Football will continue to dominate the national mood despite the Games

The UK is rightly bathing in the glory of Team GB in the Olympic Games thus far, but the Olympic buzz will not lead to an overhaul of the national sporting interest.

Every four-year cycle, especially when Team GB excels in the Olympics, or in the wake of outstanding achievements like the rugby World Cup in 2003 or The Ashes in 2005, the dominance of football on the national consciousness is predicted to end.

With such a superb effort by Team GB in the Games so far and the natural juxtaposition of the football team’s not doing as well (relatively speaking of course) the predictions have come out again about the status of football in this country curtailing in favour of cycling or rowing or track and field.

Like every other time in the last decade or so however, this will not happen.

For all of the inspiring sporting moments over the last eight days and those still to come over the next seven days, by the end of the month once the season is in full swing, football will retain its place at the top of the nation’s sporting interests.

It is a rather depressing state of affairs that little can challenge the omnipotence of football, but that is just the way it appears to be.

Even while the Olympics is in full swing, augmented by the two best teams in Test cricket going at it, football news still proliferates the media, taking up at least three or four pages in the national newspapers every day.

The chicken and egg situation of whether it is the media satisfying the public need for football news or the importance of football being overplayed by the press is the eternal question but the key point is that this incessant coverage means football remains top of the tree.

The stories of Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah, Ben Ainslie, Victoria Pendleton and countless others are fantastic and awe-inspiring but perhaps what makes them so is that they are so fresh and new due to their relative lack of coverage as opposed to football.

Come the end of August, regardless of however much it disgusts us at the moment, football will be back taking up the majority of the sports pages day in, day out with all of the sports we have become semi-experts on over the last seven days reduced to minority coverage in the ‘news in brief” sections.

We have been here time and time before where it looks like football’s dominance will be ended by other sports, but it has remained top of the tree and there is no reason to believe anything else will change come the start of the Premier League season.

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