LAUSR

On 13 December 2020, the New York Times ran a detailed piece entitled ‘2020: The Year in Sports When Everybody Lost’ (Drape et al., 2020). The article lamented the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across the world’s sporting organizations, describing losses of US$13b in the US sporting leagues, US$28.6b in wages and earnings, and nearly 1.5 million jobs in the US alone, while revenue losses exceeded 1 billion euros among some of Europe’s biggest football clubs. Similarly, dire outcomes careered through all sub-sectors of sport when major events and competitions were cancelled, postponed and shortened, including Wimbledon and the Olympic Games, the latter polarizing the residents of Tokyo (Sato et al., 2020). Participation sport ground to a halt or a series of stop-starts, and leisure, recreation and exercise continued only outdoors and in homes. At the same time, as crises gripped mainstream sport, alternative sporting content and activities proliferated leading to a massive surge in home fitness equipment sales, online exercise studios, esports and re-packaged sporting material. While conventional sport and its supply chain exsanguinated, new versions blossomed, the two blending in the middle as hybrid fan-facing initiatives were invented by the more innovative and well resourced, thanks to mobile, streaming technologies and the giant firms providing them. Meanwhile, those lucky enough to maintain jobs in the sporting industry worked largely from home. Forget about the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ or even the ‘Age of Information’, according to an e-book produced by technology giant Cisco in collaboration with Wired magazine, we have arrived at the ‘Age of WFA’ – Work from Anywhere (CiscoxWired, 2021). So arrived yet another ‘new’ working model, in this case based on a hybrid response to a sudden amplification of the remote economy. As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, the pandemic has revealed the extent to which traditional sport is inextricably coupled to participation and fan attendance. Hyperbole for once seems inadequate to fully account for the prodigious impact the sporting world and its stakeholders and fans have endured and are continuing to combat. If the response to the call for papers for this special issue is a measure of the sport management scholarly community’s assessment of COVID’s importance to the industry, we would conclude that has never been a single exogenous event that has