Nothing Beats Being There: Why Live Sport Matters

Tru7 Honda Racing team at the final round of the British Motocross Championship 2026 at Blaxhall (MXGB)

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By Andrew Smith, CEO & Founder at SPORTA

Last weekend I stood at the fence for the final round of the British Motocross Championship at Blaxhall (MXGB), with my youngest beside me for his first ever round. The last time I'd been to one was 1989. My first was 1986, and my dad took me.

Forty years between the two, and the thing that struck me most wasn't how much had changed. It was how little had. The noise, the smell, the sand in the air, the moment before the gate drops... all of it landed exactly as it did when I was a kid. That is the point of this piece.

Watching is not the same as being there

Let's be honest from the outset. Highlights, clips and live broadcast are good for sport. Short clips are how most young people discover a sport in the first place. Watching live on TV or a streaming service is a big step above that, because nobody knows the outcome and you're watching history being made in real time.

But being there is the best version of watching. It is a different thing entirely.

At a live event every sense is engaged at once. The sound of a tackle rather than the picture of one. The crowd rising before you've seen why. The air falling out of a ground when the home side concedes. The smell of a bike at a motocross start line, or cut grass at a cricket ground on a Saturday. When the senses are engaged, the emotion follows, and when the emotion follows, the memory sticks. Ask anyone who fell in love with a sport where it happened, and almost every answer is a place, not a screen.

Why this matters beyond the fan

That memory is not just a nice moment. It's the mechanism that keeps sport alive.

At the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham this summer, 218,135 people came through the gates over seven days, and roughly a fifth of them were children on free or discounted tickets. Somewhere in that crowd a child chose a hero, and that choice will shape what they play, where they belong and who they become. Every participant, every volunteer, every coach and every future season ticket holder starts as someone who was there.

This is why attendance matters at every level of the pyramid, not just the top. Around 80% of sports clubs in the UK fail to break even, and across the country that represents close to £120 billion of social and economic value at risk every year. Those clubs don't survive on broadcast rights. They survive on people turning up. Gate receipts, the bar, the club shop, the sponsor who sees a full ground, the parent who becomes a volunteer because they came to watch and stayed to help.

Being there is the revenue. Being there is the community. Being there is the pipeline.

What a live day gives you that a screen can't

Take motocross, because it makes the point better than most, and I have just lived it just days ago with my youngest son.

At a football match you watch a fixture. At a championship round you get a whole day. Practice, qualifying, the youth class at lunchtime (the stars of tomorrow, and you can see it), then the two senior classes racing two motos each. Three hours of racing, and you can walk the circuit while it happens, watching from a corner, then a jump, then the start straight. The paddock is open, so you're up close to the bikes, the mechanics and the riders throughout the day.

Then there's the start. Up to 40 riders behind a single gate, the engines building, the held breath before it drops. Broadcast gives you no sense of it at all. You have to be there.

Different sports do this differently, but the principle holds everywhere. A League One ground where you can hear the manager. A county cricket ground where you can talk to the players at tea. A village rugby pitch where the touchline is a metre from the action. Closeness is the thing a screen cannot sell, and it's the thing grassroots and lower league sport has more of than anyone.

The counterargument

The honest pushback is that the screen gives you more. Better angles, replays, commentary, the full race rather than the corner in front of you, and all for the price of a subscription rather than a day out.

That's true. You see more on a screen.

But seeing more and experiencing something are not on the same scale. But seeing more doesn’t mean you’ve seen what you need to. In motocross being there you hear those that get on the throttle earlier, you can feel who is braking later. None of these small things can be captured by a camera, so they don’t come across in a screen. Until you have stood at an event you don't fully understand the sport, and you don't see the organisers, the officials and the volunteers who make it exist. A screen shows you the result. Being there shows you what it takes, and what it took to win.

What we take from this at SPORTA

Everything we build is in service of sport and sport participation. The club exists because people turn up. So the question we keep asking ourselves is simple: how do we make it easier for more people to be there, more often, at every level?

That means helping fans discover what's on near them this weekend, not just what's on television. It means making it simple to get through the gate, to belong to a club rather than just visit it, and to be recognised and rewarded for turning up week after week. It means giving clubs a true picture of who came, so the next sponsor conversation starts with real data rather than a guess. Attendance is the single most valuable thing a club has, and for too long it has been the least well understood.

We can't manufacture the moment a child chooses a hero. But we can make sure there's a club, a ground and a fixture there for it to happen.

Go

So this is the ask, and it's the same one I'd make to anyone.

Go. Grassroots, non-league, League One, a national championship in a field in Suffolk. Take your children, take your friends, or go on your own. Get as much live sport into your life, at as many levels as you can, as often as you can.

Life is about experiences. Nothing beats being there.