World No Tobacco Day 2002
Tobacco free sports

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Sports Without Tobacco

Some people fear that a withdrawal of tobacco sponsorship will harm sports which are currently heavily sponsored by cigarette brands. However, all the evidence shows that this is not the case – many sports have voluntarily given up tobacco sponsorship money, including both the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup Football – the world's two biggest sporting events. They have not suffered financially as a result.

There are also many examples of sports teams, sports federations and countries, who have decided voluntarily to do away with tobacco sponsorship. Since the late 1980s, the Olympic movement has been tobacco free. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association, FIFA, the world Football governing body, has refused to take tobacco sponsorship at any of its events since 1987. UEFA, Football's European Governing body, has taken a similar stance. In both of these cases, there has been no discernable difference to the financial viability of the events, with football in particular enjoying unprecedented financial success in the 1990s.

In India, the National Cricket Team has recently ended its long-term association with Wills Cigarettes (a subsidiary of BAT), who were, for many years, the team's sponsor. This is a significant step, given the growing importance of India as a television market for cricket.

In 1992 the Australian federal government, passed legislation banning tobacco sponsorship of national and state sporting events.

There is no evidence that the bans on tobacco company advertising and sponsorship through sport has harmed Australian sportspeople or sporting organizations from either the perspective of raising revenue or of sporting achievement.

Rather than harming sport, all of the evidence points in the other direction, with Australian corporate sponsorship of sport at record and rising levels. Since the federal ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship became effective in 1996 corporate support for Australian sport has risen from US$ 350 million annually to US$ 700 million in 2000 – excluding Olympic sponsorships, an increase of 45%.

The most prominent sponsorship of Australian sport has been the Benson & Hedges sponsorship of the Australian Cricket Team. Since Benson & Hedges stopped sponsoring Australian cricket, revenues to the Australian Cricket Board have increased and the on-field success of the Australian Cricket Team, in both One Day and Test Matches, has been at an all time high.

Far from harming sport, the exodus of the "easy tobacco money" has caused sporting administrators to need to know the real commercial value of their sports and to be more creative in marketing their sports to commercial sponsors.

There is no evidence to support the idea that banning tobacco sponsorship would harm sport – indeed, the success of sports that have ended their associations with tobacco show that sport simply does not need tobacco money.

The tobacco industry uses sports sponsorship as a way of getting around national restrictions on tobacco advertising. As the examples show, tobacco companies simply cannot be trusted to regulate themselves responsibly. The only effective way forward is for governments to legislate to ban tobacco sponsorship of sport.

The moment has come to remove tobacco from sports. A comprehensive ban on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship is one way to reach this goal. WHO's 191 Member States are currently negotiating these and other crucial issues in the development of the world's first legally enforceable treaty on tobacco, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.