The global economic crisis has affected everyone and the latest to come under its spell is the sporting world. The sporting world has never seen such a time, nowadays every sport has got high influx of cash from the corporate world in it with sportsperson’s in various sports earning big money. Due to the influence of major corporates in sporting world, the current global economic crisis has resulted in some of the major finance companies to go into bankruptcy now the sporting world is facing a similar situation.
AIG (American Insurance Group) the sponsor of the biggest football club in the world Manchester United and the amount agreed for sponsorship was an English League record. But with AIG going into bankruptcy the whole sponsorship amount is in jeopardy. Another English club that is West Ham (known as Hammers) are now sporting a nameless T-shirt as their previous sponsors’ the tour operator XL leisure group collapse. Northern Rock bank the sponsors’ of Newcastle United were in jeopardy but were rescued by the British government. Football in my opinion is the worst possible victim of this financial debacle. But according to the chief executive of the BPL Richard Scudamore said that the structure of the game was sustainable despite the crisis.
Amid slumping sales by nearly all the major automobile industry the highly financial dependent Formula 1 has had its victims. Honda, a Japanese automobile powerhouse has pulled out of the formula one racing amidst global crisis which has severely affected their automobile sales. For the F1 team Honda employs around 700 employees and drivers Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello. This move might also prompt fear into other manufacturer’s minds. Another victim has been the French Grand Prix which has been the part of F1’s circuit since its inception in 1950’s, but recently the 2009 French Grand Prix was cancelled amidst financial crisis.
The global financial crisis has also left its scars on cricket. The Jalandar sports industry whose annual turnover was somewhere around 20 billion rupees is facing the heat coz of the current crisis, with depreciating rupee further weakening its volume of trades. Even the cricket stadiums are not able to find any takers for the corporate stands (The Karnataka Cricket association Ground in Bangalore even their tickets were so high priced they just managed to sell 18000 tickets) . Even the broadcasting companies are facing the heat of financial crisis like Neo Sports who found it hard to fill the ad space in the recent India England home series where the initial ad space was 4 lakh for a 10 second spot but was later sold at 2.5 lakh. The effect of sliding value of rupee has also affected the IPL franchisee’s as the foreign supposed to be paid in dollars, now when IPL started the value of rupee against dollar was 40 but now it’s almost 50, hence the franchisee’s have to shell out a lot more for the foreign players.
Phew......this global financial crisis has surely taken the sporting world into its helm and all the sports are reeling under its pressure.
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