I fully applaud the introduction of Shakespeare to this topic. Although A Comedy of Errors, his iconic farce, is probably more appropriate.
For me it’s not unreasonable that the riders want enough money to make a living. It’s a dangerous job, they could be paralysed at any moment, and there are costs. The basic problem here is NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE GOING TO THE SPEEDWAY. If there were more fans, there would be more money generally, more interest in TV deals, more ability to fend off developers trying to build on the stadiums, more justification for asking for local or national government support.
Just more people, through the gates, that’s what is needed. In particular young people, since they are less likely to die and thus more likely to keep coming to the speedway. And maybe even allowing their kids to do speedway.
Big name riders ain’t gonna do that if nobody’s heard of them anyway. What speedway basically needs is to hook in whole new categories of people, if necessary for free. The single thing that has allowed me to get my wife into speedway last year has been the matches showing up on YouTube for free.
note that this is already happening. Nothing extra needs to be done to facilitate it, but if for example BSN decided to make one full match per week available on YouTube for one week only, for free, consistently, and publicise that, that gets somewhere.
the other half of the strategy is an energetic social media campaign to push this free footage to people who haven’t seen it before, using mostly TikTok and instagram. Once a buzz starts, that will wake up monster and other potential sponsors. Potentially it might be worth the clubs giving out bucketloads of free tickets to neighbours and local colleges/universities - because none of those people are going anyway, the clubs would lose no money, but gain some in merch/bar revenues, and a stronger argument when negotiating with the local council next time round. And sponsors and tv revenue.
look, it doesn’t matter what form the league takes or how many teams there are. It could be the same opponent every week, it would still be a much better sport than football. If they run out of teams belle vue could hold a Peter craven series, just doing open individual meetings every week. Whatever. All that matters is getting young people to go to the matches, which starts with not taking down the naughty YouTube videos but instead pushing them.
The sport itself is good enough that once we get it alight the whole thing will catch. But if we just huddle in the corner waiting for the killing blow to come, then it’s all over sooner or later.
