Happily, and unlike
previous Olympiads, most of the ticketed sporting events for London 2012 have
sold out. Many could have done so
several times over. For those of
us who despaired at the phalanxes of seats which remained empty in Beijing,
while the huddled masses pressed their noses against the ground-glass, this is
a wonderful thing.
It is not true,
perhaps predictably, of the football. Organizers hope that yesterday’s draw at Wembley, fronted by
Gary Lineker and shown live on BBC Two – albeit at not-exactly-prime-time 11
o’clock in the morning – will stoke the imaginations and, more importantly,
debit cards of football fans.
Olympic football
tournaments have been done very well and very badly. Even in the modern era, the variation has been marked. In 2004, Greece sold barely 12,500
tickets per match for the men’s tournament despite having just won the European
Championship. Four years later,
the equivalent figure in China was over 43,000.
The Olympic football
tournaments have a fine history – longer, it should be remembered, than the
World Cup – and are taken seriously… in most countries. That it is largely shunned in Britain
has much to do with the fact that we don’t usually compete but there is more to
it than that. There are two forms
of equal and opposite snobbery at work.
The first is the
anti-football – and perhaps anti-professional-sport – feeling that still runs
deep among some Olympic enthusiasts.
The Olympics, they argue, are not the pinnacle of football – this is the
World Cup, of course – so it has no business being involved in the Games. The same argument is often made about
tennis and basketball. It is
piffle.
Football is an
accessible and globally competitive sport. Can that be said of show-jumping? Of rowing? Or
of fencing? What business do the
Olympics, which involve synchronized swimming and dressage, have in denying the
world’s most popular game its place at the Games?
And over in the blue
corner, we have the anti-Olympics snobbery of many British football fans. Let’s be blunt: we can be a parochial
lot. How many of us would get out
of bed to see, say, Belarus vs Egypt at Hampden Park? I would, but I’m not your typical
football fan. I bought tickets to
two double headers at St James’ Park, as FIFA insist it will be called during
the Games, and had no idea who would be playing but that was not the
point. It is a major international
football tournament on my doorstep; that is why I’m going.
So, it should be remembered,
will at least a million others. Between
British fans such as your humble servant who have bought ‘blind’ and the fans
of the visiting men’s and women’s teams, almost a million tickets have already
been sold. That is more than any
other sport but the venues are so much bigger and sessions so more numerous
that football remains the sport most threatened by visions of masses of
unoccupied plastic chairs.
For this reason, the
pressure on Stuart Pearce to select David Beckham could become immense. Beckham, though, has no rightful place
in the 18-man Great Britain squad.
The three over-age berths ought to be taken by those players most
unfortunate to be omitted from England’s Euro 2012 squad. Nor should tokenism lead to the
unmerited inclusion of players from Northern Ireland or Scotland – Wales is
sure to be represented, quite properly, by the excellent Aaron Ramsey and the
world class Gareth Bale – at the expense of more deserving cases.
A fondness for reason
does give cause to sympathise with LOCOG.
As I discussed in a recent blog, the British public simply do not seem
interested in attending women’s matches.
Great Britain’s opening clash with New Zealand is the first event in the
whole Games, yet just 15,000 tickets have been sold in the 74,500 capacity
Millennium Stadium. LOCOG cannot
be blamed for underselling the event and hopefully the draw will see sales pick
up.
The women’s
tournament, though, sees LOCOG bivouacked between a rock and a hard place. The fear criticism for sparsely
occupied stadia but may have been loath to allocate the women’s matches to the
smaller venues for fear of being accused of treating it as the secondary
football competition.
It is unreasonable to
expect the huge football stadia to sell out for the Olympics but it is
important that attendances are generally high. That would indicate a change in attitude; both of British
football fans to the Olympic competition and of Olympophiles to football. The game belongs at the Games.
