It’s time to focus on the sporting spectacle and not the pantomime
12 hours ago
As another sports docuseries invades our screens, David Granger, director at content marketing agency Arc & Foundry, asks if they hold any value for the fans or the federations.
This month saw the first simultaneous launch of every F1 car in its new livery in London. The spectacle would have been unthinkable ten years ago – or even five years ago – but the popularity of the sport (thanks in no small part to the documentary series on Netflix) meant removing covers outside a garage on a cold pre-testing morning at a closed circuit in Jerez is no longer fitting for the world’s most watched series.
The fall-out however has been pretty acrimonious and pretty bizarre. One of the drivers, the current world champion no less, was booed when he appeared as was his team principal. Rather than put this down to spectators’ partisan participation (after all sport is nothing if not tribal), the request went out to “not lose sight” of the fact that the pair “have both contributed greatly to the sport we love.” Contribute they absolutely have, but F1 fans choose the teams and drivers they support.
And those they vocally choose not to.
Is creating caricatures over the six seasons of Drive to Survive to blame? Does the behind-the-scenes entertainment, the construction and production of a pantomime around a world series overshadow the actual essence, that tribalism, of the sport?
Exhibit 2 in the collected evidence for this case comes from another documentary streaming series. The Six Nations rugby union championship is one of the hardest, most raw, yet most cerebral, competitions. It attracts sponsors, crowds and interest in numbers (not quite the level of F1, but still considerable), and so a prime candidate for a behind-the-curtain examination of the characters, the sub-plots and the machinations of the teams, countries and players.
What emerged, however, was one of the most tone-deaf ten minutes in documentary-making – the first episode of the second series released a month ago. In it we had England players discussing their new car in the Mercedes showroom and a fly-half signed with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation marketing group discussing his great hair and world social media domination. We also got sports doc staples: super-super-slo-mo, Wagnerian soundtrack and a new one… throughout the series one of the strangest motifs ever conceived: the excruciatingly awkward video call conversations between wives/girlfriends and the players who were either picked or dropped for the games. No party in any of these brief, stilted exchanges came away with much credibility.
But, all this soap opera/reality TV has been broadcast against a backdrop of some gloom over the English and Welsh domestic games. Historic clubs face financial hardship with Wasps, Worcester and London Irish having gone into administration. Added to this all Premiership Rugby clubs made a loss in 2022/23 and, according to SportsPro.com, their collective losses amassed £30m.
The shame is that Full Contact could, and should, have been a financial and popularity shot in the arm for the sport. However, the third series has been cancelled, the money paid by Netflix is not enough to help save the domestic clubs in financial trouble and, perhaps worst of all for the popularity of the sport, it will no longer be free-to-air on television. There will be less access for fans to follow the games in the UK.
Full Contact should have been a boost for rugby union in Europe. It should have opened up the sport and broadened its fanbase, boosted its sponsorship coffers and ushered in a new era. Instead it failed to recognise the prevailing situation of the sport, and like Drive to Survive, it didn’t address issues. An opportunity missed.
The hope, the expectation is that the spectacle of sport is enough to entertain and enthrall. The supporting, second-screen content is useful to enhance the stories, give them context and different perspectives, but they should, at their heart, represent the sport they purport to be reporting on.
David Granger is the director of Arc & Foundry content marketing agency.