Sports in the time of COVID-19 - general thoughts (not sport-specific)

[Conigliaro's Potential]

The sport-specific forum structure in SoSH tends to make it difficult to talk about issues which transcend multiple sports in one place. But there are some pandemic-related sports issues in particular which cross every sport and league and which I think ought to be discussed more broadly. So hopefully this is the right forum in which to start a thread for that purpose.

Two initial topics to throw out:

1) Fans and social distancing: how many fans can you actually get into a stadium (indoor or outdoor) and still observe social distancing recommendations? I've seen speculation that you might be able to get 5,000 fans into an NBA arena or 15,000 to 20,000 fans into a football stadium, but those estimates seem very optimistic to me - even if you ignore the need for people in the middle of a row to go to the bathroom, and I don't know how you get around that issue, basic math would suggest that at the very least you would need to leave every other row empty and have at least empty seats for every person in every occupied row, which gets you down to 1/6 of a stadium's capacity at the very most. (In theory, members of the same family or household unit could sit next to each other...but how could you enforce that, and how would you ticket that sort of arrangement?) And when fans start cheering and screaming and possibly singing, don't you need more than one row between everyone anyway? Never mind the difficulty of keeping fans spaced out in the concourses before or (particularly) after a game; are ushers going to have to turn into kindergarten teachers or communion ushers at the end of a game and escort everyone out of each section one row at a time?

And this is for sports played in stadiums with seats. The Memorial Tournament is supposed to be the first PGA Tour event back which fans are allowed to attend; how that will work, I have no idea.

FWIW, I did watch some of the Australian Rules Football game between Adelaide and Port Adelaide this morning, and there were a few (very spaced out) fans in the stadium - the first game at which I've seen members of the general public since the lockdowns started. They made some noise, and it was nice to see people in the stadium waving flags and dressed in team colors, etc. But there couldn't have been more than a few hundred people there, and I have to wonder how it can possibly be worth it for a franchise to let so few people in (and get so little revenue) for what I'm sure is a real hassle.

 

[Conigliaro's Potential]

2) Crowd noise and empty stadiums: The idea of adding fake crowd noise to Bundesliga soccer matches in Germany seems to have been a Fox Sports idea in America at first, but it seems to be catching on, to the point that most soccer leagues around the world are adopting some sort of solution along these lines to add atmosphere to the broadcasts. (EA Sports in particular seems to have become an active partner in this endeavor.) When the English Premier League resumes this week, most of the networks broadcasting the games will have separate "Fake Noise" and "No Noise" options to view, and it seems as though other leagues in other sports are looking at similar ideas as well.

I'm firmly on Team "No Noise", partly because I enjoy the novelty of games being played in empty stadiums (which I assume won't become a permanent phenomenon), but also because I feel like this is a slippery slope to go down. What's to stop broadcasters from piping in noise to "improve" the the product once fans do start coming back, particularly at first when they're only coming back in small numbers? What's to stop an historically under-attended team (e.g., the A's or Rays in MLB) from messing around with atmosphere to make themselves look better? Are we going to end up with CGI fans to fill the empty seats as well? What about piping actual crowd noise into a stadium to try and increase your home-team advantage? (My Atlanta Falcons have already forfeited a draft pick for doing this, of course...but what if this become socially acceptable?) If the NFL can't have fans yet when its season starts, I can see the NFL deciding to let teams pipe in crowd noise when the other team is on offense to mess with their play-calling procedures - this might even be under the guise of competitive fairness, insofar as fans might be allowed to return to games later in the season, and is it fair if the Cowboys don't get home fans against the Giants in Week 5 but the Giants do get home fans against the Cowboys in Week 17? There are a lot of issues to chew on and digest here which I don't think are being considered fully at the moment.

 

[singaporesoxfan]

I have a friend who's a C-Suite executive in ONE Championship, which is an MMA sports championship based in Asia (and supposedly "the largest global sports media property on the continent", per Wikipedia), so we've been chatting about these issues. Here are a couple of issues that have come up in our chats:

1. International travel: How do you structure international competitions like ONE Championship or the Champions League or Formula One, if players / fighters come into a country and have to be quarantined for 14 days?
2. Amount of TV vs in-stadium revenue: in some sports, in-stadium revenue is relatively small compared to TV revenue, particularly when you don't own the stadiums and have to spend money to rent venues anyway. ONE Championship has even done fan-free streamed fights. But the value of having fans is creating the atmosphere and crowd noise that creates not just a home team advantage (which doesn't really exist in his sport) but makes for a better broadcast experience.

 

[Conigliaro's Potential]

International travel: How do you structure international competitions like ONE Championship or the Champions League or Formula One, if players / fighters come into a country and have to be quarantined for 14 days?

Or the ATP and WTA tennis tours, which are even tougher for me to get my head around given that they're always jumping from country to country pretty much every week (excepting most of the summer hard court season in the US). At least the Champions League isn't the sole tournament for the teams in question, and F1 often has multi-week breaks between events.

Amount of TV vs in-stadium revenue: in some sports, in-stadium revenue is relatively small compared to TV revenue, particularly when you don't own the stadiums and have to spend money to rent venues anyway. ONE Championship has even done fan-free streamed fights. But the value of having fans is creating the atmosphere and crowd noise that creates not just a home team advantage (which doesn't really exist in his sport) but makes for a better broadcast experience.

Re: the revenue streams, it's instructive to look at a situation like English soccer. In the Premier League, the TV revenue dwarfs in-stadium revenue for most clubs, and even in the Championship, TV revenue is sufficient enough to get the league back up and running. But the divisions beneath those two have all abandoned their seasons, because there's no real TV money to speak of and there's no chance of any in-stadium revenue. I do a lot of work commentating on games in leagues or competitions where the in-stadium revenue is needed to make them viable; e.g., the Champions Hockey League (ice hockey equivalent to the UEFA Champions League in soccer) simply won't happen without fans, because it would be a total loss leader otherwise. Needless to say, I'm pessimistic that I'm going to have any CHL work this autumn and winter.

As for the atmosphere and crowd noise making a better broadcast experience, in the abstract I totally agree with that, but I wish the leagues that are getting back underway now would lean more directly into the novelty value of not having the fans there. "Sports in 2020 are now all about the purity of the competition, players trying their best to do their best because that's what they love and that's what they do, not because the fans have to be there egging them on"...stuff like that. Instead, leagues are trying to make their broadcasts sound the same as they normally are - e.g., the fake noise with soccer games. I mean, I get it: everyone is risk-averse and afraid to try new things, and heaven forbid that people might actually like the fan-free content better (which might lead to revenue losses down the line). But barring a total societal collapse, sports are eventually going to get back underway with fans, and things will mostly if not totally go back to how they were before; let's embrace this altered reality to the extent that medical science allows us to, not run from it.