Sport First launched on Sunday amid not much more than a trickle of publicity (I was waiting for the ads to come along during Sky’s football and cricket coverage, but if they did I missed them. Perhaps too over the moon over Overmars). I gather there was a supporting radio campaign.
The new title runs to two sections, one devoted entirely to football, and aims to eventually replicate the success of Gazetta dello Sport (average 376,000 circulation, 618,000 Mondays) and L’Equipe (372,000 average) in Italy and France respectively. However, there would seem to be two obstacles which may prove insurmountable – that the “British sporting mentality” may not run to a sports only newspaper (weekly let alone daily); and that the Sundays do a pretty good job of covering sport already, so Sport First may not get far enough to consider its intended expansion to Saturday and Monday.
I could find very little of major consequence in the first issue that I could not have got from any of the quality Sundays. Sport First does offer more depth – more soccer reports, covering all divisions, more features, more rugby reports (5 pages in all), more guest columns. The coverage of semi-professional, junior, schools or amateur sport is a first, and there are some well-known writers – Harry Mullen on boxing and John Thicknesse on cricket to name just two, but the whole is rather uninspiring somehow.
You would expect this paper to excel in the preview of upcoming major fixtures and the considered analysis of sporting issues, but instead I felt this was a weakness in the first issue. The analysis in the other quality Sundays of England’s selection problems for this week’s friendly and the coming World Cup offered more insight than Trevor Steven’s column for Sport First, and I learnt nothing new from any of the features that I read. There was no attempt to mimic the tabloid sporting exclusives, sticking instead firmly to the high ground, but the result was a lack of punch.
There are plenty of launch issue advertisers – unsurprisingly financial and motoring biased. Vauxhall, VW, Rover, Citroen, Peugeot, Gartmore, Nat West and Britannia Fund Managers all feature. Others include Guinness, Citizen, Psion, DHL, NEC, Epson and bookmakers, William Hill and Coral.
This concept should succeed given the continued rise in popularity and profile of sport in this country, and the product is fine -good broad coverage, good photography, and decent writers. But even at 50p would I buy it again as well as my other Sunday reading? Would I have time to read it fully if I did? Given that I fit the paper’s target market, therein, I believe, is encapsulated Sport First‘s dilemma.
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