SportBusiness.com

Companies find the Singapore market too small to justify the expense of backing major sporting events, sport tournament professionals say.
"Nobody is in the business for charity. Everybody wants to see their money bring returns," Richard Young, vice president of Event Management Group, a unit of Asia's largest sports television network ESPN STAR said.
"And if a place cannot guarantee returns, it will never interest the market players," he added.
One of the biggest casualties has been the ATP Tour's Singapore Open tennis organised by Event Management Group.
The tour was played for five years running before the sponsor, a brewery, pulled the plug last year.
The group has since decided to sell the event back to the ATP rather than go shopping for yet another sponsor.
It is a fate narrowly avoided by the Singapore Open golf tournament. Now in its 40th year, it tees off at the Jurong Country Club on Thursday with its third title sponsor in four years.
The Singapore Golf Association (SGA) struggled to find a suitable sponsor for the prestigious stop on the Asian tour.
The 1998 and 1999 tournaments were sponsored by mobile phone manufacturers Ericsson and Nokia , respectively, but the one in 2000 had to be played without a major corporate backer.
The future of the 2001 event had looked shaky. The SGA had already told the Asian PGA they could not hold the tournament when the regional body stepped in to find a third mobile phone maker - Alcatel - to fill the breach.
COST VERSUS SIZE
Event Management decided to sell the tennis tour back to ATP rather than try to convince sponsors to back it.
"We could very well have gone the way of golf and shopped around for a new sponsor every year. But it's really an uphill task considering the huge costs involved in holding a major event like tennis," Young said.
"So we have decided to move to other sports like futsal (five-a-side indoor soccer), bowling and our very own X-Games."
Young said the costs involved versus the size of the Singapore domestic market was the key reason.
"If a major shoe manufacturer were to sponsor the tennis, they would need to sell 20 pairs of shoes to each of the four million population to justify the expenses," he said
"If they go to India or China, they need to increase their sales by only half a percent to cover the costs."
Young said players were happy to come to Singapore and that the city state's telecommunications facilities and flight connections were top-notch.
But holding a tournament in Singapore was more than four times costlier than in neighbouring Malaysia.
"We used to end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in air-conditioning bills alone during tennis tournaments that featured Michael Chang, Marcelo Rios, Mark Philippoussis, Lleyton Hewitt, the Woodies and the like," Young said.
"On top of that we guarantee live television coverage for the entire tournament, but still the sponsor feels it's not worth his while pumping money into the Singapore event. They would rather be elsewhere."
Young's sentiments are echoed by the sponsors themselves.
Coca-Cola sponsored the 1999 three-nation cricket tournament but its local marketing office, when asked about its commitment to the game, said: "It had nothing to do with us".
"It was all done by our India office," a spokesman said. "The amount of money they spent on that one tournament would be more than our publicity budget for the next five years in Singapore."
The 2000 cricket tournament was played without a sponsor and this year's event hangs in the balance.
PULLING THE PLUG
Badminton has a fairly large following in the region but the Singapore Badminton Association's marquee event - the Singapore Cup - was cancelled last year as the sponsor for the previous five years, a film and photo equipment maker, did not renew.
The association said that, being an Olympic year, it would be impossible to attract top class players.
Later, it emerged that most top teams had slotted Singapore into their calendar as part of preparations for the Sydney Olympics, only to be told at the last minute that the event was not going to happen.
The event is usually played in August to September and there were no signs of its revival this year.