The waiting cruise boat on the Seine could be seen clearly but, perplexingly, there was no obvious route down to board it from the embankment by the Eiffel Tower.
This was not for a Sky News team’s Champagne-fuelled sightseeing tour. We were attempting to show how, in July, a floating parade of athletes would be part of the most ambitious opening ceremony conceived by an Olympic city.
Televised sport is big business, from the sums broadcasters pay for rights, to the audiences and advertising revenue it generates and the eye-watering salaries of its stars.
At the end of last month in Saudi Arabia, depending on broadcaster DAZN’s pay-per-view receipts, Tyson Fury could have pocketed more than £100m from his heavyweight unification fight against Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk. And he lost.
May 2016. Tears cascade at the King Power Stadium as Andrea Bocelli serenades a sea of ecstatic, incredulous Leicester City fans. We’ve achieved the impossible, our team of giant-slaying underdogs have toppled the phenomenally rich “top six” Goliaths of modern-day football, defying odds of 5,000/1 to lift the Premier League trophy. It’s surely the most historic football moment I will ever experience. At 18, my life as a football fan has peaked.
Women’s football is “a success story but it’s only just beginning”, argued Dawn Airey, Chair of the Barclays FA Women's Super League and former Channel 5 Chair. “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it. We want young women to see you can play football at a very high level and make a really good career out of it.”
Free-to-air access, she said, was “absolutely critical”, adding that women’s football has to balance “revenue and reach. We need to drive money into the game but we absolutely want engagement, and to get engagement you need that fee-to-air opportunity.”
The Euros is a football tournament like no other before it.
Delayed a year by the pandemic and rerouted to multiple venues around Europe, it will be – at best – problematic, and, in some cases, impossible for fans to follow their teams. The UK broadcasters covering the tournament – with games split between the BBC and ITV – face the same difficulties.
Broadcaster Isa Guha, Barbara Slater, Director of Sport at BBC Sport, commentator/presenter Jacqui Oatley, former Wolves keeper turned pundit Matt Murray, and Mark Cole, Managing Director at Whisper TV, share their tips on how to break into sports broadcasting.
On 12 March, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta tested positive for coronavirus, sending his team and staff into self-isolation. The following morning, the Premier League threw in the towel – it was obvious that it was no longer possible to play football during the Covid-19 epidemic.
The rest of football and pretty much all sport followed. At a stroke, the schedules of the UK’s specialist sports broadcasters had been emptied.
Data is pervasive in today’s professional sports world. It’s difficult to remember a time when football on TV didn't have information on pass completion percentages and shot counts, when tennis didn’t have Hawk-Eye, and when cricket didn’t have its Hot Spot infrared imaging system.
In much the same way as retail, healthcare, or financial services, the industry has embraced digital transformation, and with it, an appreciation of the power of data.
Welcome to the great British summer of no sport. There will be no Wimbledon, no Euro 2020 football, no Open golf and no Olympics, which leaves the sport broadcasters on the canvas.
Punch drunk they may be, but no one is throwing in the towel. The challenge is to fill the hours of telly set aside for sport this summer and to attract the bumper audiences being enjoyed elsewhere on TV during the lockdown.
Live sport has not disappeared entirely – Taiwanese basketball and baseball anyone? – but there is not much of it about.
