Is the latest decision on horseracing TV rights in the UK significant?

I have seen a lot of reactions during the last 24 hours to the decision to let ITV show UK horse racing on terrestrial TV from 2017. The sense I get from the reactions I’ve read is that we should view this decision as significant.

Overwhelmingly, the reactions seem to be negative and, possibly, my initial tweets may have also been viewed that way. However, my concern is far more fundamental. The rights decision is just another example of the sport’s administrators not having a strategy that will sustain the industry which surrounds a sport that’s been part of my life for many years.

There are various examples around the world of sports that have taken a long-term view of their opportunity: laid out a strategy and they thrive. Almost without exception, the starting point for any such strategy has to be a clear understanding of some principles:

• What are the key attributes of the sport that are going to appeal to an audience?
• Who are the audience and how are they going to pay for their association with the sport?
• What are the primary sources of revenue and are there any secondary sources that could be attained?
• Does the landscape change substantially during the next year, five years, ten years and how does the sport evolve to remain relevant as those changes occur?
• Who is in charge of the sport and how do they impose authority on constituents?

There would be a lot more questions and some detail to the answers if one were to build out the relevant strategy for racing but, germane to the latest rights decision, is that it’s unclear to me how material it is to the future of the sport. Is the terrestrial audience really that significant: today, in the medium term or in the long term? I suspect the answer is no but the fact that a decision has been made in isolation from a coherent strategy makes it a bad decision anyway.

I hope it’s not too late to save the sport but a turnaround is needed if it’s going to survive and a very clear strategy is going to be needed if it’s going to thrive.

If I use American Football as an example then today the NFL is the most obvious form of the sport that we see from outside the US but, within the US and on TV domestically, particularly College Football has a large and very committed audience and both the NFL and College variants of the one sport are doing well commercially. So, what is racing as a sport? Who is in charge? Do they control all aspects of the sport? Are the needs of the National Hunt and Flat variants of the sport the same? Does racing own its customers or do its customers own it?

I’ve long held the view that its wrong to continue having one authority controlling National Hunt and Flat racing. At the highest level, I see National Hunt racing as analogous to College Football. Its audience is mostly local and there are numerous aspects of the sport that therefore need to be tuned to ensure that its potential can be exploited to the full. By contrast, I see Flat racing as analogous to the NFL and therein I see a more global potential for the sport but, again, there’s a lot of tuning required.

Concentrating on just Flat racing for now, we have too many Flat races today. There are too many courses trying to put on Flat racing. We might even need a two tier Flat racing industry so that there is somewhere for lower grade horses to compete. There needs to be a premium value in mainstream Flat racing that can be clearly demonstrated or the sport will never fund itself. Clearly, betting will always be linked to the sport but the dog needs to be capable of wagging its own tail. For too long, the tail has been wagging the dog!

In that last comment, I am not blaming the bookmakers for the parlous state of the UK Racing industry. It is definitely a failing of Racing’s administrators that they’ve never earned the right to control the relationship. That has to change.

Returning to the NFL analogy, that sport has elected to be a franchise so all constituents (for example, team owners and players) benefit from the success of the sport wherever and however it is viewed. The viewers are the sport’s customers whether they attend a game or watch on TV or the web. Racing doesn’t need to become a franchise to start to own its own customer base. It could and that might be a facet of the ultimate strategy but, for certain, it needs to define its proposition better and control its own destiny. It needs to lose its dependence on subsidy and operate for commercial profitability.

If one looks at how any sport is being viewed generally and combines that analysis with the way in which viewing habits are changing across the board, any rights owner or content provider that doesn’t closely control access will lose its audience. Any strategy that considers positioning in a linear programming guide as significant has lost the plot. On demand viewing is the only way forward.

Allowing multiple distribution channels to exploit racing’s rights make sense, but the current allocation of rights to two competing UK-centric racing channels is nonsensical in my mind, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. Racing is a minority interest sport and the sooner the commercial realities of that situation are recognised, the greater the chance that we can retain a sport with a rosy future.

Racing is only a ‘major sport’ if viewed through the lens of the betting industry as a source of revenue. This view should be shunned by the leader that takes on the challenge of planning racing’s future.

The racing industry is important to the Government from an employment perspective but having the Government aligned with anything that needs to be commercial is wrong from my way of thinking.

While I wouldn’t want it to be that Bernie Eccelstone takes on the challenge personally, racing needs an entrepreneur to recognise the potential of the sport and rebuild it. The dysfunctional committees that are in control today will ultimately kill the sport.