Splinters 2a: LIV goes LIVE
Splinters 2a: LIV goes LIVE
Plus Jai Hindley wins the Giro, a bunch of soccer news and running marathons.
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.
LIV goes LIVE
And it looks like shit.
The team names are trash, the logos are trash and the draft isn’t really a draft because several players have already agreed to play together in the same teams. I didn’t even get to the murderous regime funding it all or that Ari fucking Fleischer, spokesman for the Bush administration during the War on Terror
and liar extraordinaire, is running PR for this disaster. This is simply too on the nose for satire.Before the journalists tried to make this about themselves after a confusing opening press conference
, alarm bells started ringing for me a couple of days ago:LIV Golf announced its opening event this week in London will be shown on Facebook, YouTube and its own website.
These are the broadcast arrangements for park footy, not of a multi-billion dollar sporting enterprise. Once the rubber neckers lose interest after this first event, surely the lack of broadcast reach
is going to severly curtail the potential audience for the breakaway league. There’s no illusion of prestige here.Success of the league then heavily relies on presentation, which they’ve clearly flubbed
, and the star power they’ve signed. As a golf hater, I could recognise a handful of the names that they’ve signed, although I will admit that Dustin Johnson is only in that group because of this saga. Sergio Garcia and Phil Mickelson are obviously well known but after that, you’re relying on the magnetism of captain of Torque GC, Talor Gooch, who might have the funniest name in all sports, to bring the punters in.I just don’t think the Saudis have enough in their corner, unless they’re willing to lose even more money for an extended period of time and lure more players over with pay checks, but I think that might be too far even for them. In a way, it’s a relief that even the right-leaning multi-millionaire dipshits that make up the PGA can’t be bought out. There’s some hope for us yet.
The grace, the beauty of sports
Soccer news
There’s a bit that’s happened in the world game since the last newsletter. You’ve probably heard most of it but here are the highlights:
French police tear gassed fans at the Champion’s League final because… it’s not at all clear why. Something about fake tickets and people sneaking in causing problems? It seems to me that corralling people into a tight space and unleashing the violence of the state upon them is a greater risk to health and safety than a few thousand extra people stealing their way into the Stade de France. The speed at which French authorities and UEFA deflected any responsibility was breathtaking
, which was almost as breathtaking as suggesting blockchain has any role to play in preventing this from happening again. Then two days later:
Chelsea has been sold to Americans and private equity, continuing the influx of likely very dumb American money chasing returns that will only come to pass if the bull-market-verging-on-bubble of sports club prices continues ad infinitum, which it won’t. Note that of the £4.25 billion quoted, a large chunk of that is paying off debt that Abramovich is owed but said he wasn’t going to call in.
UEFA and its clubs have agreed on a new Champion’s League new format, which I obviously have no intention of watching but the machinations of which fascinate me for perverse reasons I don’t fully comprehend. The clubs accepted UEFA’s Swiss model with 36 teams but negotiated them down from 10 to 8 group stage games and the assignment of entries to historically good teams is now to be assigned based on country’s performance, so will go to English teams anyway. I think the former is astonishing, given the revenue involved, but most attention has been focussed on the latter. The clubs got their Super League but UEFA gets to be in control of it; win-win. Can’t wait for the furrowed brows when people realise that, irrespective of the branding, the rich clubs will continue to get richer.
FIFA has not renewed EA Sports' licence to use the FIFA name on its incredibly popular range of soccer games. The demands FIFA were making sound insane and the comments Infantino made afterwards make it sound like he has no idea what’s going on.
"I can assure you that the only authentic, real game that has the FIFA name will be the best one available for gamers and football fans," Infantino said in a statement. "The FIFA name is the only global, original title. FIFA 23, FIFA 24, FIFA 25 and FIFA 26, and so on - the constant is the FIFA name and it will remain forever and remain THE BEST."
The power of the series formerly known as FIFA relies on the deals EA has with individual leagues and federations, clubs and players to allow you to live out the fantasy of playing Lincoln City’s star striker as you carry them from the fourth division to the Premier League. FIFA itself is largely irrelevant
. The reality is that the new FIFA-branded game will get an initial surge in sales from confused consumers before everyone gets used to the EA Sports FC branding and life moves on. FIFA seems to have really shot themselves in the foot for no apparent gain.Speaking of Super League, this podcast from last year that I only listened to a few weeks ago was incredibly insightful. Well worth a listen to that episode in particular but also the show in general.
An interesting court case:
Jai Hindley: Giro winner
Please bend the knee to our Aussie king.
It’s a little difficult to contextualise what winning the Giro means if you’re not familiar with the sport. I think the closest equivalent might be winning the French Open in tennis. It’s a big one but perhaps not the biggest, wrapped in history and prestige, and it only suits a subset of all possible competitors for arcane technical reasons. Those focussed on the Tour or hard court specialists need not apply to their respective competitions. It’s paradoxically both rareified air but also means there isn’t a huge field to overcome. Only former winner Richard Carapaz gave Hindley any trouble with Mikel Landa at some distance. Other challengers, the likes of Dumoulin, Bardet and Yates, fell away due to their own issues. More impressive riders, like the Slovenian duo or Hindley’s bete noir from the 2020 covid Giro, did not deign to enter. Hindley never looked uncomfortable in the three weeks and struck the death blow at the last moment.
None of that it is to diminish Hindley’s achievement. It is massive in the context of Australian sport but will likely attract a fraction of the attention Cadel Evans got for winning the Tour, which is reflective of the fact that the Tour stands alone and everything else sits in its shadow. Of the five monuments and three grand tours, Australian riders are yet to conquer Flanders, Lombardia and the Vuelta, which is not a bad return considering Australians had never won any of them until 2007.
Between Hindley and Ben O’Connor - surely gunning for a podium at this year’s Tour - the future of Australian grand tour racing looks bright, a welcome reprieve from the last decade of media pretending that Richie Porte had It.
As an aside, the stage win for Eritrea’s Biniam Grimay was exceptional, both in execution and meaning. Eritrean riders are becoming more common and we seem poised to have a well overdue breakout of black African riders, like we did with Colombians about ten years ago, although it seems unlikely any will be as talented as Nairo Quintana. It’s unfortunate he nearly blinded himself with a champagne cork.
#ModernPentathlonWatch
The World Cup continues to Ankara this weekend but the main event is the athlete’s forum where they will get to air their displeasure about having to become ninja warriors instead of horsey boys/girls. There will be a test event shortly after with the new format and we’ll all find out how much they really hate it.
Going back aways, I thought this was a pretty neat piece of writing for a bureaucrat.
Some personal sporting news
The newsletter has been quiet lately because I was sick twice with different probably-not-covid-but-I’m-starting-to-suspect-maybe-RATs-aren’t-very-accurate diseases in May, which was the ideal preparation for running the Noosa Marathon and then the Brisbane Marathon. All of this has left me pretty deflated, without the energy to cobble together a few thousand words about jerkoffs in sport.
For the record, I completed both
, eight days apart which meant feeling a level of athletic fatigue deep in my skeletal structure that I’d forgotten existed. My times weren’t all that impressive even by my own standards (albeit it’s been five years, a marriage, a kid and a few kilos since my last marathon), but they’re done. I doubt anyone wants to hear about my heroic perseverance overcoming cramps from a lack of preparation, life threatening levels of chafe or my various minor gripes with each event. It was a timely reminder that running itself is not fun but goddamn if I don’t enjoy stopping. Knowing you don’t have to go any further and can sit down might be a top five feeling the world.This brings the life time tally to five full and five halfs, with two more of each potentially on the cards before the end of winter, which is only relevant because I spent Monday night melancholically but methodically adding screencaps of official race times to previous Strava activities. True sicko behaviour.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this piece from Adam Conover about running marathons.
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Which was, you know, begun by terrorists from Saudi Arabia. History is a flat circle.
This league is exactly as newsworthy as the media have decided it needs to be. They aren’t actually obliged to cover it but it is a good opportunity to ask golfers needling gotcha questions about the Saudi regime. I don’t think anyone is unaware of what’s going on, so I’m not sure who this is for exactly? As with most journalist content, it’s probably for other journalists.
Yes, everyone has access to Youtube and Facebook but you’ve got to beat their algorithms and better organisations than LIV Golf have tried and failed.
Normally I wouldn’t say stuff like this really matters but they’ve fucked this up so badly, it’s impossible to ignore.
Seriously, what a bunch of cunts.
Everyone else in the world can get people in and out of a stadium without deploying the riot gear but the French need web3 to do it.
You can’t even play a proper World Cup in most of the recent versions I’ve played. The franchise clearly peaked in 1998 which featured every country in the world, a full qualifying format for the World Cup, Song 2 as the opening title song and an indoor soccer stadium.
Subscribe to Garbage Day.
“I ran both” would be a dangerous strech of the definition of “run”.
E.g. it’s too humid, it’s too hilly, it’s too early, there’s not enough toilets, the pacers can’t hold a pace, I’m tired and hungry and have 15km left to go and that’s like two and a half hours at walking pace, wahh