There is hardly an athletic contest anywhere in the world that does not attract an audience. This means there is a demand for the particular type of entertainment offered. Where there is a demand, ways will be found by enterprising individuals and organizations to exploit it as a source of income. Football This is practically true with football due to the phenomenal scale of the sport. A clue to the scale is the shear number of people that participate in football; this is around seven million across the country, with over 5million children included in that figure.
The grassroots set up is well established with 40,000 clubs, 45,000 pitches, 2,000 leagues Its easy to get involved. Football is Britain’s most popular team sport shown in table 1.1 and 1.2., for participation. If these figures included speciation Football would definitely top the table. The consumer type of interest in football creates jobs; there are around 6,000 people directly employed by football, and thousand more which related jobs.For premiership clubs, crowds for matches can exceed 60,000. So on match days there will also be stewards and security guards.
The crowd also provide a market for refreshments, programmes and other souvenirs which creates more jobs. The commercial side of football secures millions of pounds in retail, for example sales of replica kits in the UK alones is thought to be around 200 million. But this is also an example of the exploitation of the ‘beautiful game’, as prices are marked up 200% on production costs. Hockey Hockey has a completely different story to tell.
There is no real commercial aspect to the game. The vast majority of the people who follow hockey are hockey players themselves and their main interest in the sport is participation. This means very few spectators, so its financial suicide to charge for entrance to match, the only time its possible to sell tickets is for international matches. But there’s no money made from these, ticket sales just cover costs. In football the spectators don’t just provide revenue from tickets sales but produce a multiplier effect on the whole industry; generating money and creating jobs.
The few jobs that are available in the sport are jobs in organisation, the NGB; ‘England Hockey’ employs about 20 full time workers there opposite body in football ‘The FA’ have more than 100 employees; regional development officers, directors, media officers. Information on hockey employment was scare and this lead me to believe there is little opportunity. One area where there is a few employees is the sale of equipment, as the majority of players tend to buy from specialist boutiques for the main reason general sports stores hockey range is small and in some cases non-excitant.
Sports shops are business, and they can see that even if they did stock a wide range of hockey products it would not make the money that for example footballs and football shirts would. This is down to depreciating participation numbers as shown by the tables on table 1.1 there are many more sports young people and adults prefer to spend there time. This creates a vicious circle because as less people take up and continue playing the sport, participation and equipment cost rise putting of more people.