hearts.
The irony is that in trying to make sport more accessible, we are making it less meaningful. In trying to make it more exciting, we are making it less memorable. In trying to reach everyone, we are reaching no one.
So here’s the plea: slow down. Let sport breathe. Let it be boring sometimes. Let it be difficult. Let it be real.
