Football (soccer) is king at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that other sports aren’t growing, too.
After all, it must be jampacking to watch the World Cup next summer in South Africa. As well as the prospect of religiously-ordained millionaires faineting in the street in Monte Carlo over the duration of the tournament, there’s another exhilarating event happening in town every June: the onset of the football season in the English football league.
This is football’s version of the Kentucky Derby, the cross-generational superball. In the UK, it goes something like this: every single football league in the country has just one representative in the race to the title of Britain’s best football player. It’s been a uncontested championship for a while, but the Football League is about to get a load of attention.
Don’t say he didn’t warn you. The presence of a professional footballer at this tournament is enough to affect the minds and attitudes of the other players. Joyal, Jenson, King, and Rodriguez have been talked up as future England players, but can you spot the other members of the once-ennis-run England team?
popular vote’em
There’s no doubting Phil Cope’s influence: he’s the face of Gibraltar football, and was even rumoured to have had a falling out with the club chairman, who apparently isn’t too happy with the billionaire sense of the city’s fusion with the Premier League. Whatever the truth is, you can bet the proceeds of the tournament will go on Joyal and Jenson, and whoever replaces Phil, should it be Cope or Hull City’s sharply-dressed right-back Robert hustled onto the pitch during opening ceremonies, they’ll need to pay the price for their services in the likely event that the Football Association decide to instate an chairman from the stands.
In the Championship, it’s a case of staying in the same place where you belong. While it may be tempting to rub elbows with the relative big boys, the efforts will prove futile. Odds are thatrr will be headed home early, the owners and board members will have already turned a blind eye to you, and you’ll be wasting your potential leverage.
In the battle for public perception, however slight, there is one easy place to hurt. It’s in your own country. It’s in the UK. Football is almost as popular in England as cricket and cricket is in India. The country is crazy about the sport, and almost as committed to its friends and family. Relationships based on betting are not uncommon, and it is no different in relationships to friends and family based on betting.
Friendships based on betting are not uncommon, and it is no different in relationships to friends and family based on betting.
So, what is it about football that means it gets such a hold across the United Kingdom? Is it the history? The culture? The players? Does it stand out as a team on a placid field? Is it the fans?Essentially, no. It’s all a function of marketing, and in the case of the Premier League, a by-product of the UK lottery draw.
The lottery draw gives the State funds an unknown but fairly predictable number of millionaire lottery ticket buyers. The money raised from the lottery is dangled in the hope that the lottery appeal will act as a road map to other European lottery draws, and by so doing, to future jackpot prizes in the millions.
The role of the agent is to sell the dream to the agent, and to encourage existing customers to plays the lottery in the hope of winning a far greater amount of money than they had originally planned.
If the pitch for the lottery is that you have a very good chance of being a millionaire, then one way to sell the dream is to make it about the amounts of money you can stand to win. Then the agent can encourage the dream by comparison in the terms and conditions of the lottery, or even by telling the agent how much you were planning to win.
Such pitches for lotteries have found their way round the United Kingdom lottery draw, and were recently explored by a group of twelve former National LotteryCommission members. They concluded that, while there is no immediate evidence of serious lottery fraud, the practices of a small number of syndicates may have gone sour, and that ‘oyalty bonuses’ are offered to agents and their clients in the expectation that they will be shown how much potential profit was saved by not sold on. Such bonuses turn out to be a backdoor method of Scoop 6, and should be avoided.