Thirty years ago, I went to see Diego Maradona appear as a guest of the Oxford Union. One abiding memory of that evening is of getting blocked at the door to the loos by his bodyguard, with Maradona inside at that moment and apparently needing conditions of privacy to do whatever he needed to do.
But another memory is of Maradona being invited to put on an academic gown and receive an honorary degree in the form of a beribboned scroll – a cod ceremony, of course, bestowing an honour of no formal value, the Oxford Union being a students’ debating society rather than the university itself.
Maradona didn’t seem to know, though. He looked moved – profoundly honoured. It was a squirm-inducing sight: a living legend reduced to a state of bewildered and ultimately groundless humility by people who weren’t really fit to lace his boots.
I feel a bit like that every December about the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award. Sport certainly has no trophy-lift like it. There’s no gleefully grabbing the silverware, dropping into a squat and then (“WooooOOOOH!”) thrusting it upwards in a burst of confetti. Instead, the winner, honoured to the point of bashfulness, steps soberly forward, gingerly nursing the prize, while orchestral music plays of a kind that would suit the end-credits for a historical drama in which the hero has died, but nobly.
“What’s the kink here?” I find myself wondering, looking on at this strangely hallowed scene, and feeling almost nothing. “Is it that, deep down, some people long to see our greatest sportspeople humbled?”
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Whatever, we can surely agree that, as a prize for winning prizes, the “Spoty” is superfluous by definition, and that these days it exists chiefly to remind us of the continuing power of the BBC to award it. Back in the golden age of publishing, magazines would inevitably end up launching their own annual awards nights, in which a sincere desire to pay tribute to their central passions (pop music, say, or men) almost but not quite eclipsed the rampantly opportunistic brand-building that was also going on.
Well, the Spoty is the same kind of authority-grab – except it’s worse, because this is sport, and the great thing about sport, you may have noticed, is that, unlike pop music or men, it’s already a near-perfect meritocracy all on its own. No need for anyone to phone in a vote. No need to accept the uneven playing field (ironically) of a curated shortlist of six nominees. No need to turn a blind eye to the undeclared vote count. Instead, sport conveniently produces its own winners by getting them to play sport. That’s how we can already confidently recognise sport’s winners in 2025: they won. There’s not really anything Spoty can add, without it all becoming confusing again.
It was interesting to be thinking about all this in the same week that Anthony Joshua fought Jake Paul for bucks and clicks on Netflix. There were people who took exception to the idea of a pro boxer fighting a YouTuber. And there were people who devoted serious consideration to where the Spoty would go. And often these were the same people. Which is odd, really, because both these things were essentially the same: riffs on reality television, designed mostly for the generation of buzz.
And if, at some point last week, you had accidentally washed either or both of them under a hedge with a high pressure hose, in the world in which actual sport takes place it would have made no difference at all.
Yet still you could find people earnestly discussing Spoty, as if all of sport’s most gilded roads lead not to their own glorious ends but to this hokum Christmas coronation, and as if it mattered.
But ’tis the season, clearly. Also last week, sport’s most grammatically irritating honours, the Best Fifa Football Awards, were distributed, amid gullible headlines, in Doha, at (naturally) a “star-studded ceremony” – forgetting that what many of us love about football, and sport generally, is that it’s the exact opposite of a “star-studded ceremony”; that, indeed, sport’s very purpose on Earth is to leave “star-studded ceremonies” in the dust.
Photograph by David Davies/PA Wire