Tommy Martin: Still some joy and surprise amid the sporting effluent
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YOU can tell what kind of 12 months it’s been when the dictionary people choose their words of the year.
The Australian English Macquarie Dictionary went with ‘enshittification’, a term coined by Canadian journalist and author Cory Doctorow which it explained as the “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”
The Oxford English Dictionary, meanwhile, chose ‘brain-rot’, which they defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
Yep, that kind of year. The two words seem closely related and go beyond the tech world to a more general malaise. Brain-rot is clearly a symptom of enshittification, with, say, this year’s US presidential election being a grand gala display of the process.
On a personal level, fears about brain-rot are rife among those of us with children who consume oodles of enshittified online material. How we wish for them the intellectually stimulating fare of our own childhoods, like Bananaman, Inspector Gadget and Pat Sharp’s Fun House.
Nor did sport did escape enshittification in 2024. It was there directly in the way that athletes continued to be targeted for online hatred, the great shit funnel of social media turning itself on the best and brightest. That one of the emblematic Irish sportspeople of 2024, Rhasidat Adeleke, would have to endure racist abuse following the European Athletics Championships, was, to put it bluntly, pretty shit.
Enshittification went beyond the online effluent that accounts for a large chunk of sporting discourse. It was there in a broader sense in the every word, act and deed of Fifa, whose busy year of making things worse included selling off great swathes of the world’s game to the state of Saudi Arabia – from hosting rights for the men’s World Cup, to sponsorship of the women’s World Cup, to the funding of their idiot stepchild Club World Cup idea – in order to bankroll the personal ambitions of its president, Gianni Infantino.
It was there when rugby fans watched the Champions Cup and lamented the bastardisation of a once great tournament. It was there in the Ineos takeover of Manchester United’s football department, which involved cutting 250 staff and appointing roughly the same number of sporting directors, and slashing the staff’s £100 Christmas bonus while paying £21million to sack and replace Erik Ten Hag as manager four months after giving him a new contract.
It was still there in professional golf, long enshittified by the LIV wars and continuing in the delusion that people will watch competitions where the best players don’t play against each other and get paid grotesque amounts of money for the privilege. There is more where that came from, with the forthcoming Rory McIlroy- and Tiger Woods-backed TGL team-based indoor league sounding like something that came from an AI generator for terrible golf formats.
Gaelic football reached such a state of enshittification that it had to be rescued from itself by the Football Review Committee (FRC), a crack team of grizzled veterans, kind of like a GAA version of The Expendables. The FRC were helped in their arguments for rule-changes by an All-Ireland Football Championship which seems to have been blown from the memory already, like the tumbleweed meme that summed up most of its fixtures.
There are too many hurling matches behind paywalls, too many people going for pints in the Aviva during rugby matches and too many soccer matches full stop. Cheltenham is too long and the Brits are rubbish at training horses so it’s no fun anymore.
What happened to the Irish lineout? Why can’t Evan Ferguson get a game at Brighton? Why is Brian Fenton retiring? How did we not qualify for the women’s Euros? Why was Rhasidat Adeleke denied an Olympic medal by a Bahraini athlete who had served a two-year ban for the serious doping violation of missing three tests? Why is the taxman going after the Cúl Camps? Why was Gladiator II so crap? (Ok, not sport that last one, but still).
And yet, for all that, for all the greed and corruption and mismanagement and the continued existence of VAR, the amazing thing is that the words that define 2024 in sport are not those chosen by the dictionary people, but words like surprise and delight and pure, unadulterated joy.
When the mind conjures 2024 in sport it goes not to the grim “consequences of profit-seeking” that seem everywhere but to the wonderfully batty opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics and the glorious fortnight that followed it.
Those images of fencing at the Grand Palais and dressage at Versailles and beach volleyball at the Eiffel Tower, of Leon Marchand and Mondo Duplantis and Simone Biles and Antoine Dupont. The skateboarding! The surfing! The breakdancing!
That summer dream of a fortnight when we seemed to be up for medals every day and every one of them had a story that lit up the finest corners of the human condition. The courage and resilience of Rhys McClenaghan and Kellie Harrington, Mona McSharry’s journey within herself to find the split second to win an Olympic medal, the touched-by-gods majesty of Daniel Wiffen, Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy. The feats of Adeleke individually and her relay teammates, who took no medals but all of our hearts.
But it’s more than golden memories that saved us from the sludge. It was the surprising twists, like the collapse of Manchester City or the juddering halt to the Limerick hurling machine or the emergence of Luke Littler as the kebab-toting hero for a generation or, I’ll be damned, the Irish men winning a couple of international soccer matches.
It’s in the joy of the Georgian football fans at Euro 2024, their own Italia ’90 while political unrest reigned up home. It’s in the parable about change and renewal that is the Irish out-half succession, with 38-year-old Johnny Sexton handing over to 24-year-old Jack Crowley, who is challenged by 21-year-old Sam Prendergast, who all the rugby experts reckon should be looking over his shoulder at 19-year-old Leinster academy starlet Caspar Gabriel.
It’s in the electric fluctuations of fortune that made Clare’s All-Ireland hurling final win over Cork the fitting finale for hurling’s short, spectacular summer. It’s Shels winning the maddest League of Ireland ever and that not even being the biggest story in domestic football thanks to Rovers' exploits in Europe. It’s watching Rory miss those putts at the US Open and wondering how any benevolent deity could allow it. The sheer indefatigability of Katie Taylor and Katie George Dunlevy. And it’s in Ciara Mageean’s European 1500 metre gold, the sheer guts of it, not least because she was running with the pain that would end in the heartbreak of missing the Olympics.
All these things are what make sport remarkably resistant to the forces of enshittification. We look forward to enjoying more of them in 2025, if the brain-rot allows.