首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
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
admin
2013-06-17
38
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.
The very passion that excites football crowds (and once excited investors) often causes decisions to be taken ______.
选项
答案
on non-commercial grounds
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/suM7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
Attentiontodetailissomethingeveryonecanandshoulddoespeciallyina【B1】______jobmarket.BobCrossley,ahumanresourc
Michaelisanexampleofaseverelydisabledpersonwhohasbecome______atmanysurvivalskills.
A、WithanEnglishfamily,B、Inaflatnearthecollege.C、Withalanguageteacher.D、Inastudentdormitory.A信息明示题。弗朗西斯博士虽然开始提
Thepromiseoffindinglong-termtechnologicalsolutionstotheproblemofworldfoodshortagesseemsdifficulttofulfill.Many
OlympicGamesareinternationalsportscompetition,heldevery-fouryearsatadifferentsite,inwhichathletesfromdifferent
MessagetoyoungChineseinthe21stcenturyFundamentalSciencehasprovideduswithanincreasinglydetailedandaccurate
MessagetoyoungChineseinthe21stcenturyFundamentalSciencehasprovideduswithanincreasinglydetailedandaccurate
Theholidaysareatimeforeating:piesatThanksgiving,chocolatesforAdventandoverflowinggiftbasketsofcookiesandcand
ThecurrentemergencyinMexicoCitythathastakenoverourlivesisnothingIcouldeverhaveimaginedformeormychildren.
Itisobviousthat____________(电视对人们工作和学习的影响的确是很大的).
随机试题
假定社会平均资产收益率为8%,无风险报酬率为2%,被评估企业所在行业平均风险与社会平均风险的比率为1.2,则用于企业整体价值评估的折现率为【】
黄芪桂枝五物汤的功用是()
线形骨折最常合并的颅内血肿是
下列属于倾销行为的是( )。
“学为人师,行为示范”的主要内容是()。
同桂林山水、云南石林、长江三峡一起被誉为中国四大自然奇观的是()。
【给定资料】1.地区差距问题是一个历史的问题,也是一个现实的问题,还是一个发展中的问题。由于我国国土辽阔,不同地区之间自然条件不同、资源禀赋各异、历史基础有别,我国的地区差距问题由来已久。中华人民共和国成立以后,尽管居住在西部地区的少数民族在政治上实
党的十九大报告指出,加快完善社会主义市场经济体制。经济体制改革必须以________和________为重点,实现产权有效激励,要素自由流动,价格反应灵活,竞争公平有序,企业优胜劣汰。
以下属于智力因素的是()
编写如下程序代码:OptionExplicitPrivateSubForm—Click()DimxAsVariantDimiAsVariantx=Array(50,27,69,80,45)
最新回复
(
0
)