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It’s a big weekend for FC Barcelona, as the Catalan club readies for its first home game of the new football season.
The bad news is that the match won’t take place at Camp Nou. The €1.5bn renovation of one of football’s most famous venues drags on, with the city council recently rejecting Barca’s request to host Valencia and 27,000 fans in the middle of a building site.
Instead, the game will take place at Estadi Johan Cruyff, a pocket-sized ground on the outskirts of town. It is normally home to the Barcelona women’s team, and has capacity for just 6,000 people. The revamped Camp Nou, when finished, will hold 105,000.
The club will only allow the 16,151 people who held season tickets during the two seasons spent at Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium to buy tickets, and if demand exceeds supply there will be a lottery.
For a club that so sorely needs cash, the prospect of playing more home games in front of tiny crowds is a disaster. There may be scope to move back to the Olympic Stadium, but a packed out music schedule including Lady Gaga and Katy Perry makes that a real challenge.
This week we’re looking at a row over how betting on horseracing should be taxed. Plus we ask if quick-fire tennis is what the sport needs to reach a broader audience. Do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor
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In the global horse race, the UK is falling behind
On Wednesday the great and the good of British horseracing gathered in a conference hall opposite the Houses of Parliament in central London to mark something that had never happened before. For that one day, no racing took place anywhere across the country. The sport decided to go on “strike” (or at least shift fixtures) in protest at a planned change to the way betting on racing is taxed. The Racing Post newspaper printed a black front page.
Currently online gambling on horseracing and other sports is taxed at 15 per cent in the UK, while the rate for online casinos and slots is 21 per cent. The Labour government has proposed “harmonising” the rates to “create a level playing field”. To racing, that simply looks like a tax increase.
Those running the sport believe it should continue to be taxed differently due to its social importance and cultural heritage. Thoroughbred horses, after all, require a lot more looking after than virtual roulette wheels, while hundreds of thousands of people turn up to watch what is still the country’s second most popular spectator sport.
Other sports, such as football, have huge TV deals with broadcasters. Racing relies on the money it gets from bookmakers to pay the rising bills.
The worry is that a higher tax rate will be the breaking point for the already very strained finances of horseracing. Affordability checks designed to stop problem gambling have already had a cooling effect.
Reducing the profits of bookmakers through higher tax will mean taking money out of the system. Betting companies currently spend significant sums to sponsor race events and to carry the live broadcast feeds from racecourses to their betting shops across the country. Higher taxes will reduce that spending power, and might prompt some bookies to prioritise marketing for their other, cheaper products.
Prize money for the races themselves, already a big challenge in the UK, would then go down even more, fuelling a further exodus of horses as owners look to race elsewhere. The quality of races might then decline and the downward spiral accelerate.
The British Horseracing Authority warns that changing the tax regime could cost the sport £60-70mn a year and send it into “irreversible decline”.
Those inside the Treasury think the warnings are overblown, and have yet to make a decision on the issue anyway.
Racing bosses had been hoping to get more money via the state, not less. They came close to agreeing a new funding formula with the previous UK government that would have resulted in a modest increase in the amount of cash the sport gets from the betting “levy” — a cut of betting profits mandated by the state. But the general election prevented it being signed off.
Without more revenue from somewhere, British horseracing will struggle to remain competitive in a global market place. Prize money elsewhere is higher — whether that’s Japan, Australia and the US, or Ireland and France close to home. While prestige still counts for a lot — few can top the pomp of Royal Ascot — it isn’t enough.
This current fight is about trying to fend off what those in the sector see as a real and immediate threat. But winning it won’t change the way the wind is blowing.
Why tennis needs tie-breaks more than ever
Tennis: tough trade © Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images
Love, 15, 30, deuce, advantage, game. The tennis scoring system might make perfect sense to ardent fans, but it isn’t the most intuitive for casual viewers.
The International Tennis Federation’s official partnership with Tie Break Tens, announced this week, shows the governing body’s growing appreciation of simplicity.
In TB10, as the competition is known, the first player to score 10 points wins, though a 2-point lead is required. No games, no sets, just tiebreakers, the sudden death game usually played when players have put themselves and fans through 12 games of a set and grabbed six each. An entire tournament can wrap up in two hours or so — a far cry from the three-to-five set marathons tennis is known for.
Players have fought for $2mn in prize money at 13 elite TB10 tournaments since it was founded in 2015.
Shorter, simpler formats are emerging as sports attempt to reach casual fans, who are valuable to sponsors, broadcasters and organisers. They spend money diehards don’t — and there are a lot more of them.
While purists scoff, the England and Wales Cricket Board has won over international investors with the creation of The Hundred, a 100-ball competition that does away with some of the jargon of Test cricket (those matches can go on for five days, so tennis fans can’t complain).
In football, Baller League and rival Kings League have experimented with an influencer-first approach that targets viewers on social media and ditches the traditional 11-a-side format in favour of smaller teams.
NFL, the US powerhouse, is pushing flag football to increase grassroots interest, while rugby sevens, a shrunken version of a game known for fielding 15-a-side, delighted crowds at Paris 2024.
Formula 1 holds faster “sprint” races. Saudi-backed LIV Golf is named for the Roman numerals that correspond to the 54-hole format.
Tennis has its own problems. The season is gruelling, a global tour where something is happening every month. No wonder the ITF has promised that TB10 isn’t going to compete with the existing tennis calendar but complement it.
Then you’ve got the fragmentated ecosystem that spans the Grand Slams — the Australian Open, Roland-Garros, Wimbledon and the US Open — the Association of Tennis Professionals and the Women’s Tennis Association.
And there’s the threat of padel and pickleball, two racket sports gaining traction with amateurs and professionals alike.
Luca Santilli, executive director of tennis development at ITF, told Scoreboard that a lot of tennis clubs had benefited from padel and pickleball.
“We know there’s a growing appetite for new formats of play and we want to be part of it,” he said. “We think there is room for everyone.”
The ITF’s recognition of TB10 addresses the need to find the next Carlos Alcaraz or Aryna Sabalenka. Under the governing body’s plans, young players will learn TB10 through the ITF’s development programme for juniors. That could lead to Olympic ambitions (flag football will join the programme in Los Angeles in 2028). Don’t worry if you’re a lapsed adult amateur, the ITF wants you to play TB10 too, just not at the Olympics.
“The tradition of our sport is our strength but sometimes slows us down in a fast-evolving world. With this partnership we believe we can talk to more people of all ages,” Santilli said.
Highlights
Kawhi Leonard: aspirational © Mark J. Terrill/AP
Paramount Skydance is preparing a bid to buy Warner Bros Discovery with funding backed by Oracle’s Larry Ellison. If a takeover is eventually completed, their combined sports offerings would rival Disney’s ESPN.
The collapse of fintech start-up Aspiration Partners has set off a conflagration engulfing the National Basketball Association, Hollywood and the White House. The Los Angeles Clippers basketball team and its billionaire owner Steve Ballmer have denied wrongdoing. The NBA is investigating whether Ballmer’s investment in Aspiration was used to circumvent the league’s salary cap by back-channelling $28mn to star forward Kawhi Leonard through an endorsement deal with the fintech. Catch up here.
Chelsea Football Club was hit with 74 charges relating to alleged breaches of the English Football Association’s regulations concerning the agents who play a vital role in the multibillion-pound transfer market. The alleged wrongdoing took place during the tenure of former owner Roman Abramovich. Private equity firm Clearlake Capital and financier Todd Boehly uncovered the issues when they bought the club for £2.5bn in 2022 and informed the FA.
A new report by Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates diagnosed rugby union with an old illness. The international game is dominant among the 800mn people with an interest in the sport but only 24mn are superfans of the club game.
Vodafone partnered with European football governing body Uefa, in a deal worth around €300mn over five years, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Sponsoring the men’s and women’s Champions League and other Uefa competitions is the latest sports partnership for the telecoms company, which is also the new shirt sponsor of German football club Borussia Dortmund. Vodafone intends to promote its travel eSim product through the competitions.
Transfer Market
Monumental Sports & Entertainment hired Steven Miller as executive vice-president and chief financial officer. Miller, previously CFO of eyewear company Warby Parker, will report to founder Ted Leonsis, who leads the company that owns brands including the Washington Capitals ice hockey team, the NBA’s Wizards and the WNBA’s Mystics.
Final Whistle
© Amel Emric/Reuters
Imagine you are the head coach of a national football team but you’re still recovering from ankle surgery. How do you get to and from the dressing room? German coach Ralf Rangnick has the answer. He took his Austria side to face Bosnia this week, and found a novel way to get around.
Scoreboard is written by Josh Noble and Samuel Agini in London, with contributions from the team that produce the Due Diligence newsletter, the FT’s global network of correspondents and the data visualisation team. It is edited by Benjamin Wilhelm in New York and Lee Campbell-Guthrie in London.
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