The whole is a gentlemens game reason is a joke. Lol There is nothing gentlemen about football but its the biggest money maker in the United States sports wise so save me that silly nonsense. It's simple... they have sponsors.. which means major tv networks can sell advertising time ..which means they get major tv spots. It's that simple lol
The only joke is the persistent but idiotic beliefs that the image of a fledgling sport really doesn't matter, and that sponsors are responsible for taking a sport from the fringes to mainstream success.
Let's start with the sponsors. You couldn't be more wrong, and in fact are so wrong that you actually have it exactly and totally backwards. It is not sponsors that attract people to a sport and make the sport a success. It is the success of a sport that attracts the sponsors.
Sponsors seek two basic things:
1) A good return on their money. While several factors are involved in getting a good return on their money, more than anything else this is dependent on very large numbers of eyeballs on their product. The very large numbers of eyeballs on their product comes from the very large numbers of fans viewing the sport.
2) A sport whose image reflects positively on their brand, or at the very least does not reflect negatively.
3) The more you have of #1 (fans, and good return on the sponsor money), the less you need of #2, although #2 never goes away and always retains some relevance.
You don't get fans by getting sponsors. You get sponsors by getting fans. This is what snooker did. Snooker built their fan base, and as a result they were able to secure good sponsors which then make it even easier to continue to build the sport and fan base even further, but without a pretty decent fan base to begin with, you can never get those first good sponsors to begin with either.
Number 3 pretty much sums up the fallacy of your "image doesn't matter" argument. It matters, a lot, especially at first. Yeah once you have a ton of fans and are making money for the sponsors hand over fist then yeah, you can get away with a bit more of an unsavory image. But you can't get away with it at first because sponsors simply aren't going to accept it when you don't yet have the exceptional fan base to offset it.
You mentioned [NFL] Football as an example of that supposedly supports your assertion that image doesn't matter. What you failed to consider however is that football had an extremely clean and wholesome image when it was becoming popular many decades ago. Yes, once it had already become extremely popular, it then became filled with unsavory characters, but by then it was already wildly popular and full of sponsors who were getting a great return on their money and so at that point it could get away with it to a large extent. But even so, players that get too out of line still get sanctioned by the league so that the league can retain its sponsors and fans.
Sponsors didn't make snooker popular. Snooker made itself popular which in turn then attracted the bigger and better sponsors--and one of the keys to their success was promoting a cleaner image because sponsors simply aren't going to accept a seedy image unless you have a large enough fan base to make it worth it them and you never have that large enough fan base in the beginning, hence the need for starting off with a cleaner image. Later on when you become popular you can get away with letting your image slide because image is less important to the sponsors once you are making them a ton of money.
