Short-Format Sports — Too Little of a Good Thing?
Since the virus that must not be named took over world sport, life has felt like an extended international break week, except the week is indefinite, and you can’t even watch the Championship or pretend to like tennis.
Similar to the period between Christmas and New Year, time does not move in the post-sport world, and I find myself longing for the reassurance and routine that sport brings. Gone for now are the days of following a test match unfold over the course of a working week or staying up past your bedtime to watch what will (probably) be the last frame of the snooker.
However, it is not just the C-word that is preventing us from enjoying the longer formats of sports from the comfort of our living rooms. Sports with a shorter format have brought in crowds from far and wide for decades. The world-famous Hong Kong Rugby 7s tournament opened in the 1970s, now bringing in over 120,000 fans across the weekend. Over the last two decades, many other sports have developed short-format versions of their game. Their goal is to boost participation and spectator attendance and can draw in much-needed funds and sponsorship to support the sport’s governing body.
T20 cricket was introduced in England in 2003 as an accessible alternative to traditional 5-day test matches. Whilst this new format was a success in the UK, it failed to gain traction internationally until India beat Pakistan in the inaugural T20 World Cup final in 2007. T20 then exploded in Asia. The Indian Premier League (est. 2008) demonstrated how popular, exciting and profitable the shortened format could be. Similar T20 leagues soon sprang up across the world. The broadcasting rights for the Indian Premier League for 2018–2022 were sold at a price of US $2.55 billion, making it one of the world’s most lucrative sports leagues per match.
T20 seems to have been the catalyst for the evolution of short-format sports at a professional level. Whilst Netball’s High5 has been taught in schools as an entry game to the sport for years, Netball Fast5s was introduced in 2008 as an exciting and spectator-friendly version of the game. Short-format sports are designed to be high scoring, exhilarating and high-risk, high-reward. They can compete in a world of instant gratification where cluttered TV channels demand quality content that grabs viewers’ short-lived attention. They also reduce the complexity of a sport’s laws, making it more accessible to new viewers. RugbyX spectators don’t have to worry about understanding lineouts, scrummaging or maul defence.
This also makes the sport easier for new players to learn; beginners can focus on honing basic skills without the distractions of complex laws. Similarly, RugbyX doesn’t require posts or full-sized pitches, making it a gateway into the sport for inner-city schools. The Welsh Prison Service has even expressed an interest in adopting RugbyX across Welsh prisons.
However, the complexity of a sport is something that those who love the game truly miss. The addition of 3-point super shots from outside of the circle in Netball Fast5s draws on rules from basketball. Whilst it makes the game more exciting and chaotic, it significantly changes the traditional tactics and precise nature of the game. Similarly, in a one-frame snooker match, snooker fans will miss the long, high-pressure safety frames that demand intelligence and mental stamina and keep the crowd on tenterhooks.
More commonly, we see the removal of features from a sport. Whilst often criticised for being the slowest part of the game, the scrum plays a significant role in rugby. Scrummaging drains the legs of both forward packs, the heavier players who work together as a unit, creating opportunities later in the game for the faster backs to run around tired opponents. RugbyX has no scrums. Without the need for the heavyweight, albeit exceedingly fit, players to perform in the scrum, we see faster and lighter players who can run at pace. Even though this creates a faster game with more ball-in-play time, RugbyX seems one dimensional in comparison to the full format game. It is the fine balance of a sport’s features that make it feel complete and many fans won’t miss them until they are gone.
Admittedly, short-format sports are an excellent gateway into the full games. New viewers to get a taster of a sport they may come to love. They may even attract people who will never be interested in the full-format game, offering different demographics for sponsorship opportunities and exciting tournaments with DJ sets and a less formal atmosphere than at Wimbledon. Short formats can help to fund the governing body of the sport and offer opportunities to more professional players.
As the largest spectator sport in the world, football seems immune to the phenomenon. Other sports have had to compete to boost their profile, capture viewers & participants and squeeze into the TV listings between football fixtures and talk shows. In 2017/18, the English Football Premier League achieved an annual operating profit of £867 million. Compare this to the English Premiership Rugby clubs which lost nearly £50 million between them in the same year. Football clearly doesn’t need to change its game.
Perhaps contributing to this is that football is inherently easy to understand. Teams pass the ball to each other to score in the net. No lineouts, no complex scoring system or five-day matches that can result in a draw — just offside, and if you can’t take five minutes to understand that, you’ll struggle with most sports anyway. Because of this, there is no need to simplify the game, and the low scoring aspect of football even works in its favour — fans wait so long for a goal that the adrenaline rush is much more intense when their team finally scores.
All in all, I’m not opposed to the principle of shortening of sports and its benefits are undeniable. But as someone who genuinely loves sports, who gains immense satisfaction from gradually understanding the more complex and niche rules of a sport, who waits all year to watch a snooker final unfold over 35 frames at the Crucible, I feel it would be a shame to see the erosion of longer-format sports in favour of their commercially-minded, instantly-gratifying counterparts.
