bleungberg.com

It sounded like a good idea for the best part of about ten seconds - a new series linking Britain’s top flat races into some kind of coherent narrative on network TV, starting in early May and ending in mid-October every summer, with huge prize-money and the crowning of a champion racehorse on the flat, beginning in the spring of 2010.

Except it’ll never work.

The brains behind the pompously-named Sovereign Series - the venerable Jockey Club and some horse-racing-ignorant marketing suits - are deluded to think that the racing and non-racing public will suddenly patch onto something to rank alongside The Open Championships or Wimbledon during the summer.

More crucially, they assume that television companies will be falling themselves into paying big bucks to broadcast ten races which amount to about sixty minutes of airtime in total. The idea is to increase racing’s value in terms of sports rights, and is modelled on what Premierhsip football and Champions League have achieved in extracting the maximum amount of cash out of broadcasters.

The problem is that this is horse-racing, a well-attended but not universally popular and fairly difficult-to-understand kind of sport. Whilst the likes of Cheltenham Festival and Grand National, the Derby and Royal Ascot have genuine appeal to the masses - more through the occasion, the history and the punting - can you really imagine people switching over from the women’s Wimbledon final just to watch the Eclipse Stakes at Sandown Park, let alone stick with it for a whole season where the same horses might not even run in every race?

No.

As for broadcasters battling to broadcast the series - well, these business suits really are retarded. The BBC doesn’t care about racing except for the few national events. Channel 4 is paid by racing to continue broadcasting. ITV doesn’t give a shit, and with the World Cup in 2010 in South Africa, it will not have airtime to horse-racing on Saturday afternoons when it’s busy with football. Sky can’t cover the series as the Derby has to be on network TV, which leaves Five, who doesn’t care.

So it’s either Channel 4 or the BBC. And if either one loses out, they might as well not bother with the sport, which means just one channel will be left with racing, and complacency will set in, allowing them to reduce coverage, and cherry-pick what it likes to broadcast - something which the BBC is already doing.

Besides, in the current economic climate, it is crazy to think that cash could be found through sponsorship of such as series. Three of the races in the proposed series currently have no commercial sponsors, and with numerous other sports struggling to attract blue-chip companies such as tennis - both the LTA and WTA are having difficulties doing that - it is hard to imagine why any company would want to sponsor this series in a third-tier sport.

Moreover, some people say the series is unworkable, as it only enhances one’s prixe-money but not - crucially - one’s stallion values - the basis of flat-racing. Who’s run their horse in the Champion Stakes at Newmarket when they could go for the ultra-valuable Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris two weeks earlier, and then attempt a double in the even more valuable Breeders’ Cup Turf at the end of October in America? The Champion Stakes just doesn’t fit it.

Maybe I’m sceptical, and I would dearly loved to be proved wrong. In the meantime, as the opening titles of the Frank Skinner/David Baddiel show goes, ‘It’ll never work.”