Against The Grain: 'We have to change our lazy view of sport'

Simon Chadwick is professor of sport business strategy and marketing at the Centre for the International Business of Sport at Coventry University. He argues that Britain doesn't take sport seriously enough, and that universities are the key to producing well-rounded, élite athletes as well as widening overall participation.

People argue that sport is just a hobby or a leisure activity, and that we don't need a strategy for it. I think we do. In terms of both physical and psychological health, it's indisputably important, but in socio-cultural terms, it's very important, too. Sport is arguably the only thing that can both bring people together and address all kinds of social problems, whether it's obesity and heart disease or youth crime and social cohesion. Britain also has an issue about its cultural identity at the moment, and sport would be a way of asserting who we are and what we stand for.

Sport is big business in this country, too, and is implicitly important to us, but we have an incredibly laissez-faire attitude towards it: it's something that just happens. After England won the rugby World Cup in 2003, we squandered the legacy it could have provided, and the same happened when the England cricket team won the Ashes in 2005. We need to move away from our lazy view of sport, and start treating it as something to be proactively managed. We must give it a prominent role.

Countries such as the US have a strategy for producing élite, world-class performers, while the Australian government has ploughed huge amounts of money into sport at a grassroots level. You can see the fruits of these strategies in the form of world-class sport and athletics teams. Meanwhile, Scandinavian countries have focused on mass participation: in Sweden and Finland, upwards of 70 per cent of their population will take regular exercise on a weekly basis. They might not have a production line of Olympic gold medallists, but what they do have is a very fit, active population. As a country, we don't do either of those things, and it's time to start a debate on a strategy we'd like to follow.

This debate has to involve universities as well as the Government. It's a no-brainer: the US system of offering sporting scholarships makes it very easy for people to play sport and be at university at the same time, so talented people don't have to give up their studies in order to be successful. It's also a good way of providing young people who are good at sport with funding. It would help the Government hit its targets for widening participation by presenting university as a place where sport can thrive alongside academic studies. We'd be left with a ready supply of talented athletes for today, with the potential to become the skilled and insightful sporting decision-makers of tomorrow.

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