Tasmania’s AFL dream
Tasmania’s AFL dream
Hopefully the last about LIV for a while and financial problems in netball and Derby County.
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.
Tasmania’s AFL dream
Autralia’s least popular populous state, Tasmania, is trying to get a team into the AFL. There are only 540,000 people living in Tasmania, smaller than the Gold Coast (679,000) but larger than Geelong (287,000). Despite a long history in the sport, that suggests a limited commercial viability - successful sports franchises tend to be located in or near densely populated cities - made worse by the fact that Hobart and Tasmania sit outside the 5 city metro TV ratings, which is largely what drives broadcaster revenue
As a state of rusted-on fans albeit neglected by head office, the AFL has already largely captured the commercial value in Tasmania. That’s not to say there isn’t more to be had by planting a team there but it’s marginal and might steal some of the revenue base of the existing clubs. Crucially, the existing clubs have minimal interest in sharing resources with a new team that they see as bringing very little to the table. If your job is to keep the Suns or Kangaroos or Saints alive and the pie isn’t getting bigger but the number of mouths to feed is, what’s the incentive to take a smaller share?
Having said all of that, it’s hard to see what else the AFL plans to do into the 21st century. As the nation’s popular national football league
with no need to turn a profit or any realistic international expansion opportunities, why doesn’t it continue to plough funding into new teams that have no commercial viability but can further embed a sense of nationalism into the game?That works equally as well for the Gold Coast, where there is an incredibly limited audience for the inept brand of football the Suns have produced to date, as it does in Tasmania, where there is a numerically limited audience but is receptive to the sport. I think that sense that AFL can reach the whole country (rightly or wrongly) is something really appealing to sponsors. That’s reflected both in the kinds of deals the AFL lands but also its place in advertising as a shorthand for Australian sport that soccer or netball or the rugbys aren’t afforded.
The Tasmanian state government is prepared to go all-in, funding an insanely expensive stadium and funding to team operations. And why not? If nothing else, it’s a guaranteed vote buyer if the government can land a team and will give Tasmania a place on the national stage that it simply doesn’t have through any other cultural avenue
.The AFL could easily half ass this and try to force a relocation of either the Suns or a struggling Melbourne club to Hobart to avoid creating a 19th licence but they’d be better off biting the bullet. This is the just the price of doing business as the national sporting quango.
The grace, the beauty of sport
LIV Update: It’s Going Well
The first round of the LIV golf whatever was completed in London last weekend. It looked like shit and, from all of the completely biased reporting that I’ve seen filtered through to my bubble on social media, it was shit. I’ve read exactly one piece that named the winner and seen plenty about the lack of crowds, sponsors or the sense of joy that sport is supposed to have. The players struggled to answer direct questions about Saudi involvement, prevaricating around the fact that they’re getting paid a lot of money and don’t really care where it comes from.
What I wanted to focus on was this pair of numbers:
That is extremely dire. Those are some park footy-ass numbers for a major sport. Worse, those numbers will not be increasing. Some not insubstantial part of that audience tuned in for novelty purposes only. They will not be back for round 2 and definitely will not be there by round 8. The first event being in London, home to a large number of English language journalists, meant that reporting interest was at an all time high and, again, will not be there in the latter rounds as it becomes increasingly apparent that no one is interested in watching or hearing about this tour.
So what then for the Saudis? The only road to victory, Pyrrhic as it may be, is to hope that money wins, that they can drag over more big names with ever increasing cheques as the dust settles around the Saudi involvement
and that in turn will create a virtuous cycle of increasing fan interest, drained away from the ossified PGA.It’s clear that no commercial return will ever be achieved but that was never the point. It wasn’t even to launder the reputation of Saudi Arabia. The point was to establish the country as big swinging dicks on the international stage. Kudos, job well done, but I can’t help but feel a nuclear weapons program would’ve been both cheaper and more effective.
The inestimable David Roth had the best take on this whole situation.
(The Guardian also had a good take)
Netball in #crisis
I am naturally very sceptical when claims of financial mismanagement are thrown around in the media, especially by News Corp. It’s often very difficult to identfiy precisely who is making the claim and what they are basing their claim on and what, if any, expertise or judgement to bring to the situation.
Still, Netball Australia and its players are obviously at loggerheads. If the numbers reported are correct, there seems to have been an enormous emphasis placed on getting players paid first and then worrying about how that will happen later. I doubt there’s many other sports leagues where 90+% of the broadcast revenue goes to player salaries but it’s also clear that the broadcast revenue is woefully undervalued compared to the product.
I can’t say who’s to blame for that. The pandemic didn’t help. Structural sexism in the media doesn’t help either, which consistently undervalues what women’s sport can and will do because they largely rely on dinosaurs the world passed by decades ago. The fact that the AFLW and NRLW can basically give away women’s sport for free as competition to netball for largely the same demographic hurts.
But it’s incumbent on the leadership of the game to overcome those factors. It doesn’t matter how hard it is, that’s their job and it seems they haven’t been doing it well enough. Worse, they don’t seem to have brought the playing group along for the ride. Worse still, they seem to be responding far too late.
Unlike many actual netball fans, I think selling hosting rights to the grand final is a good idea. It’s less so if its done on the run, announced a few weeks before the event is due to take place and without a proper tender process, because the financial situation has gotten so dire. I’m personally ambivlent about gambling sponsorship but Netball Australia is looking at that because all cards have to be on the table, which undermines the family friendly angle that netball craves to distinguish itself from the grubbier male dominated sports.
Even a few million dollars would turn this ship around pretty quickly. The question is that when you’ve sold yourself for so cheap for so long, who can you convince to start paying the bills? What will you have to sell to make it work?
More financial problems: Derby County
I don’t know if the financial demise of Derby County is a particularly interesting story. A soccer club I’ve heard of seems to encounter significant trouble every couple of years. Rangers, Portsmouth and Bolton Wanderers are recent examples just off the top of my head.
I figured everyone knew that was the price of doing business in a free market economy. Sometimes, a dipshit is going to get their hands on the levers, make the wrong bets and ruin the whole thing. The football machine will never stop because there’s always plenty more willing to take their place. Something about the machine of capitalism being oiled with the blood of workers something.
So I was surprised to see this:
If only there was proper oversight and regulation! The whole point is to not have these things because that’s what makes it a quote-unquote meritocracy. Surely government intervention, presumably followed closely by bailouts for culturally important community assets like soccer clubs, is an anathema to the bootstraps graft soccer has set up for itself. If you can’t survive, then you deserve to die and that’s the way it’s always been. Why bother to change it now, even though it’s patently obvious that’s not how a civil society is set up? Next you’ll be suggesting something insance, like how pro-rel is inequitable!
A good tweet
I didn’t realise watching a bunch of Washingtonians be disappointed is what would brighten up my day but here we are.
Links
Football to hold ‘kick-in’ trials instead of throw-ins as lawmakers aim to cut time-wasting. Honestly, what are we doing here folks? Is this level of tinkering really required to justify the salaries of soccer’s faceless bureaucrats?
US’ Major League Soccer has sold its entire streaming rights package to Apple. Which seems like something that should be an earth-shaking move but is also completely irrelevant because its American soccer.
Major League Cricket, with $120M pledged, pitches a new T20 venture in the U.S. The T20 bubble is back on folks. This time it can’t fail!
The Denver Broncos sold for a lot of money. Because the accounts for big sports teams are so opaque, it’s really hard to get a grip on how much teams on either side of the Atlantic should be worth. My feel is the market is being driven by ever-increasing price of assets, rather than the fundamentals of the businesses being bought, although the market is so illiquid who can say? Sports clubs are probably closer to fine art in that respect than Fortune 500 companies.
Bonus good tweet
Turns out the Perth Heat sponsorship was the bell at the top of this crypto cycle.
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Content is sold to regional networks in bulk, so the likes of Nine and Seven are insulated from the ratings performance of TV in the sticks. Their revenue is largely driven by the performance of their content in the 5 metro city ratings, which drives ad sales and explains why there is only one AFL team outside of those markets.
The main way to get around this is to charge an expansion fee.
The NRL is popular but not national, the A-League is national but not popular and Super Rugby is neither.
The NBL doesn’t count because no one watches it.
Especially if they, say, stop executing children.