Splinters 1: Australian ice hockey
How many ice hockey leagues does a country like Australia really need? Also more on an alternative future for sport that leaves the powerful behind.
Welcome to the latest edition of SSWOS, the Sick, Sad World of Sports, where sports is the mechanism by which we learn about the depths of shithousery and assholery and dipshittery of the human soul.
I hope you find it fun or informative but not both. If you want more of this particular species of brain worms, follow @scksadwos.
I also write exclusively about rugby league on pythagonrl.com and @pythagonrl.
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Splinters
Readers are likely already familiar with the mechanics of a sports league breakaway. There was the Super League war of rugby league, fought from 1 April 19951 until the cessation of hostilities in late 1997. It requires no recapping that Mike Colman, Steve Mascord and the Rugby League Digest haven’t already given it.
There was also the soccer Super League of last year, the public culmination of an idea that’s been around for as long as I can remember. Unlike it’s rugby league equivalent, there were no broad sweeping changes and it lasted all of a weekend. It was less a civil war and more of an Anglo-Zanzibar War, over in forty-five minutes.
There are other examples without the Super League moniker - baseballs’ Players’ League in 1890, the split in rugby in 1895, World Series Cricket in the 70s, the American Football League in the 70s and USFL in the 80s, USAC versus CART and then IRL in American motor sport and the establishment of the English Premier League in the 90s - which all sought to change the way in which resources created by the game were distributed2. We’ll call these splinters.
The general idea of splintering is to steer more income into the players’ pockets and to use this as justification to completely upend the commercial status quo of the sport to steer as much, if not more, income to rich benefactors that were previously cut out of the loop. Whether the breakaway is seen as a betrayal to the existing order of things largely depends on whether the establishment was sufficienctly won over to the new side that we pretend they never had a problem in the first place and/or the establishment was so brutally crushed, they kowtow to their new masters. In the much rarer drawn result, or even a no decision, acrimony exists between both sides until the situation is resolved because people can’t help but drag their feelings into what is largely a business transaction.
Right now, there are (at least) four super league wars simmering:
European soccer (funded by banks)
Golf (funded by Saudi Arabia)
Padel (funded by Qatar)
Australian ice hockey (what is this funding you speak of?)
This week, we look at Australian ice hockey.
The grace, the beauty of sports
Australian ice hockey
I have to thank reader Jonny for posting this:
I hadn’t heard anything about these disruptions via Twitter, so I turned to the one place I knew that could be relied upon to have melted Australian brains into a viscous goo: Facebook.
It turns out there are three (3) Australian ice hockey leagues. There’s the incumbent Australian Ice Hockey League, which has teams in Adelaide, Canberra, Melbourne (x2), Newcastle, Perth and Sydney (x2); the start up Pacific Hockey League, which will have teams in Brisbane, Adelaide, Central Coast, Canberra (which is not shown on their Facebook page), Melbourne and Queenstown (which is possibly the “and more” listed on their single page website); and the extremely oddly named National Hockey Super League, which has three teams in Adelaide and nowhere else3.
I knew of the AIHL and had toyed with going to games before finding out there was no Brisbane franchise. The idea that there is sufficient demand in Australia for semi-pro ice hockey to allow three (3) leagues to exist is insane. Comparable American sports leagues in Australia - the National Basketball League and the Australian Baseball League - have ten and eight teams respectively and no rivals and both have struggled to deal with the impacts of the pandemic. By contrast, ice hockey has split its resources across three competitions (are there more?!) and possibly as many as sixteen teams (with five (5) in Adelaide!).
Casting aside the NHSL as a non-entity for our purposes, the PHL seems to comprise disaffected players and administrators from the AIHL. I can guess what the gripes would be with the existing admin - too far behind the times, too slow, not enough money to go around, not listening to the kind of individual egos that would create their own league out of spite - by virtue of having had any exposure to Australian sport.
The PHL looks slicker than the AIHL, by which I mean they’ve got a graphic designer or at least someone who knows how to use Adobe on the payroll, but have the notable disadvantage of not having actually played any games. The club Facebook pages are sharing a lot of the same content as the main PHL page, which suggests this is a centrally run social media operation, if the whole thing isn’t centrally run. The exception is the Queenstown Rush, who have barely posted anything. Promising.
The PHL are talking a big game, like they should, but plenty of startup leagues get stuck in the rhetoric and planning and fail to actually deliver anything on the pitch/field/rink or make any money.
Speaking of, the million dollar question is who is paying for all of this?
There have been zero (0) sponsorship announcements so far.
According to LinkedIn, PHL CEO Andrew Petrie is an executive at an IT outsourcing company in Sydney called Sydpro, which lists 22 employees. Head of People and Operations, Dayne Davis, is managing director of probable one-man-band Timber Design Studio in Melbourne. Director of Corporate Services, Damian Holland, is GM Distribution & Sales at Netwealth, a company everyone is at pains to point out is listed on the ASX and has several hundred employees.
The point is that they’re not exactly VPs at JPMorgan with capital to fund this out of pocket but that may or may not be relevant depending on the league’s financials. There’s not really a lot to go on here, which may or may not spook potential stakeholders. Suffice to say, funding a breakaway ice hockey league in sub-tropical and temperate Australia - where even our southern major cities get 35°C+ days - is going to make running the Arizona Coyotes look like a breeze in comparison.
At least these are real people, although Petrie’s twitter profile probably needs an update, so that’s a start. That they all have a corporate background won’t hurt. Petrie’s coaching experience should lend itself to recruiting players.
Everyone seems to know this is stupid and yet here we are. The most optimistic view was that the short term rivalry should drive them to greater heights while acknowledging that this is a disaster long term.
It remains to be seen if defection to the rival league will affect the ability of players to represent Australia, which currently competes in the third division of the Ice Hockey World Championships and are ranked 33rd in the world, which is a typical move when the incumbent power is threatened (see: UEFA and FIFA during last year’s soccer super league). According to one random commenter, this might not be possible if players are still playing in affiliated state leagues. A lawsuit here could easily destroy the financially weaker side.
The move has seen the AIHL announce expansions into Brisbane and the return of a Central Coast team to head the PHL off at the pass because what you really want to do is over-extend yourself in order to fight a new rival that hasn’t done anything yet after two years of cancelled play. The Perth franchise has already given up playing any time soon, despite the pandemic being more or less over. The new Brisbane Rampage franchise is no longer associated with Ice Hockey Queensland and its two clubs4. Presumably the new Brisbane team will be some conglomerate of these establishment organisations.
What makes this whole dispute unusual is that there’s no money or resources or prestige to be divied up. Ice hockey - which has to adopt the ‘ice’ prefix to distinguish it from the far more popular field version in Australia - wouldn’t be in the top twenty most popular sports in a country of only 25 million and the dip in interest is significant once you leave the top eight or so. It seems like a lot of this could have been avoided with a good old fashioned boardroom stoush. Instead the two sides are going to each take one of the two pennies that Australian ice hockey has to rub together and go their own way.
Considering people are still upset about the rugby league splintering twenty-five years later, I’m sure this won’t consign them to irrelevance in the long term.
A coda to the previous newsletter
We found the line but I was truly surprised there was a line at all. It’s not where it should be but it’s a start. In a way, this newsletter exists because the line isn’t where it should be. The gap between our hopes and expectations, and our reality is both interesting and instructive but also often nauseating.
So now we know where the line is, what’s next?
The next instance of Russia invading Ukraine might be China invading Taiwan. I fully expect that would kick a much bigger hornet’s nest in a geopolitical sense (Russia invading Poland or even Germany might be a more apt comparison) but it seems likely that this would have similar repercussions for China in the sporting sphere. Again, it’s neither a particularly wealthy nation other than its sheer scale and there are no existentially huge broadcast deals. China is not due to host anything significant in the near future like a World Cup or an Olympics, nor are they entwined in the fabric of mainstream western sports, outside of the NBA, which could probably limp along without if needed. F1 has done ok without several Chinese grands prix, the Chinese soccer bubble burst some time ago and I think the people of China prefer badminton and table tennis and other sports which they might consider more in line with their own tastes.
Elsewhere, rich people still infect sport. MLB owners held an entire season hostage because, despite choosing to get into the business of baseball, have no interest in baseball happening if its not on terms they consent to with minimal financial risk to themselves. I’d make an analogy about these chuds running a factory but it’d be too apt and de-humanising to the players.
Roman Abramovic has had his assets frozen by the UK government and, as a result, Chelsea’s immediate future is extremely unclear. Abramovich is trying to sell the club - and there have been hundreds of interested parties but perhaps few real tenderers - but it’s not known where the money from the sale would go. While the club is trying to complete its season, it has to seek permission from the UK government to do anything. It cannot sell merch and it cannot sell tickets but it will still receive broadcast funding and has to honour existing season ticket commitments. Whether Chelsea survives depends a lot on whether the UK government views the club as a community institution worth saving, as Chelsea would prefer to present itself, or as a blue Anlgophonic shield for an ownership that, in the very best case scenario, has ties to some incredibly shitty people, which is probably closer to the truth.
It seems like it would be preferable if sport wasn’t beholden to geopolitical machinations or the whims and grievances of people who are as petty as they are wealthy and instead was an opportunity for special people to do entertaining things and earn a lot of money doing so5. Unfortunately, the current system, a blend of old fashioned nationalism and crony capitalism, doesn’t leave a lot of room for alternatives.
In a sense, the popularity of sport as an institution is its undoing: it has a power that can be used and abused, and a sufficiently flexible cultural shape that can be moulded to suit the powerful, so that’s what happens and has always happened. Sport ends up reflecting society far more than society reflects sport.
It might be nice to start dreaming of a different future, one where we can establish a line that is both morally right6 and uncrossable without significant penalty. Whatever that may look like, I can assure you that it too will have its own political and economic problems because wherever people go, these follow.
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The traditional date for the commencement of the war, although serious but secret preparations had been underway a year prior.
Maybe once I run out of ideas for this newsletter, we’ll start doing some deep dives into these because I find them really fascinating and I think they also offer some insight into the politics and economics of the day.
This is, by definition, not a national league.
One club is located at each of Brisbane’s ice rinks: the northern one at Boondall, home of the Brisbane Buccaneers, and the southern one at Acacia Ridge, home of the Southern Stars. As one Facebook commenter pointed out, if the Southern Stars gain entry to the AIHL, they will be located further north than the Newcastle Northstars. That’s the kind of chaos I can get behind.
Preferably without becoming shitheads themselves.
Or, at least, in the ballpark of right-ish.