Keep Stifling Stars and Sport Loses its Voice
When Boris Johnson was Mayor of London, his press office told me that he’d taken the view that media training Bo-Jo would be like taking the fizz out of the champagne. Let people see the real man and enjoy him for what he is. It worked. While that strategy might not have commuted to the Prime Minister’s office, Boris was a wildly popular mayor.
Sports PRs could take a lesson from this. Media training has polished away so many edges, so thoroughly, that post-match interviews may as well be AI-generated.
‘We’ll take away a lot of lessons’, ‘we’ll work on it as a team’, ‘I just wasn’t good enough’, ‘it’s surreal’…word salads dressed up as insight. At least ‘sick as a parrot’ or ‘a game of two halves’ gave us a giggle. Now we don’t even get clichés with character, just platitudes.
And this matters.
Sport, more than ever, is built on personalities. As fans start buying into stars more than the clubs they play for, if they are boring when they speak, the club, team or sport suffers.
Contrast that with the rise of creators. Sitting adjacent to sports and out of its control, they are stealing the cultural moment. Look at golf: it’s not Rory or Rahm driving the next generation of fans on TikTok and Instagram, it’s creators producing fun, wildly popular content and, above all, authentic content.
The issue isn’t new. Stories have just come out that on the 2005 Lions tour, Gavin Henson, a heavenly mix of talent, cheekbones, and profile, described life on tour under the comms regime of Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former spin doctor. The tales weren’t happy ones. I’ve always struggled with outsiders telling sport how to best do its thing (see also today’s Welsh Rugby Union debacle), they rarely get it right.
Campbell’s PR playbook may have been brilliant in Westminster, but it bombed in Wellington.
So, here we are, stars muffled, journalists frustrated, and fans tuned out.
The solution isn’t more control, it’s less. Give players room to be human again and let us enjoy their imperfect, emotional, maybe even funny selves.
In the meantime, let’s welcome the rise of creators who are making commentary not just engaging but actually enjoyable.
Because if sport can’t find its own voice, someone else will.
Want more like this?
Sign up to Access Innovation – the newsletter that tells you what’s next before it ends up in your competitor’s performance stack.
No comment yet, add your voice below!