Why do sports newspapers fail in the UK?
Throughout southern Europe, specialist sports newspapers consistently feature among the most widely read newspapers in the country. Italy’s La Gazzetta dello Sport, with its distinctive pink pages has a readership of 3.4 million. Marca and L’Equipe are the mostly widely sold papers in Spain and France respectively and in Greece there are at least 7(!) national sports dailies.
In the UK, sports newspapers have not met with the same success. In the late 1990s, Sport First was launched in a fanfare of publicity but poor readership meant that it went from being a daily to a weekly in a short space of time. It can now be found in few outlets and goes under the title of Football First. The latest attempt is The Sportsman which aims to tap into the growing sports betting market.
Many argue that the reason for the failure of sports newspapers in the UK is that there is now such widespread sports coverage in other newspapers and with such competition it is difficult to penetrate the market. To some extent this is a valid argument, however there is significant sports coverage in the national pages in Spain, Italy and Greece and yet sports papers still flourish.
How do they achieve this? By strongly aligning themselves with one of the major football clubs, much in the way that national papers align themselves with political parties. In Spain, Marca and AS are strongly aligned with Real Madrid; El Mundo Deportivo and Sport are aligned with Barcelona. In Greece, Panathinaikos supporters read Athlitiki Icho or Derby; Olympiakos supporters read Protathlitis, or Fos. By doing so they are able to diffentiate themselves from the mainstream press and meet the specific needs of a particular set of fans, hungry for a daily diet of news, outrageous rumour and biased opinion and as fans rarely change teams, the readership is loyal. If UK attempts followed this model, rather than remaining unbiased, they might be more successful.
Over the next few weeks we are going to take a closer look at some of the main sports newspapers in Europe and some of their most unlikely rumours.
