Sport is anything but a game

It used to be said that the best way to turn a large sum of money into a small one was to buy a football club. Those were the days when a family meat business owned Manchester United and you could buy Chelsea for £1.

So much has changed since the eighties, of course. Middle Eastern royalty owns Manchester City. Hollywood royalty owns Wrexham AFC. These days the people’s game promises hard cash and soft power and often, though not always, delivers both.

For cities, sport can be the difference between global renown and relative anonymity. A former leader of Birmingham City Council once told me his city’s reputation lagged Manchester’s internationally because of sport; his city’s most successful team didn’t even have Birmingham in its name, he complained.

For Warwickshire, winning the cricket country championship has been a once-a-decade experience this millennium. Without wishing to play down that success – or rule out other factors that may have contributed to the cities’ relative reputations on the world stage – but City and United have brought back considerably more silverware to Manchester (between them 49 men’s senior trophies this millennium, by my count). That matters. To invent an equation: the further you are from a city, the more your support for its club is success-dependent.

And for the built world, is there anything more emblematic of sporting prowess than a stadium? Everton FC move into Bramley-Moore Dock next season. More than a 53,000-seat cathedral to sport, the stadium is a critical component of Liverpool’s Northern Docks regeneration project. By contrast, proposals from the All-England Club to treble the size of the home of the Wimbledon tennis championships will be subject to a judicial review, starting next month. Sport is transformative. It’s also controversial. Emotions run high.

Last week, Venice was celebrating the Biennale Architettura 2025, curated by the architect and engineer Carlo Ratti. To see a city celebrate the built world – with thousands in town for the Vernissage – was inspiring. The city was at its noisiest on Saturday, however, when Fiorentina fans arrived early for their match against Venezia FC some 48 hours later. Football fans may have accounted for far fewer visitors than architects, but they made far, far more noise. That’s the power of sport.

There may be no Olympics or men’s FIFA World Cup in 2025 (the two events that generate the biggest global TV audiences) but there are no shortage of attention-grabbing, reputation-moving, GDP-generating sporting events taking place in the UK this year (and some for the first time).

The Women’s Rugby World Cup takes place in August and September; for golf fans, the AIG Women’s Open is being held in Wales for the first time in its history this summer; Queen’s Club London hosts its first women’s tennis tournament in more than 50 years in June; and the first World Boxing Championships for Women will take place in Liverpool in September.

It was former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly who is reported to have said: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that.” It’s arguable whether he intended the line to carry the weight it now bears. Nevertheless, for cities, for economies and for the built world, sport is anything but a game.