Hacker: The crunch hits sports fans where it hurts most

What do Shunsuke Nakamura, Jenson Button and the British Olympic table tennis squad have in common? The answer is that their sporting futures are very much in the balance at present, and all for precisely the same reason: the global financial crisis has begun to sink its teeth into the world of sport.

That’s right, the credit crunch just got interesting – though, without question, deeply more concerning.

Traditionally, Scottish gentlemen’s public-house banter has centred on a single dominant theme of mutual fascination: the beautiful game of football. Yet, in recent months, the rise in the price of your average pint of ale has brought with it a new subject of discussion as old friends gather down the local to discuss the critical state of the global economy.

However, this week has seen a captivating new dimension brought to the table; an opportunity to combine the two favourite conversation pieces of honest pub-dwelling Scotsmen. The news to which I refer is that of Celtic’s 2007 player of the year, Shunsuke Nakamura, remaining at Parkhead until at least the summer, as his perspective new club simply cannot afford to buy him.

Earlier this season, a reported £3 million deal was struck between Scottish champions Celtic and J League side Yokohama F Marinos to take the Japanese international back to his homeland. However, the move, originally planned to take place during the January transfer window, has been put on hold as Marinos’s parent company, car manufacturing giant Nissan, has pulled the plug on big-name transfers due to the credit crunch.

Outside of football, the global financial squeeze has impacted other areas of sport, including one of the most lucrative sporting franchises in existence, Formula One.

Last week, established F1 driving team Honda pulled out of the world's richest sporting series, blaming the global economic crisis for the decision to sell its racing team. The move leaves British racing non-entity Jenson Button and team-mate Rubens Barrichello without teams to drive for, with only a limited number of middle-ranking seats available before the start of the new season.

In an attempt to bring the sport's soaring costs under control, F1's governing body has considered introducing a standardised engine and gearbox that would be fitted to every car, regardless of its team or the technological agenda of its parent company. Although implementing such a move would undoubtably increase Button's chances of putting some long-overdue points on the board, as things stand, there is no secure indication that he will even be competing in the championship next year.

What's more, the future of two-time world champion and renowned misery-guts Fernando Alonso was also brought into question last week, when the sulky Spaniard announced that he would consider retirement if the rules for engine standardisation came into effect. There you go, Jensen, keep your fingers crossed and there might just be an empty seat at Renault for you come 2009. Or not.

However, the multi-millionaires’ playgrounds that are Formula One and top-flight football are not the only sporting industries to have suffered as a result of the worldwide recession. Last Wednesday saw the announcement of UK Sport’s Olympic 2012 funding programme, and while lesser sports such as basketball, synchronised swimming and archery were among those to benefit from the budget, others were not so lucky.

Having not yet received any conformation of individual funding allocations, a total of eight Olympic sports and four Paralympic sports are to share, as things stand, a paltry £12.5 million between them in the run-up to the London games. Beyond this clearly insubstantial offering, the unfortunate athletes involved have absolutely no assurance of financial security beyond UK Sport’s rather flimsy and ambivalent promise to “help identify further funding, both from private investment and from other potential sources of income.”

One such ill-fated squad is the British table tennis side, who have had high hopes for 2012 since previous government funding allowed them to move to the state-of-the-art facilities at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield. However, since UK sport’s budget was announced, British table tennis representatives have voiced major concerns over the allocation of funds from UK Sport’s £550 million budget.

Indeed, the table tennis association’s outcry is hardly surprising given a number of seemingly bizarre budgetary decisions made by British sport’s governing body, including a 136.9 per cent increase in the amount allocated to basketball—now £8.75 million—and a 109 per cent hike in investment towards synchronised swimming, amounting to £3.46 million.

Nonetheless, it’s always reassuring to see that no matter what dire straits certain global sporting organisations find themselves in, there will always be the likes of Manchester “Middle Eastlands” City, who slapped the credit crunch in the face last week by tabling a record-battering £129 million for Real Madrid ‘keeper, Iker Casillas, to remind us that not everybody is a looser in the fiasco that is the world economy.

“Damn the Man!” I hear you cry? “Damn the Man City” more like it.