How to change so as not to die: a journey through the sports that are reinventing themselves

"Football is experiencing a huge crisis of appeal to the new generations. The most alarming fact is that 40% of those between 16 and 24 have no interest in the world of football. Creating a competition that simulates what they do on digital platforms - like Fifa - means going to meet them and facing the competition of Fortnite or Call of Duty which are the real centers of attention of today's kids, who will spend tomorrow". Almost four years have passed since these words of Andrea Agnelli to Repubblica, the manifesto-interview of the former president of Juventus given in the hottest days in which it seemed the Super League would be born, and even if (for now) the project has not come to fruition, the sport is living in restless times of transformations and in some cases real revolutions. Like the one that took place on Sunday 9 February in Düsseldorf, Germany: for the first time in history, a long jump competition was held without a take-off board, but with a wider “take-off zone” (40 centimetres) introduced by World Athletics, the international federation, to reduce the number of invalid jumps and make the discipline more spectacular and attractive to a wider audience. This change in the rules means that the distance of the jump is no longer measured from the take-off board line, but from the actual take-off point of the foot thanks to the use of technology. “It will mean that I will switch to the triple jump,” commented sarcastically the two-time Olympic champion Miltiadis Tentoglou.