What Are The Challenges?
Mark Fairbrother believes that the main blocker when it comes to sustainability in sport is money.
“From a club perspective, it’s all about finite resources. I think the challenge for a lot of clubs is the competitiveness: the short-term competitiveness, with the investment in the sporting side, versus the long-term position of the organisation. Your fans might appreciate the long-term plans you put in place, but they certainly won’t appreciate missing out on a player, or a bad performance on the pitch. There’s such an enormous amount of money involved, and you’ve got to focus your efforts where you can. That’s the challenge: high risk, high return.”
What Are The Challenges?
Mark Fairbrother believes that the main blocker when it comes to sustainability in sport is money.
“From a club perspective, it’s all about finite resources. I think the challenge for a lot of clubs is the competitiveness: the short-term competitiveness, with the investment in the sporting side, versus the long-term position of the organisation. Your fans might appreciate the long-term plans you put in place, but they certainly won’t appreciate missing out on a player, or a bad performance on the pitch. There’s such an enormous amount of money involved, and you’ve got to focus your efforts where you can. That’s the challenge: high risk, high return.”
Confirming this point, Irwin Mitchell’s Ted Powell identified the influence of fan’s expectation – a dynamic not shared by any other sector. “In sport, your performance isn’t just measured on your financials or long-term projections. Your performance on the field and league positions are equally as important. While fans want to see their club committing to sustainability, I think right now, they’d still rather see their club get promoted than miss out on a spot because of a sustainability project. But we’ve seen a shift in attitude already, and hopefully priorities will change further as the awareness grows.”
Fans’ perception of their clubs’ wealth may also be inaccurate, Russell Seymour added: “There’s still a perception that the move towards sustainability is going to be expensive. A lot of people think that sport is awash with money because they see Premier League footballers getting multi-million-pound deals or travelling round the world. But even in professional sport, that’s not quite true. The operational side of the business is sometimes run on a shoestring. For some venues it’s tight financially, even for the top venues.
Fans’ perception of their clubs’ wealth may also be inaccurate, Russell Seymour added: “There’s still a perception that the move towards sustainability is going to be expensive. A lot of people think that sport is awash with money because they see Premier League footballers getting multi-million-pound deals or travelling round the world. But even in professional sport, that’s not quite true. The operational side of the business is sometimes run on a shoestring. For some venues it’s tight financially, even for the top venues.
“It also remains an overwhelming concept for a lot of organisations. It can feel like something quite scientific and difficult, and they may not fully understand it or know how to approach it. There’s also the issue of finding the time and resource to address it on top of everything else that goes into running a sports club. It might be that further education or training is needed to help the sector understand what they can do, and that it’s perhaps not quite as hard or costly as they expect to make a difference.”