Euro 2008 : Sport and Business Event

Euro 2008 has come, yeaah....

For all football lovers around the world, this event is been waited since few days, few months or even few years ago!!. Yup, Euro cup is the 2nd biggest football event in the world after the world cup. This year, Austria and Switzerland were honoured to be co-host for the most wanted football tournament in europe. 16 teams will participate in this 3-Wks tournament and will kill each other to win the cup.

As another football event, Euro is attracted the attention of most of world's citizen including Indonesia. The atmosphere is already impose Jakarta since last week which some big shopping centers have put big banner and offer attendance to join in "nonton bareng" event. Some TV station have advertised this event frequently and combine it with popular entertaintment program as instance, music concert and quiz.

Nowadays, football is not just a sport but it is already replicate into big industry. It is a business which involve million or even billion dollars inside it. With million of watchers in entire world football can generate enourmous profit for host country, sponsor, participant country, or even the player. Let's take one simple example which can describe how big is football industry, football players income. Let's take a look one name Cristiano Ronaldo, a portugal midfielder who recently famous due to his awesome skills when driblling a ball, is paid more than 1 Billion IDR in one week!! WoW!!. It means in one mont he received not less than 4 Billion IDR!!

We can imagine, only to pay one CR, football club is will to spend that big numbers. It's mean that to pay eleven player, a club must be spent more than 12 Billion IDR in one wk. Hence, the club must have at least 48 billion IDR in one month thus their monthly income should be not less than 1 trillion IDR wow! what a fantastic numbers!!.

Since this sport has been a big industry, football club already replicated their organization structure as a business entity. It means a football club is equal to corporation which running out a big business within.

This new paradigm has changed some basic ideas of sport itself. In my opinion, formerly sport event were created or held in order to facilitate people to get fitness and healthy but nowadays when sport has become an industry the main idea to held sport event like euro has moved into business ideas which main goal is to make money and gain profit. Other impact is athletes are become business professional just like as banker, lawyer, etc.

The main idea of this passage is to highlight new paradigm of recent sport which mostly adopted business ideas and not purely a way to make pepole healthy.

So..enjoy your euro and don't sleep too late... :)