Hello and welcome to another edition of Offside.Recently it has been suggested – by the powers that be – that Offside should deal with things beyond the Beautiful Game. So, this week we are going to ponder something that has become such an integral part of sport and appears intent on ruining it: the attention economy.There is some debate about who came up with the term first, a Newton-Leibniz moment for the social sciences, if you will.Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning American economist and cognitive scientist, laid the intellectual groundwork in 1971 when he argued that an abundance of information inevitably creates a scarcity of attention. Michael Goldhaber, an American physicist and early theorist of internet culture, later popularised the idea of an “attention economy” in the 1990s, arguing that in a world overflowing with information, the truly scarce commodity was other people’s attention. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Goldhaber as being among the first to describe the shift from an “information economy” to an “attention economy”, building on Simon’s earlier insight.No matter who came up with the term, sports fans can probably agree that there are times when rather too many people at sporting events appear to be interested in everything except the sport, what Roy Keane many years ago called the “prawn sandwich brigade”.At times, the World Cup in North America seemed to be an IShowSpeed stream.The US Open is under fire for influencers distracting Naomi Osaka, who, to be fair, has been accused by opponents of distracting them.And closer home, a 21-year-old powerlifter who won a silver medal in a junior event has been harangued online by everyone from amateur geneticists to anime fans. Now let’s not be churlish about sport’s need for attention.Sport, at the end of the day, requires people, to borrow from Maximus, to be entertained.George Best probably generated more headlines than Bobby Charlton because of his Beatles mop top and lifestyle.Muhammad Ali’s tongue probably forced Foreman to start selling grills.Jose Mourinho could generate quotes faster than any LLM.Eric Cantona could philosophise about the pathways of seagulls.But the point is that these raconteurs were first and foremost masters of their art.Best played with such panache that gangsters would threaten violence if anyone interfered with coital relations.Muhammad Ali could box like no man had ever seen, to the point that the rope-a-dope remains a viral meme to this day.Mourinho won the Champions League before announcing himself to the Premier League press.Cantona wasn’t Cantona because he stuck his collar out; he could do things with a football that ensured everyone wanted to listen to him talk about seagulls.But now we have influencers generating attention who have no connection whatsoever to the sport.Simply put, our brains cannot give equal priority to everything placed before us. The finest example of that is the Invisible Gorilla experiment.In 1999, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris asked people to watch a video of players passing basketballs and count the passes made by one team. Many became so absorbed in the task that they failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the game. And the fact that mentioning a gorilla in 2026 probably makes half the internet think of Harambe tells you something else about how our minds now work.Simon summed up the larger problem rather brilliantly: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Now consider what that means for sport.In the 20th century, Manchester United competed with Liverpool, cricket and perhaps a pub fight for your attention every Saturday afternoon.In 2026, the Red Devils can’t even compete with Everton. I digress from another post-Fergie lament, but today Manchester United must compete with YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, gaming, podcasts, memes, breaking news and everything else that has figured out how to make your phone vibrate. In fact, at times, it appeared that the people running the club were more bothered about social media engagement than actually winning on the pitch.A football match is usually 90 minutes plus injury time unless VARgentina is playing. The human day remains 24 hours. The number of things demanding those hours has exploded.Which explains IShowSpeed, who was born Darren Watkins Jr and is perhaps the only other person on the planet, apart from Piers Morgan, who thinks Cristiano Ronaldo is a better player than Lionel Messi. That he was such a headliner at the World Cup shows what FIFA thinks of its audience. And you know we are in trouble when the world’s most popular sport thinks it needs a YouTuber to promote it.Except FIFA would argue that this is precisely what it should be doing.Its partnership with TikTok created 30 World Cup creator correspondents, while the tournament generated 1.2 trillion views of World Cup-related content on the platform. Speed captained YouTube’s FIFA Creator Cup in New York and then performed at the closing ceremony before the World Cup final. The point was obvious: the match remained the centrepiece, but FIFA wanted to own the thousands of little battles for attention taking place around it as well.The academic defence of that is simple: someone who comes for Speed might stay for the football. Someone who would never watch a studio panel with Thierry Henry and has no clue who’s Thierry Henry might accidentally come for Speed and stay for the football.Attention is simply a gateway drug. But the problem is when the gateway becomes more interesting than the house.Which brings us to the US Open.Around 100 content creators were credentialled for this year’s tournament, including 20 dedicated to food and beverages. The US Open has long been there to sell New York, celebrity and spectacle along with tennis. But a line was crossed, when a group staged a photoshoot while Naomi Osaka was preparing to serve and the chair umpire had to intervene. Osaka’s logic was simple: “If you come to a sporting event, you have to respect the sport.” Her victor, Jessica Pegula, said it had become too much. But then again, Osaka’s critics have also argued that by turning the Slams into a fashion walk before her matches, she is criticising the sauce for the goose while enjoying it as the gander.But that would be an asinine argument because Osaka, irrespective of what she does before a match, is playing the sport. Many years ago, Beckham’s follicular adventures would generate headlines, but Mohawk or buzzcut, he went on the field and played.Perhaps it’s churlish to complain about this becoming a problem in professional sport, given that the most powerful man in the world doubles up as an AI content creator and has found his way to the White House because he convinced America that his reality show was reality. Recently, the man who controls the biggest nuclear arsenal put up a video of himself as Green Lantern in which his ring is building borders and boosting American manufacturing.There is so much AI slop that even AGI – should it accidentally come alive – would rather commit hara-kiri and go back to non-existence.But sport faces the same problem everyone else does. If attention is scarce, then only the absurd will capture our attention. Communicating is not enough; you have to get people’s attention while they doomscroll.And this attention economy has an extreme dark side.Take the case of Keyaa Kunal Banerji, a 21-year-old Indian powerlifter who deadlifted 140kg at the 2026 IPF World Sub-Junior & Junior Classic Powerlifting Championships and won silver in the deadlift in the Junior Women’s 47kg category.Now junior powerlifting isn’t football, and most people wouldn’t be able to name the world champion with a gun to their head unless they were gym bros. And yet Banerji became a household name, even more so than 17-year-old Madhura Kar, who won four gold medals in the Sub-Junior Women’s 52kg category, including the overall title, and attracted a fraction of the attention.The algorithm picked up Banerji for various reasons – clearly showing it doesn’t award eyeballs based on the medal table – but what followed was even worse: she faced online sexual harassment, dozens of fake accounts masquerading as her, arguments about her ethnicity, ancestry and caste, and thousands of AI-generated images.Her plea was painfully simple: “I just want to exist as a girl who likes to deadlift.”But there’s no stopping a machine and its rabid acolytes once a target has been acquired and must be milked till they find the next big thing.Now sport has always required spectacle and, like any good organisation built to make money, FIFA wants IShowSpeed’s audience. The same goes for the US Open courting influencers and content creators.But in our era of the doomscroll, attention is not the preserve of achievement. It flows towards whatever the algorithm decides can stop the scroll.And for professional sport in particular, it’s a rather Faustian deal, a Catch-22 situation. Sport cannot grow without attention, but the harder it fights for attention, the bigger the risk that the person filming the match before the game becomes more interesting than the match itself, and that the content becomes more important than the creation.Without attention, it cannot grow, sell television rights, attract sponsors, pay athletes or find the next generation of fans. But with the wrong kind of attention, it scares away folks who have spent decades following it.Sport needs attention to survive. But can it survive what attention has become?