Sports trends

The crunch bites

Tiger Woods has already lost a sponsor to the credit crunch, and if it can happen to The Most Marketable Man On The Planet, everyone else should start to panic. Expect events-based sports such as golf and tennis to shrink their schedules - marginal tournaments with forgettable names will vanish as quickly as they arrived. In F1 it's the teams, rather than the races, that are in danger - we wouldn't be surprised to see others drop off the back of the grid like Honda.

Small clubs are most vulnerable: prepare yourselves for a few sentimental names to go to the wall. Top-flight footy may still be affected however: new stadiums are being put on hold and excessive salaries are, says Downward, likely to come down. We'll believe that when we see it.

The 20/20 effect

Thanks to the success of Twenty20 cricket, more sports are slimming down and sexing up. 'Express Eventing' now squeezes all the parts of three-day eventing into just one, and in June polo follows it with a shortened version of the game to be staged in London's Hurlingham Park.

And it's not just the horsey types trying to make themselves more accessible. By the end of the year, the PGA will have hosted its first PowerPlay Golf World Championship, played over nine holes. 'People are leaving golf because of time,' says Peter McEvoy, the driving force behind PowerPlay golf. 'It takes too long. It's a cultural change - a need for more instant gratification.' Time is particularly important where television is concerned. As long as football, rugby, tennis, Formula One - in their tidy, telly-friendly packages - continue to absorb fan interest and broadcast rights money, other sports will have to adapt. We look forward to single-frame snooker matches and 24-minute Le Mans races with glee.

Player power

It's the kind of term you expect to hear from newly redundant managers, but 'player power' will reach a new peak in 2009. Players have long been in control of tennis but come May, one will 'own' a tournament for the first time - Novak Djokovic's family bought the rights to the Dutch Open last year, and are relocating it to Belgrade to become the Serbian Open. Ana Ivanovic is expected to do something similar for the women's tour.

This year, the last major sport without a players' union, snooker, forms the Association of Snooker Professionals, pioneered by John Higgins. The Scot also helped launch - and then win - the World Series of Snooker, staged throughout 2008. And in cricket, players itchy to get to the Indian Premier League are able to hold their governing bodies to ransom: witness Sri Lanka's withdrawal from their tour of England this year.

Reference: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/jan/04/4