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  3. Football and Money Why was it football, rather than the other great Victorian sports, that captured the world? One reason ma

Football and Money Why was it football, rather than the other great Victorian sports, that captured the world? One reason ma

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问题                                 Football and Money
    Why was it football, rather than the other great Victorian sports, that captured the world? One reason may have been that it does not require expensive equipment or a well-manicured playing surface. Football is ideally adapted to kick-arounds in the favelas (巴西的贫民区) of Brazil or the shanty (简陋小屋，棚屋) towns of Africa, which continue to produce many of the world’s leading players. Football’s simplicity may also have contributed to its popularity as a spectator sport. It means not only that everybody can play, but also that any country or club can aspire to win. Even the most famous players from the richest nations or clubs can be defeated by 11 inspired opponents. Football’s superpowers are Brazil, Argentina, Italy, France and Germany. Its rising powers are in Africa.
    Any event that can attract the attention of billions of people would seem sure to be a big money-spinner. What would business or product not yearn for exposure on such a scale? Certainly there is an ever-increasing amount of money washing around the game. The television rights for the 2002 and 2006 World Cups were sold for a minimum of $ 1.7
billion, an eightfold increase on the deal covering the previous three championships. Companies such as Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Toshiba, Hyundai and MasterCard queued up to sign World Cup sponsorship deals, said to cost up to $ 45m apiece. MasterCard’s Deborah Hughes says the World Cup "delivers the most broad-based international TV audience possible," and points out that after the last tournament MasterCard issued 1.5m "World Cup Affinity" credit cards. Most of them were new accounts.
    In Western Europe, the popularity of football has played a big part in the evolution of the media over the past decade. In Britain, the success of BSkyB, a subscription-based satellite-television service that has broken the monopoly of terrestrial broadcasters such as the BBC, was built on Sky’s acquisition in 1992 of the rights to live Premier League football. In France, Canal Plus, a subscription-based channel, wooed its audience with a formula of football and films. The print media too have become devoted to football. In Spain, France and Italy, some of the countries’ best-selling newspapers are given over to sport, and above all football. And even such publications as Le Monde and the Financial Times (as well as The Economist) now write about the game.
    Footballers and football clubs are also playing with ever bigger amounts of money. Mr Zidane recently attracted the biggest transfer fee in football history, when Real Madrid paid $ 64.5m to secure his services; his post-tax pay is thought to be over $ 150,000 a week. That is still less than a top American sports star such as basketball’s Michael Jordan can command, but perhaps not for long. Calculations by Deloitte Touche Sport, a consultancy, show that Manchester United, the richest club in international football, now has larger revenues than any franchise in America’s National Football League (the kind that is played with helmets and hands). Stefan Szymanski, an economist at Imperial College, London, suggests that the football industry worldwide is worth about 150 billion ($ 216 billion).
    But large revenues do not necessarily mean profitability. The world of football seems beset by commercial disasters. The last two companies to own the rights to World Cup football--ISL of Switzerland and Kirch of Germany--have both gone bankrupt. Kirch made a profit out of selling on the World Cup rights, but suffered big losses on its pay-TV operations in Germany, mainly because it had overestimated the public’s willingness to pay for watching televised German league football. Similar problems have sunk ITV Digital in Britain, which had paid 315m to get the rights to some low-grade English soccer games, only to find that viewers were not very interested. ITV Digital is now in administration and says it cannot pay England’s lower-league clubs the money they had been promised. As many as 30 of the less glamorous professional English football clubs are thought to be in danger of going bust.
    The big money in international soccer is concentrated on the elite European clubs, but some of them are also suffering serious losses. In Italy top clubs such as Fiorentina and Lazio have had trouble paying their players this year. The English Premier League (英超联赛) is widely regarded as admirably businesslike, yet almost all Premier League clubs will lose money this year. The share prices of the 20 quoted football clubs in Britain have been plummeting, generally to around a third of their level two years ago. European problems, however, are dwarfed by the financial chaos in Latin America’s clubs, where bankruptcies and strikes are commonplace.
    Some of Europe’s difficulties can be explained by technological and commercial change. When pay-TV arrived, it became plain that football rights were seriously undervalued, so their price shot up, making them too expensive in many markets. Now the inevitable correction has set in.
    This is the kind of thing that could happen in any business. But football as an industry may also have a more systemic problem. The very passion that excites football crowds (and once excited investors) often causes decisions to be taken on non-commercial grounds. Many football clubs across the world are run at a loss by rich men, either for the love of the game or to boost their ego. With so many rich sponsors willing to burn money to fund their teams, even the clubs that are quoted companies--and thus obliged to put profits first--are sucked into a desperate struggle to secure the services of the best players. Footballers’ pay has spiraled out of control. The more money the clubs receive, the more they are compelled to spend. Alan Sugar, an English businessman who retired from football-club ownership after a disillusioning decade, calls it the "prune-juice effect": you can pour a lot in, but it all comes out at the other end. In Italy, according to recent calculations by UEFA, the European football authority, the cost of the players now averages 125% of club revenues.
It’s football’s simplicity that may have contributed to its popularity as a spectator sport and captured the world.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案A
解析
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