SPOTY is outdated, so let’s find a way to celebrate all of our sporting achievers

Lucy Bronze made the shortlist but not Jamie Vardy, the story of the football season so far

Lucy Bronze made the shortlist but not Jamie Vardy, the story of the football season so far (Getty)

The question is not who won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, but who cares? I’m all for applauding sport, recognising talent. Indeed, I’ve somehow made a career filing bulletins on some of the best British sporting moments over the past two decades.

But why the need to rank one above another? Does Andy Murray need to be classified above Lewis Hamilton to authenticate his achievements? Would the coronation of Jessica Ennis-Hill by public vote make her successful return to competition at the World Championships any more stirring? It seems to me that victory was the only reward Ennis-Hill required to validate her efforts.

At the risk of being ungenerous and curmudgeonly at this time of year, there is a sense in which the importance of the whole shebang is rooted in the ownership of the property and the projection of it. The BBC is clinging to the idea of its own relevance in the broadcast sport arena when it has little. There was a time when the award had its place, when televised sport was appropriated largely via the state broadcaster. But those days are long gone. What remains is the shell of a prize that retains no inherent value.

The shortlisting process offers its own rum judgement on the whole affair. The BBC gets itself in a right old pickle each year in arriving at a plausible list. And I’m not talking about the political and ethical considerations associated with the views of one athlete or another, though the hand-wringing over Tyson Fury has been amusing. A bigger gaffe than his inclusion is the exclusion of any Paralympic athlete. Four years ago, it was the absence of women on the shortlist that caused offence.

The problem lies in the artificial boiling down to 12 men and women good and true. How can it be that Joe Root, a man at the core of the British sporting canon, cricket, the world’s highest-rated batsman to boot and the star of an Ashes-winning summer, fails to make the list?

Neither is our most important sport recognised. It rarely is. Jamie Vardy has spent the last four and a bit months writing arguably one of the greatest chapters in the modern history of association football, yet he was nowhere near the list. It is patently absurd that in a beauty contest of this nature the most attractive candidate is excluded.

Yet, in some warped act of tokenism, Lucy Bronze, of the England women’s football team, was. And that is not to diminish her achievement in being included in the shortlist for the player of the Women’s World Cup last summer, or England’s in reaching the semi-finals.

There was a whiff of positive discrimination, too, when Rugby League was finally recognised for the first time with the inclusion of Kevin Sinfield. The outgoing Leeds Rhino has been a brilliant contributor to a compelling sport for the best part of 20 years but few would argue that league is anything more than a niche interest and Sinfield a marginal figure beyond its boundaries.

The player, the club and the sport are better than this artificial elevation. A consideration of Sinfield’s genius would be entirely appropriate were we not being asked to cast a vote. An end-of-year review would surely cast a more authentic glow than this attempt to wrap him up in tinsel. And it would spare the Rhinos the indignity of contacting The Independent’s sports desk, and others, in an attempt to drum up support for their man.

On letter-headed paper, the publicity department advised on the myriad ways you might cast a vote and encouraged the electorate to spread the word via social media. How demeaning that a talent as great as Sinfield’s might need a campaign in order to gain the requisite recognition. He showed what he was about every time he went under the posts, one of only four in the history of the sport to surpass 4,000 points.

Though the BBC has served the nation well in its coverage of sport over the years, its attachment to it in this era of commercial rights and multi-million pound television deals is hugely diminished and utterly at odds with the faux grandeur in which SPOTY is wrapped. After 61 years handing down its own bauble, it is time for the BBC to retreat out of shot and to put an end to a wholly unnecessary coronation that confers zip on the winner.

It is time for a different kind of annual appreciation, one that better reflects the contributions of all the talents across the British sporting landscape and sets achievements side by side rather than one above another. Chris Froome wasn’t better than Lewis Hamilton, nor vice versa, in 2015. The same can be said of Adam Peaty, Lizzie Armitstead et al. And I’m pretty sure more than 12 Britons made a mark. Let’s celebrate them all and let the context reflect the times, not the BBC.