Our sporting heritage is being marginalised in favour of monetary concerns - Yorkshire Post Letters

It seems that everywhere we look in the sporting world our heritage and traditions are being marginalised by monetary concerns.

In football our game is now dominated by a handful of clubs with predominantly mega-rich foreign owners, so that our national game features many overpaid players purchased for ridiculous sums, and the two leading contenders for the Premier League title play at the Emirates and Etihad stadiums.

In cricket our traditional county game has been pushed to the margins of the summer to make way for short and even-shorter versions suitable for those with the attention span of a gnat.

This week the trend has even reached snooker, with calls for the traditional home of the World Championships, Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, to be abandoned.

The calls for moving elsewhere have been led by the Hearn family, who smugly remind us that we ought to move into the real world, which is all about money now.

Of course, they are backed by the brilliant but odious Ronnie O’Sullivan – and guess who has a three-year deal with the Saudis in a role as ‘ambassador’?

Well, to many of us, it’s not all about money – it’s about tradition and heritage and respect for our various sports, which I fervently hope will survive the pigs-in-trough greed of the self-important controllers of our cherished games.