New Year, New Hope

A new year always brings a sense of a clean slate and a brighter and more focused, albeit sometimes short-lived, outlook on life and its possibilities. Many of us enter each new year with new personal goals and/or milestones ahead of us:

This is the year I will take charge of my fitness/finances/career/personal life (fill in your own noun), etc.

It’s no coincidence that January is the month with by far the most new membership applications to UK fitness clubs, as people look to the New Year as a year with limitless possibilities. Once past the Winter Solstice, every day is just that fraction little bit brighter and longer, and we take charge of our lives to avoid yet another Van Wilder year (although without the glorious parties), stuck in Punxatawney in an eternal winter.

We exercise more, we tighten our purse strings, we search for that next wonderful career opportunity, and if we don’t have someone, that special person to have in our lives. Whilst January is often a cold and dark month, it also allows us to look at the year as a fresh new canvas to paint the next chapter in our lives…of course hopefully a better one than Isaac did…


A new year also brings new hope to many sports fans.

This is the year that my team will finally win the championship.

Glorious are the days of the ignorance and hope. As Thomas Grey wrote many years ago:

Where ignorance is bliss, / ‘Tis folly to be wise.

Most fans (possibly excluding Royals fans) can spend the early winter months (and longer if you’re an NFL fan) dreaming that this is the year. The MLB and the NFL , with its salary cap (NFL) and revenue sharing (both), means that even small market teams are able to go on extended chases for the title if everything falls into place.

Since the introduction of the Free Agency in the NFL in 1992, the Super Bowl has seen 11 different champions, with only Dallas, Denver and New England winning more than once during the 16 Super Bowls of that era. The MLB is a little bit more skewed due to the salary luxury tax and not a fixed cap, but even the World Series has seen 9 different winners since the 1994 strike year, with only the Yankees, Marlins and the Red Sox winning more than once during that period.

Still, despite the Yankees fielding an infield earning more ($80.5m) per year than half of teams paid their entire roster in 2008 (1B: Teixera, $22m/year, 2B: Cano, $9m, SS: Jeter, $22m, 3B: Rodriguez, $27.5m), baseball is one of the sports where money isn’t the sole determining factor. Witness Tampa Bay’s total payroll of $43m in 2008 not preventing them from winning the AL East, beating the Yankees $201m and the Red Sox $138m rosters.

So, despite the unusually cold start to 2009 here in the UK, and the Yankees single-handedly trying to solve the credit crunch by purchasing every single player, winter will eventually lead to spring, and with that we all have hope for a better year than the last one, regardless of the challenges we face. We face the new year looking forward to a long overdue reform in world leadership, and a better future. 2009 can be the year we achieve that next great career jump, it can be the year we greet our svelte mirror-image in the morning, and 2009 can be the year.

To steal the catch phrase of 2008:

This is the year.