From VAR to the rise of women’s sport, the media’s finest were hit and miss in predicting how things would develop
Imagine tumbling back in time to 1 January, 2000. You pick up the 70p Saturday Guardian, with its spectacular photograph of Earth from space and a headline that hails the dawn of the new millennium. Soon you are reading a host of predictions for how the 21st century will play out – across science and sport, lifestyle and life itself – many of which oscillate between the fantastical and the terrifying.
By 2010, a newborn will have a robot pet, you learn from Andy Beckett’s brilliant essay Born to be Wired. By 2030 they will be “in brain-to-brain contact, via electronic implants, without needing to speak with family members, lovers and friends”. If that is not wild enough, one expert reckons that by the end of the 21st century, “it is not clear whether we will be people or robots”.
Yet that assumes humans even make it that far. Because over in the sports section, the heavyweight boxer Julius Francis is warning of Armageddon. “If we are facing the end of the world I want to be ready,” he adds, ominously.
What were the smartest minds on Fleet Street thinking about the future of sport when they woke up in the year 2000? And, 25 years on, how accurate were they?
The first thing that stands out when you dig into the archives? No one predicted the rise of women’s sport. In fact the one columnist who focused on the issue was breathtakingly unreconstructed.
“In your wildest dreams can you see a women’s All Black team?” wrote Robert Alexander in the Belfast Telegraph. “Could they generate the same type of atmosphere when performing the ‘haka’? I think not! On the other hand if they donned the grass skirt and did a Māori dance before kick-off it could be quite an exciting sight.”
It sounds like something an ignorant 70s standup comedian would say, especially given that the Black Ferns had won the Rugby World Cup and performed the haka the previous year. Although Alexander did later add a positive note of sorts. “Let’s not be too chauvinistic here,” he continued. “Many of the professional women’s football teams are really quite good. The last five years in the development of women’s football has improved dramatically.”
This was, of course, a very different era. The internet was barely out of its embryonic stages. Social media did not exist. Nor did smartphones. Millions of newspapers were still sold every day. Staggeringly, betting companies could not advertise on television and radio.
It seems strange now, but there was also a widespread sense that Britain was a nation in sporting decline. Especially with Team GB having won just one gold medal at the previous Olympics in Atlanta, and England, under Kevin Keegan, struggling to qualify for Euro 2000.
Speaking to Harry Harris at the Mirror, Sir Bobby Charlton voiced that concern more vividly than most. “I worry to death about England,” he said. “You have to wonder where we are going and ask: ‘Are the players dedicated enough?’ That is not just confined to football, it’s in rugby and cricket. A number of sports are suffering the same fate as football.”
Naturally, the state of the national game was on the mind of many sports writers, with many forecasting that football’s massive bubble was bound to burst. There were reasons to be worried. Rachel Anderson, the only woman to be a Fifa registered agent in 2000, predicted in the Guardian that “within five to 10 years we would lose 20% of Football League clubs, as most of them can’t even make ends meet”.
Attendances for the recent third round of the FA Cup had been disappointing, while Manchester United’s decision to pull out of the tournament to play in the Club World Cup also rang alarm bells.
In the Times, Simon Barnes sensed something was in the air. “No more than 15 years ago, football was the pariah game, and you had to be brave to speak out and say, well, I happen to like the stuff,” he wrote. “Football was a dying sport, part of a dying culture. The middle-class sports were the things to bet on.
“Football brilliantly solved its own problem by becoming middle-class, of course. The turn-around came with Gazza and Italia 90, the rest followed from the famous tears … [but] it is not the case that once a sport starts to grow, it will carry on growing for ever.”
That theme was echoed by the Guardian’s venerable football correspondent David Lacey, who warned that football should be entering the new century “aware of its limitations” before floating the idea of a maximum wage. Lacey noted that Manchester United had recently increased Roy Keane’s wages to £50,000 a week, and insisted the economics did not add up.
“There has to be a limit to what players can earn and the extra amounts spectators can be charged in order to finance higher wage bills,” he added. “Most clubs would regard a limit of £20,000 a week as a not unreasonable basis for negotiation even though this would risk losing the best English talents abroad.”
However another of Lacey’s predictions proved to be eerily accurate as he predicted the advent of video assistant referees nearly two decades early. “Refereeing controversies have become endemic because the ways television can expose and analyse decisions are becoming increasingly sophisticated,” he wrote. “An already strong temptation to make TV the referee’s friend rather than his enemy may prove impossible to resist.”
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But Lacey offered a warning too: “A fourth official studying incidents on closed-circuit television and giving his decision through an ear-piece may eventually become as much a part of football as cricket, although spectators might quickly tire of the disruptions to matches this would cause.”
Not everyone was down on football. At the Sunday Telegraph, Owen Slot wrote a superb piece that predicted – at the top levels – the game would only get even bigger. And he also was prescient in forecasting how the general population’s activity levels would drop even further. He quoted Barry Griffin, the managing director of Asics, who predicted fewer people would buy trainers to actually play sport. “They will surf the net, they’ll watch TV, the parks will be sparse,” he added. With every passing year, activity figures from Sport England prove him more correct.
However forecasting is a tough business and Slot also got it wrong in predicting that boxing and county cricket might soon be in deep trouble. There was logic behind his prediction, mind. As Slot noted, outside football, the biggest TV audience for sport in 1999 was the Grand National, followed by the Brazilian Grand Prix, the World Athletics Championships, the Wimbledon men’s final and the Rugby World Cup match between England and New Zealand. While the Open, then on the BBC, was just 18th.
“Note that cricket, in the year of a World Cup, failed to register in the top 20 and that boxing, in the year that Lennox Lewis twice beat Evander Holyfield (sort of) did not come close,” added Slot.
So how did he see the future? “Boxing may barely exist as a professional sport in the next decade. County cricket may not either. Divisions two and three of English football will be amateur leagues full of semi-professionals. And rugby unions in the northern hemisphere will still be arguing over the structure of the season.” The last bit is still true today.
Perhaps the best piece of all about the future of sport came from Simon Barnes. He identified that sport was now bigger than Hollywood. But, like the film industry and capitalism, he believed that what he called “Megasport” inevitably carried the seeds of its own destruction.
“Megasport is the modern Olympiad, the modern 32-nation World Cup finals, the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, it is the new world club football championship: it is every aspect of sport of mass consumption entertainment,” he wrote.
“But as sporting administrators seek ever greater events, on the premise that people will watch sport no matter what its quality, we see sport suffer, we see athletes suffer. The collapse of Ronaldo at the World Cup gave a clear indication that sport is reaching a stage when it is too big, too rich and too important for mere human beings.
“And as the world gets served up with too many overhyped damp squibs, sport will no longer be able to escape the Who’s anthem: Won’t Get Fooled Again. Sport will continue to grow bigger, but the seeds of decline are already evident in its extraordinary success.”
Barnes’s argument sounded logical then. In truth, it still does now. And yet those seeds continue to grow into mighty acorns. Back in 2000, Sky showed only 60 Premier League games a year – a figure unchanged since the Premier League formed in 1992. Next season, up to 270 games from England’s top tier will be shown live across various broadcasters.
Sport dominates television ratings more than ever before, even as subscription costs grow. During the Olympics, for instance, the BBC’s live show topped the ratings for 17 consecutive days. And while there are perennial fears about the lower levels of the Football League and some sports, Megasport is booming. And who is to say in another 25 years it will not be even stronger?
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