Anyone up for a bit of sport?

Peo­ple who hate sport can­not un­der­stand what sports fans see in it. While lovers of sport know that the peo­ple who hate sport are sim­ply mis­guided (guess which side I'm on). How­ever, what can­not be de­nied by any­one is that sport is hugely pop­u­lar around the world among peo­ple of all back­grounds.

The pop­u­lar­ity and im­por­tance of sport as a so­cial and cul­tural (and po­lit­i­cal and eco­nomic) phe­nom­e­non goes back, in the west, to the orig­i­nal Olympic games. Sport has al­ways been with us, and ever since they stopped the spec­ta­cle of set­ting lions on Chris­tians, it is a key source of ex­cite­ment, en­ter­tain­ment, con­flict, hap­pi­ness and dis­ap­point­ment in so­ci­ety, all things hu­mans can­not seem to live with­out.

Given the sig­nif­i­cance of sport for all of us, whether fans or not, it is es­sen­tial that it be pre­sent in Cat­alo­nia Today. As a gen­eral in­ter­est mag­a­zine, with the aim of in­clud­ing a lit­tle bit of every­thing, sport has tra­di­tion­ally been un­der­rep­re­sented in this pub­li­ca­tion. No one is per­fect, and our small at­tempts at serv­ing read­ers in­ter­ested in sport have largely been in­suf­fi­cient. But that, I hope you are glad to hear, has now been reme­died. If you haven't al­ready come across them (if not go back to pages 52 and 53) we have two new sports pages in the mag­a­zine. From now on, every month, those read­ers in­ter­ested in sport (and who knows, those that aren't might also find some­thing of in­ter­est) will get a dou­ble page of sports packed with news and re­flec­tion.

As you can see from the page de­sign, every month will start with an opin­ion ar­ti­cle about some as­pect of sport (some months there will be a news story in­stead), fol­lowed by bite-sized chunks of sport­ing news in the form of ‘Ups and downs' (who's been good and who hasn't) and a strip of re­cent quotes from sport­ing fig­ures. The fol­low­ing page pro­vides read­ers with a ‘for/against' for­mat, ar­gu­ing the toss over a rel­e­vant sport­ing issue, con­clud­ing with a round-up of news sto­ries.

Clearly, these pages can be mod­i­fied to suit the re­quire­ments of the mag­a­zine. We can also make changes to re­flect the in­ter­ests and wishes of the read­er­ship, so I would en­cour­age you to keep an eye on how they go and let us know if you get any bright ideas about how to im­prove them. In the mean­time, check them out and see what you think.

This month, the spread be­gins with an in­ter­est­ing ar­ti­cle on at­ten­dances at foot­ball matches. The Span­ish league it seems, is falling be­hind in this area, where Ger­many leads the way with a raft of in­no­va­tions such as re­duced ticket prices. Ac­cord­ing to the au­thor, econ­o­mist Al­bert Deulofeu, Barça's av­er­age at­ten­dance is around 75,000, just three quar­ters of Camp Nou's ca­pac­ity, while at the same time the club has a mem­ber­ship of some 140,000 peo­ple. You don't have to be a math­e­mati­cian to see that some­thing is wrong.

We also have the first 'for and against' rum­ble, with L'es­portiu jour­nal­ists, Lluís Simon and Marc Sal­gas bat­tling it out over who is most likely to win this year's Mo­toGP cham­pi­onship. Vet­eran Valentino Rossi has made an ex­cel­lent start, top­ping the stand­ings going into May, and in a good po­si­tion to add to his seven world ti­tles. How­ever, with the likes of cur­rent title holder Marc Márquez in the mix noth­ing is cer­tain. Per­son­ally, while I've got noth­ing against the Cata­lan rider, I'd love to see the ir­re­press­ible Rossi once again cel­e­brat­ing a vic­tory in his inim­itable style. Go read the ar­ti­cle and let us know what you think.

Fi­nally, among the bites of news on the sec­ond page, we learn that Je­remy Clark­son may soon be back on the BBC. The dis­graced Top Gear pre­sen­ter di­vides opin­ion and, to be hon­est, I'm not sure whether his re­turn is good news or bad.