Last week I was one of the 500 million viewers who watched a global megaevent. I do not know how many of those viewers were in a bar, but that is where I found myself, among a pack of well-mannered sports fans enthusiastically enjoying the competition between Real Madrid and Barcelona, two European soccer – that is to say – football powerhouses whose clash goes by the name of el clásico. Half a billion viewers would make anything a classic. The Super Bowl draws about a quarter of that size of an audience if it is lucky. Of course, the Olympics and the World Cup eclipse everything else.
But this post is not about the relative irrelevancy of American football, which I also follow religiously, on a global stage. That is a tedious subject. Rather it is about sport itself and its new relevancy.