Why Japan Invented A New Sport 🚲
Plus Mbappe to Manchester United? UEFA cracks down on multi-club ownership and Nike wins the Super Bowl.
Welcome to Athletic Interest.
One of the goals of our channel (and this newsletter) is to highlight some of the most interesting stories from that tasty intersection between business and sport.
As the money involved in sports reaches insane new heights, we are always finding crazy new deals to talk about. But sometimes it’s the long-forgotten stories, buried deep in old blog posts, that make for the best content.
In many ways, these old gems are like time capsules, each story shedding light on the complex origins of the increasingly globalised world of sport.
Today’s example is no different.
Like many of the sports we love, this story starts with a random act of chance.
As the Americans looked for a swift end to the Second World War, they made plans to drop a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Kokura. Before the city could be leveled, cloud coverage forced the U.S. bomber to drop devastation on Nagasaki instead.
With Kokura still standing, but heavily damaged from other bombings, city officials started looking at ways to make money for a rebuild.
Noticing that gambling was a great way to part people from their money, they decided to create their own sport, one of only four that would be legal to gamble on within Japan.
The understanding was that a portion of the money made from gambling would be used to rebuild the city.
With that, Keirin was born. No, not your neighbours’ annoying kid, Keirin is a cycling event where riders keep pace behind a motorised vehicle before sprinting the final 750m.
The sport was an instant hit. About 25% of Kokura’s 180k strong population turned up for the first meet, collectively they gambled an estimated 19.7 million Yen (around about 1 million dollars in today’s money.)
Within months Keirin had become one of the most popular sports across Japan. Velodromes popped up in pretty much every city and billions were being bet each week. Thanks to the agreement that betting profits would be used to rebuild cities, Keirin can be credited as radically improving Japanese life after the devastation of WW2.
As impressive as the idea of a sport saving a country appears, the early days of Keirin were not without controversy.
The huge amounts of money involved attracted the attention of the Japanese Yakuza. Soon, Keirin velodromes became violent places, rife with crime and accusations of race-fixing.
But much like Japan itself, Keirin has since flourished.
Each year, 57 million spectators attend Keirin events in Japan and bet a cumulative 1 trillion Yen.
The sport is even a staple of the Olympics, having been introduced at the 2000 games in Sydney.
Here lies the true beauty of this story. The rise of Keirin explains so much about modern sport.
It’s one of the earliest examples of people realising that serious money could be made by tapping into humanity's passion for sports and its unpredictability.
While Keirin started with the modest goal of re-building a city, the sports betting industry has morphed into a global giant, not without controversy. In 2020, an estimated €1.5 trillion was spent on sports betting worldwide - that’s the equivalent of 107 billion Keirin bikes.
🍎 Sports Business Bites
⚽️ From a sport that is stitched into the very fabric of a nation to a sport that covers the entire world.
Football is changing before our eyes. Top European clubs are attempting to break away from the Champions League, while some of England’s oldest footballing institutions are being scooped up by Qatari rulers and Wall Street investment funds.
This has worried UEFA, the body responsible for maintaining the integrity of European football.
In a recent annual report, UEFA took aim at yet another symptom of Football’s globalisation, the multi-club model.
At the time of writing, 180 clubs in the world are involved in some sort of multi-tiered club ownership. Most famously the City Football Group and the Red Bull clubs.
On the face of it, the multi-tiered model is not inherently bad. It allows larger clubs to train talent in lower leagues and gives smaller clubs access to resources they would normally only ever dream of.
But with 6,500 players now playing within these pyramids, UEFA is starting to sound the alarm bells.
There are two areas of concern outlined in the UEFA report.
Undue influence over clubs and players
Manipulation of the transfer market
The integrity argument is linked to the fear that two clubs from within the same ownership group could face each other in a competitive game. This presents a clear risk that one club would be encouraged to manipulate the result.
This could also affect the transfer market, with the owners buying and selling their players within the pyramid at whatever price best suits their needs. This can disguise the true value of players and have knock-on effects when trying to determine compliance with Financial Fair Play (Man City’s lawyers just joined the chat.)
🏈 Did you know, that this year’s Super Bowl actually had two winners?
Well, not exactly. While the Kansas City Chiefs won the actual sporting event, it was Nike that won perhaps the second biggest prize of the night…’The Most Recognisable Brand Award.’
While Brewery Anheuser Busch spent the most on adverts this year, with a $20 million total spend, it was Nike’s sponsorship of the NFL, and supply of all team kits, that made it the most exposed brand.
Nike, which pays a reported $125m per year to sponsor the NFL, received around $211m worth of brand exposure (aka unweighted media equivalency) from this one event alone.
The rest of the winners are as follows:
State Farm with $34.6 million of brand exposure.
Bud Light (owned by Anheuser Busch) - $28.3 million.
Gatorade - $27.4 million.
Apple Music - $19 million.
🏒 With the NFL dominating the U.S. sporting landscape, other sports are having to get very inventive to win over fans.
One popular strategy has been to try and engage younger audiences before they decide on their favourite sport.
And what better way to win over kids than with cartoons?
While the NBA tested the waters with Space Jam and a cartoon network-inspired slam dunk contest, the NHL actually wants to broadcast a live hockey game with animated players.
The partnership with Disney will see the Rangers v Capitals game streamed in both ‘real life’ and in a live animated replica targeted for kids.
Disney will utilise data from the NHL Edge player and puck tracking to recreate the action in real-time.
📲 We end this week’s newsletter with our customary look into the craziness that is social media, and this week didn’t disappoint.
We start with Kylian Mbappé, who inadvertently caused utter confusion on Instagram.
After PSG lost to Bayern Munich in the Champions League, Mbappé took to Instagram to post a rallying cry.
In French, the post’s caption reads 'tout reste à faire… @PSG' which translates to 'everything remains to be done'.
However, when many fans clicked the translate button on Instagram it changed the text to 'Manchester United's team is now on PSG.'
This odd translation error sent fans into a frenzy, something which was not helped by Marcus Rashford commenting a fire emoji under the post.
While fans may have thought for a moment that Mbappé was coming to United, it looks like he is still focused on getting Les Bleus through to the next stage of the Champions League.
🇳🇱 While most of the world is obsessed with football, over in the Netherlands they have another blockbuster sport to occupy their hearts and minds…Fierljeppen, also known as Dutch Canal Vaulting.
A sport that really needs to be seen to be believed.
Apparently, the sport can trace its roots back to farmers in the 18th century who would use poles to jump across the canals that crisscross their land. It became a fully professional sport in 1957 and there are now 532 registered canal jumpers across the world.
Great article, didn't know about Keirin!