Music, television, football, tennis - they're all entertainment now

So, that was the Premier League. Another epic battle between four clubs. A thrilling last-day finale between two of them. And, for afters, a Champions League final between the same pair, Man United and Chelsea. You could be forgiven for thinking that the world of football was afraid of surprises.

That the Premier League (and, to a lesser extent, the Champions League) is uncompetitive is beyond argument. What's more intriguing is that, if you look across the spectrum of the world's most commercially successful sports right now, a four-way contest looks comparatively open. Golf is all about one man (and his name is Tiger). Ditto tennis, although Novak Djokovic is threatening to make this year more interesting for the supreme Roger Federer. In cricket, there's not a single Test-playing nation that can challenge Australia over an entire series.

Clearly, the causes of this lack of competition differ: market forces, freakish individual talent, population size. But what does the phenomenon say about our 21st-century attitudes to, and expectations of, sport? Given the gritty, messy business of true competition, we often complain that it's not stylish enough.

Take Rugby Union's most recent Six Nations Cup. The results were unpredictable: the eventual winner was entirely unexpected. Yet there was no great rush of interest in the unfolding tournament, but rather a number of people complaining about the standard of play. In football, this season's evenly matched Coca-Cola Championship drew similar criticisms.

In the process of turning sport into a saleable product, we've put a heap of demands on it that it was probably never meant to meet. An outcome isn't enough for our now-sophisticated palate; we want, and expect, "quality". Why?

I have a theory that it's because sports industries aren't marketing themselves to the aficionado any longer - where's the profit growth in that? - and instead are desperate to convert the non-believer, as if civilisation will not be complete until everyone on the planet is practising their keepy-uppies.

So, sport becomes just another kind of mass entertainment, not so distinguishable from music and television, where the result isn't as important as your pre-packaged consumer experience. We create teams and personalities so big, so dominant, that no one can ignore them, so that everyone can be persuaded to be involved, whether they like sport or not. And when you can choose the big brands - and you know what you're getting - who chooses to shop for the variable produce you find locally?

I suspect that, in pushing our consumer agenda on to sport, we are taming it somewhat. I'm not sure that actually matters. Sports don't die of being uncompetitive, they die of being invisible. Most of them were born uncompetitive - few found an international audience without years of one-sided contests with emerging nations. Perhaps we're simply witnessing Sport 2.0, and this is just the calibration phase, where the architects of professional sport recognise and resolve the flaws in the program.

Talking of flaws, I'm sure you saw that the Olympic torch reached the summit of Everest on 8 May. Does it bother anyone else that sport's ultimate representation of global peace and enviro-harmony is a gas-guzzling flame that has a carbon footprint bigger than David Beckham's? Just me, then.

Emma John is the deputy editor of Observer Sport Monthly

Hunter Davies is away

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