When Fikile Mbalula announced on April 25 that he was banning four sporting codes from hosting and bidding for major international tournaments as punishment for inadequate transformation records, the irony was blatant.
Here was a sports minister who expected SA’s sporting bodies to hit their transformation targets at the top level when government was neglecting to supply the raw materials lower down.
Mbalula’s release of the Eminent Persons Group report on transformation, with its sanctions for athletics, rugby, cricket and netball, raised some important questions.
How could sports be expected to change their demographics at national level when the lack of facilities in government schools essentially leaves SA’s talent corralled in a handful of wealthy private schools?
And while it is all well and good for politicians to hold sporting institutions to account in parliament every so often, who is holding Mbalula’s department to account?
On top of the disappointment of losing a strong bid to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup — a disappointment that is surely shared by people of all races — Mbalula’s announcement was another unwelcome reminder of the unusual parameters within which the SA sports industry must operate, an industry that has provided little joy to the nation recently as it has lurched from one crisis to the next.
The transformation issue has hovered over SA sport for more than two decades now, descending every few years to send the national conversation back down the cul-de-sac of race. The debate inevitably turns ugly, fracturing the unity that sport manages to provide, every so often, to an otherwise divided nation.
Political meddling is nothing new, and its effects are keenly felt. A 2015 survey by BMi Sports Marketing showed that continued government intervention in sport affairs is the primary cause for concern among the top decision makers in the sports sponsorship industry.
While the survey listed continually high consumer interest in sport as the main reason for optimism, that is premised on sport maintaining positive associations in people’s minds — something that comes under threat when politicians interfere.
BMi’s valuation of the sports sponsorship industry (including sponsorship revenues, broadcast rights sales, leveraging and activation opportunities) for 2015 was approximately R8.5bn.
"Compared to 2014 the market grew at a modest 3.5% in 2015," says Dave Sidenberg, BMi’s executive director.
The truth is that SA has the resources and the talent to transform and to enjoy success, but is doing neither as politicians and administrators fall over themselves trying to please each other.
"Sport is political first in SA," says Richard Dunn, CEO of sports agency Playmakers. "The people who are running sport are spending most of their time addressing political issues as opposed to driving and implementing world-class innovation and solutions.
"The problem is we are not all aligned to what the word ‘success’ means within the sports playing field. Until all stakeholders get aligned it is going to be a bumpy road. It is frustrating and I don’t think it will get any better in the short to medium term. Rights holders are not spending enough time re-defining their own sports to deliver on what consumers want."
This lack of progress in the market reflected what was happening on the field.
With 53m people — most of whom are passionate about sport — and a gene pool with a penchant for producing some of the world’s most outrageous talent, there is no reason why SA should not be dominating the games that we take seriously. But our football team is ranked 70th in the world, and our rugby and cricket teams are in a rut.
The tendency after failures in major tournaments is to search for simplistic reasons. Our strikers aren’t good enough.
We don’t have enough variety in our bowling. Nobody beats the All Blacks. Quotas are holding us back.
But to glean more meaningful answers, we must reverse out of the cul-de-sac of race, analyse the system from the top down and return to the question of accountability.
If we do so we find that, much like the country, our sports are run by entrenched elites who are uninfluenced by the public they supposedly serve, and keep practices of good corporate governance at arm’s length.
To begin with, we see that none of the boards that runs the big-three sports has a majority of independent directors.
The Premier Soccer League (PSL) executive committee is made up entirely of club representatives, who act in self-interest rather than thinking about what might take the game forward.
As the chairman of the PSL as well as the owner of Orlando Pirates, Irvin Khoza has become all-powerful, his position bolstered by a close association with Kaizer Motaung, the owner of Kaizer Chiefs and the only man who could possibly challenge Khoza.
The executive committee includes seven other supportive voices, and last year the nine members pocketed more than R7m each in commissions from broadcast, radio and sponsorship deals.
Rather than demanding better governance in return for their investment in the industry, big business cosies up to sport’s governors and does its best to maintain its own entrenched elite.
In the television market, the SABC’s ineptitude and resulting inability to bid for rights essentially gives SuperSport a golden key. Little thought is given to how we might get more games on free-to-air TV, which is unquestionably in the public interest.
When it comes to big-ticket sponsorship, the pool of interested bidders is small and, in some respects, anticompetitive. This allows the status quo to be maintained, which favours the small group of overinfluential market players.
SA Rugby’s general council gives no more than a token nod to external voices, with just two independents among its 12 members. The provinces continue to have the biggest say and to vote according to self-interest, and are still to give an adequate reason why, in Jurie Roux, they continue to employ a CEO who stands accused of serious financial mismanagement from his time at the University of Stellenbosch.
Had judge Chris Nicholson’s recommendations been followed by Cricket SA in 2013, the CSA board would have included nine nonexecutive independent members on an 11-member board. But the SA Sports Confederation & Olympic Committee (Sascoc) insisted that "sport must be run by sports people", so CSA settled for five independents on a 12-person board.
This ideology that Sascoc continues to peddle is from the amateur age, leaving SA sport rooted in a bygone era. Its theory has been disproven elsewhere.
In 2013, New Zealand Cricket revamped its constitution and overhauled its board of directors, which was reduced to eight members, all of them independent. That did not mean there was no cricket experience on the board. Four of the members had played for New Zealand, including the president, Stephen Boock. All eight had strong business experience, and several had been involved in sports administration at a high level. And in Liz Dawson, New Zealand appointed the first woman to serve on the board of a test cricket nation.
The results have been seen on the field of play, where the Black Caps have caught the eye with their dynamic style of play at the same time that they have achieved new heights. Previously a middling side who punched slightly above their weight for a nation of just 4m people, New Zealand reached their first final in last year’s 50-over World Cup — beating SA in the semifinal — and turned heads while making the knockouts of the World Twenty20 this year.
The team that beat them in last year’s World Cup, Australia, overhauled its governance model in 2011 and has subsequently resumed its dominance of cricket.
The difference in progressive thinking between CSA and Cricket Australia produced a stark contrast this past summer, in the form of the two bodies’ domestic Twenty20 competitions.
In 2011, Cricket Australia recognised the format’s changing landscape and established the Big Bash League, putting their state system aside to set up eight city-based Twenty20 franchises. This summer the competition reached maturity and shattered attendance records, with over 1,030,000 people turning up for the 35 fixtures — more than the 1,016,421 who attended last year’s 49 World Cup matches in Australasia.
On January 2, the Melbourne Cricket Ground was flooded by 80,883 fans for the local Big Bash derby between the Stars and the Renegades. Around 50% of them were families — one of the league’s biggest successes has been attracting children who had never watched a live cricket match.
In the same season, SA’s Ram Slam T20 featured empty grounds and generated little television interest. It hit the headlines only when it emerged that a former international player, Gulam Bodi, had approached dozens of players on behalf of bookmaking syndicates on the Indian subcontinent who wanted to fix matches in the competition.
Media analysts have predicted that the Big Bash’s TV rights could fetch A$60m a year in its next cycle. Meanwhile, CSA is still trying to work out how to bring its competition into the modern era — and is yet to wrap up its long-running investigation into the match-fixing saga.
In many respects that scandal had its roots in player dissatisfaction, otherwise the seeds that Bodi so artlessly sowed would not have found fertile ground. Racial quotas produced most of the discontentment, but not just among white players — it was telling that the majority of those who followed Bodi’s advances were players of colour. Clearly the system is not working for anyone, which rather undermines the methodology behind Mbalula’s crusade.
Cricket is not the only SA sport to be afflicted by match-fixing. Six years after a handful of Bafana Bafana friendlies were fixed in the lead-up to the 2010 Fifa World Cup, the SA Football Association is yet to take definitive action. As a result, it was no surprise to learn recently that syndicates were attempting to corrupt the PSL. Without strong action, the fixing syndicates see the game here as open for business.
In scrutinising the rot, an important question must be raised: where are the fans? Surely, the leaders must be held accountable to the supporters, the most important stakeholders in sport.
In English Premier League football, it is common for the head of official supporter groups to sit on the club’s board and have a say in its direction. In Barcelona this is taken to an extreme (but admirable) level where the fans own and operate the club.
In SA, we appear to be too pliable. Perhaps this speaks to the peculiarities of our authoritarian past, but it is also because we prefer to see sport as a positive force for unity, and become too willing to swallow the industry’s lies.
It does not help that we have an increasingly pliant sports media, who too easily sign up to the mundane messages being peddled by the sporting bodies. Often those journalists who fall out of line are bullied by the organisations and cast out of the pack.
The good news is that the shifting nature of the media is laying the groundwork for a potential fan-led revolution, and sports marketing overseas is being driven by it.
"Social media is growing," says Sidenberg. "We’re moving into virtual reality, mobile apps. We’re talking about mass individualisation, fantasy leagues, real-time player ratings. The environment internationally — and we’re slightly behind in this — is becoming extremely interactive. Millennials are beginning to outnumber baby-boomers as fans and at major sports events. That’s the way things are heading."
This evolution becomes evident at this time of year as the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Champions League reaches its climax. Boasting the world’s finest footballers, the Champions League provides one of the greatest spectacles in sport. The final is the most-watched annual sporting event, with hundreds of millions tuning in around the world.
Among the many statistics to come out of last year’s final, in which FC Barcelona beat Juventus in Munich, was that around 28m people had 76m Facebook interactions related to the game, while there were almost 2m mentions of #UCLfinal on Twitter. With almost 55m likes, the Champions League’s Facebook page is the most popular league or association page on the platform.
The competition is also the place where sponsors display the types of innovation that can drive the sports marketing business forward in a stagnant market like SA’s.
Heineken has shown just how effective interactive advertisements can be with their Champions League association. Its most recent advertisement to go viral featured Roma fan Simone, who was presented with the dilemma of whether he should accept a VIP ticket to attend a live game against Real Madrid, or turn it down and watch with his regular football buddies at home. After taking the ticket, his betrayal was exposed on the big screen at the Stadio Olimpico prior to kick-off, but he was offered the chance to reconsider and join his three friends. Startled, he followed a steward to an exit door, only to be led to a private box high up in the stadium where his friends were waiting.
Football fans could identify with the roller-coaster of emotions and the issue of loyalty, and the advertisement has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube alone. The interplay between reality and fantasy has always been a key attraction for sports fans.
Examples of interactivity are rare in the SA market, though the Carling Black Label Cup has tapped into this with a pre-season game between Chiefs and Pirates in which the fans vote to decide the starting XIs.
"The campaign is so successful because it is driven off a real consumer insight that the fans want to be the coach," says Dunn, whose agency has played a key role in the event. "It is a great example of how important it is to leverage and put a large portion of your sponsorship investment into bringing your sponsorship to life. Ultimately this is a one-off match but it is leveraged and engages consumers in the market for around five months."
Otherwise the SA industry has retained its focus on naming rights and big-ticket sponsorship. On any given Saturday, tuning in to watch the country’s favourite sports continues to have a familiar feel, with the same big brands headlining the same events year after year. It was no surprise when SA Breweries’ sponsorship of SA Rugby was renewed for another five years in April, stretching Castle Lager’s association with the sport to 23 years.
Yet Sidenberg and Dunn both see the nature of sponsorship changing from one of single title sponsors to one of several co-sponsors who are left with more money to spend on activations — a belief backed up by SA Rugby’s inability to land a title sponsor for the Currie Cup this year, after Absa opted not to renew a 30-year association.
This emphasis on reaching the fan in a more meaningful way would appear to be the future, but also the solution to many of the ills in SA sport. If fans truly want to see their sports governed properly and their teams become successful, we are entering an era where their voices will be increasingly difficult for sponsors to ignore. —
Financial Mail
