Drunken cricket fans yelling abuse at Headingley Carnegie tomorrow could be shouting a message to the Government to take action that would cost sport hundreds of millions of pounds.
Support for a ban on sponsorship of sport by alcohol firms gathers pace with every loutish performance at a Test ground or drunken brawl in a pub after a football match.
Beer and wine companies are the second-biggest supporters of sport, paying hundreds of millions of pounds to plaster their names over the shirts of sportsmen and sports arenas — and to win the endorsement of the biggest stars. Sports organisations refuse to countenance the thought that one of their biggest paymasters could be driven out, but the precedent has been set by the tobacco industry, which went from a position of providing billboard brands for key tournaments and sports teams to being pariahs. Now the names of cigarettes are never seen at sports grounds.
Campaigners believe that alcohol should be next on the agenda, fearing that the glamorous association between sport and drink is one of the links with the rise in alcohol abuse that blights Britain’s towns and cities.
The Government is fiercely resisting the thought that alcohol could follow tobacco out of the sponsorship exit door. But the clamour is growing louder — even in Australia. A report from the National Preventative Health Task Force, set up by Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, called last month for a complete ban on sports sponsorship by drinks firms, which would cost sport as much as £200 million a year, according to estimates.
“Banning sports sponsorship for the brewers is on the agenda,” said Simon Chadwick, professor of sport business at Coventry University. “Sports sponsorship clearly works for the drinks industry or they wouldn’t put so much effort into it. But the politicians are going to look at this and wonder what they can do.”
Don Shenker, chief executive at Alcohol Concern, said: “The availability of alcohol at sports grounds has to be an issue when addressing bad behaviour. There has been a glamorising message that drink is necessary to enjoy sport.”
The (Commons) Health Select Committee questioned Gerry Sutcliffe, the Sports Minister, extensively on the issue last month, but he was unwilling to commit the Government to any action because a ban here could be a huge vote loser a year out from a general election. As many as 600,000 people are employed in the brewing industry, which is already struggling in the recession.
Millions more are sports fans seemingly undisturbed by the massive sums spent by brewers and winemakers to make their brands synonymous with teams and tournaments. Many of the associations are long and lucrative: the longest-running shirt sponsorship in the Barclays Premier League is between Liverpool and Carlsberg, the Danish brewer, whose relationship goes back to 1992. The biggest sponsorship deal in football last year came when Heineken paid Uefa £66 million over three years to put its name to the Champions League.
When England take the field at Headingley for the fourth npower Test, it will be with the estimated £5 million-a-year backing of Marston’s Pedigree ale, while Australia will have the familiar VB — for Victoria Bitter — on their kit. Yet both teams have been forced to address the issues of alcohol abuse on the doorsteps of their dressing rooms: Andrew Flintoff’s image as a pedalo-pushing carouser is now indelible and Australia were forced to send home Andrew Symonds, the all-rounder, even before the start of the Ashes series because of “alcohol-related issues”.
Where tobacco was driven from snooker, football and Formula One, drink and sport still happily go together. There is barely a blink at the mention of rugby union’s Guinness Premiership or the Carling Cup in football. Every international team have their “official beer”, which is plied at outlets around stadiums.
Even in Formula One, in which the overlap between drinking and driving and alcohol sponsorship comes perilously close, the brewers and distillers like to be seen. Johnnie Walker spends £15 million a year putting its brand on Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren Mercedes and employs him to give out the message of responsible drinking.
But it is a message that campaigners believe is missing millions as they lift their glasses to celebrate another triumph — or to bury their sporting sorrows in drink.
Get the drinks in
• Sport has many of its origins in dark bars around the country. The laws of cricket were at first devised over a pint in the village of Hambledon in Hampshire. The Bat and Ball pub is still there.
• Sheffield, the oldest football club in the world, dating back to 1857, play at the Coach and Horses ground in Dronfield. That is because the club own the pub next door.
• The drinks industry accounted for 66 significant deals last year in a sports sponsorship industry worth £487 million. Only finance houses and banks spent more.
• Wimbledon has the best-behaved crowds in spite of having a mighty thirst: more than 200,000 glasses of Pimm’s, 100,000 pints of beer and 17,000 bottles of champagne were consumed at this year’s tournament.
• At the 2006 World Cup, officials in Nuremberg calculated that 70,000 England fans drank 1.2 million pints of lager — an average of 17 pints each.
• David Boon, the former Australia batsman, passed into legend after drinking 52 cans of lager on a flight to England.
(Source: Timesonline.co.uk)
