Sports administration is one of those jobs which have built into them the fact that they attract attention only when things go wrong. A school sports day takes quite a bit of organising; anything bigger, and the complications grow exponentially. Events such as Wimbledon or the World Cup are mechanisms of extraordinary complexity, in which most of the moving parts are human, and these events are, in their way, heroic feats of administration and bureaucracy and man-management - and all that effort just goes to set the stage for the real action. The whole point of all this work is to go unnoticed. Being a sports administrator is a bit like being a spy, in that attracting attention is by definition a sign that something has gone amiss.

LRB 8 October 2009 | PDF Download