Football has tended to be under-represented in the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year awards, partly due to the fact team games do not always advance individuals for special recognition and partly because it has been a while since teams made the sort of statement beyond these shores that they did in 1966 or 1999.
Traditionally the award for team of the year has gone to World Cup winners or significant European champions such as Celtic in 1967 and Manchester United a year later. There has been only one team of the year winner from football this millennium, and you could be forgiven for forgetting which one. Don’t bother looking it up, Gérard Houllier’s Liverpool were awarded the prize in 2001 for winning both domestic cups and the Uefa trophy.
On that basis alone Leicester City’s achievement in winning the Premier League title ought to put them in with a shout. Yes, it was only a domestic title, not a conquest of Europe or an unprecedented accumulation of silverware, but where would you go in 2016 to find a better story, a more unexpected development or a truer embodiment of the notion of team spirit?
That last consideration is important, or ought to be. Say what you like about Leicester’s place in the overall scheme of things but there can be no denying they won their prize through teamwork. Jamie Vardy is up for the individual award, and doubtless Claudio Ranieri will have his backers as the coach of the year, though what was undoubtedly a team achievement deserves to win a team prize. In terms of working for each other, sticking together, maintaining concentration and holding their collective nerve, there was quite simply no better team in the country than Leicester.
Most people would agree, even if the prize they won was only an annual event that some football team or other is bound to pick up every year. Yet the BBC’s gong show tends to look for more elevated achievements, and as 2016 was not only an Olympic year but another phenomenally successful one for British athletes, Leicester’s remarkable feat could end up being overlooked in favour of Team GB, or some conflation of Olympic and Paralympic medallists.
Perhaps there would not be too much wrong with that. Olympians have to wait four years for their chance to shine after all and they are finding the individual recognition marketplace somewhat crowded these days. Back when gold medals were something of a rarity, an Olympian would generally win the Spoty award every four years – Mary Rand, David Hemery, Mary Peters etc – though now there are so many vying for attention it becomes difficult to choose between, say, Mo Farah and Nicola Adams.
Would Alistair Brownlee be more deserving than Max Whitlock, and what about all the cyclists? The strong suspicion is Andy Murray will take the main award – he may have already won it twice but if he won Wimbledon and Olympic gold and finished the year as No1 in the world there is a powerful argument 2016 eclipses everything that went before – and in that event the easiest and most diplomatic solution to the Olympic debate would be to recognise everyone together as the team of the year.
Convenient as that would be, it still remains possible to regard Leicester as more deserving. For one thing Team GB do not actually constitute a team in any meaningful sense. Farah does not contribute anything to Britain’s cycling success and vice versa. Medals won in the velodrome are separate from those won in the gymnasium, swimming pool or equestrian arena.
Team GB are a list of individuals, all experts in their discipline but unreliant on anyone else’s, because that’s what the Olympic Games are: a series of separate events and disciplines. There is no teamwork involved beyond, say, the tactics within a pursuit race or the pacing of a relay.
There is no question Britain sent out a team of athletes to Rio and a very successful team they were, though they won their rewards through individual merit and not by operating as a team. One could substitute the word roster for team and no one would mind. There is nothing wrong with that, it is the nature of the activity, though if there is going to be an award for the best team of the year it probably ought to go to a collection of individuals who play as a team.
In that sense Eddie Jones’s vastly improved England rugby union side would be in with a chance ahead of the Olympians, too. Over the past year or so he has supervised the addition of a mysterious yet successful element to his side’s performances, something that remains elusive to pin down but may best be described as teamwork. Jones is an outstanding candidate for the coach of the year, and there is an international aspect to his side’s success too, though nudging England up to No2 in the world rankings does not seem quite as enormous and improbable a surprise as the one Leicester sprang on the world.
Quite simply, with the number of players in this country and the funds and facilities at their disposal, England always should be among the leading rugby union nations of the world. Similarly, it seems likely that now all our athletes are properly funded and most of them are effectively full-time professionals, Britain will generally do well at the Olympic Games, at least until such time as the rest of the world catches up with this country’s level of resource and development.
The trade-off is that the amount of surprise and delight a medal-winning performance can yield will slowly diminish. The playing field is no longer quite level if success can be bought and if that seems too harsh a view just think back to all those stories in summer about the average price of each goal medal. Money rules in any sport, it has just taken athletics, supposedly amateur for most of its history, a little longer than the rest to find out.
Money has long ruled in football, and though Leicester are not exactly a rags to riches story – poverty is relative in the Premier League – their team ethos brought about something no one thought could possibly happen.
Just think about that for a moment. Could the same be said about Farah, Adams, Brownlee and co? Did Team GB induce panic stations at bookmakers or result in Gary Lineker presenting Match of the Day in his underwear? This is not to suggest our Olympians and Paralympians are in any way undeserving of recognition, it is more a matter of semantics.
Perhaps the BBC still has time to come up with a Roster of the Year award or a Grand Weigh-in category for medals. Because the award for team of the year should surely go to participants in a team sport. And, just as surely, you may spend a lifetime or so waiting to see a more notable team performance than Leicester’s of last season.
