Not long after publishing the last newsletter in March, I spent six months turning out a couple thousand words every couple of days on The Maroon Observer.
That didn’t leave a lot of time for writing about other sports or weaving grand conspiracies of modern kleptocratic capitalism around them. Then disconnecting from what was then Twitter - a good thing that I highly recommend - disconnected me from the cut and thrust of bad takes that used to power the componentry of this newsletter. In the end, I didn't spend much time on the Sick, Sad World of Sports in 2023.
SSWOS is now in its third year and while it has a thesis, it has no structure and is totally haphazard but I think that is its appeal to me. So I make no apologies and I will continue promise nothing other than I'll get to get it when I get to it.
Here’s what’s been happening.
January
Georgia won the College Football Playoff National Championship for the second year running, destroying TCU and enshrining Stetson Bennett into the Guy Hall of Fame. Germany won the men's (field) Hockey World Cup. Max Langenhan and Anna Berreiter won the singles titles at the European Luge Championships. Denmark won the men’s World Handball Championship. Yukon finished atop the medal table at the 2023 Arctic Winter Games with 61 gold medals.
February
The Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl, the last time the Chiefs would appear on TV without a reference to Taylor Swift. Senegal won the delayed 2022 African Nations Championship with Morocco unable to defend their title after Algerian airspace was closed to Royal Air Maroc. Real Madrid won an also delayed FIFA Club World Cup, held in Morocco whose confirmation came about six weeks before the tournament was held. Presumably no Algerian airlines were involved. Australia won the women's T20 World Cup. PKC won the Korfball Europe Champions League. Sweden won four of five individual women’s gold medals in cross country at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championship but could only manage third in the relay. I had a second child. The first one has still not learned to use the toilet properly.
March
Japan won the World Baseball Classic, with newly minted $700 million*-man Shohei Ohtani pitching to then-Angels teammate Mike Trout for the final out to seal a 3-2 victory over the United States. This is easily in my top three sports highlights of 2023.
Major League Baseball followed this up with tweaked rules, more importantly introducing the pitch clock and less importantly increasing the size of the bases (although this did seem to increase stealing). This resulted in a better product for spectators, a general improvement in ratings and people seemed to be enjoying baseball more. Then the World Series between the Diamondbacks and Rangers was the least watched ever. Rob Manfred can only push the water around with his broom against the historical king tide coming for (almost) all sports. In this case, cord cutting has annihilated the regional sports networks that provide a not insubstantial part of MLB's broadcast revenue. I personally enjoyed baseball more this year than any time since covid; it just had a bit more juice. Whether MLB will cotton on that a Four or Six Nations tournament in lieu of the All Star Game should be the next thing American sports execs copy from Europe remains to be seen.
Sweden won both Bandy World Championships. China won the World Wheelchair Curling Championship. Japan won three of four gold medals at the World Figure Skating Championships.
April
Ding Liren won a Magnus Carlsen-less Chess World Championship. Even though chess is not a sport, it would be remiss to not point out the not one but two stories of anal bead cheating reported in the one calendar year. Bryce Young was selected #1 in the NFL Draft by the Carolina Panthers, who promptly became the worst team in the NFL. Mongolia won the men's FIBA 3x3 Asia Cup.
May
The Giro d’Italia was almost entirely rained out and the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix was cancelled thanks to the flooding caused by same. This was a less disturbing cycling-adjacent meteorological event than the November verdancy of Il Lombardia (usually nicknamed the race of the falling leaves), as observed by Rob Hatch. Climate change: it’s happening, folks. Somehow weird stuff like this will keep happening, more frequently, and people just won’t quite put it together that, while action is being taken, it needs to be a lot faster because the crisis is here.
Australia's Aron Sherriff and Scotland's Julie Forrest won their respective World Indoor Bowls Championships. Canada won the IIHF World Championship. Austria and Croatia won their respective World Team Ninepin Bowling Classic Championships. Spain swept the individual medals at the European Race Walking Team Championships. Brooks Koepka of LIV Golf won the PGA Championship (which is not owned or run by the PGA Tour), presumably presaging the events of next month.
June
The mooted LIV and PGA merger might be one of the biggest, most exhausting and inexplicable sports stories in living memory. Never have so many hours of podcasting been devoted to such little substantive information which took everyone by surprise and was not at all how I expected this to unfold. Consequently, I will refrain from making further predictions.
After being at war for a couple of years, the head of Saudi Arabia’s PIF and the PGA commissioner had a secret meeting in Venice and hammered out an agreement. That agreement did not contain anything you might consider important or anything resembling details, just that they would merge and how ownership of the new merged entity would be divided up. Then the powerful men issued this proclamation to the press, with little-to-no warning to anyone else - Rory McIlroy got a phone call but most other golfers found out on Twitter - and it was left to the media to speculate what this might mean. The powerful men spent about a week taking questions, leading to headlines like “PGA's deal with LIV Golf plan sparks backlash from 9/11 families and Human Rights Watch”, before finding cover to allow other people to do the work of filling in the gaps. As of time of writing, those gaps should have been filled in by now but probably won’t be until next April at the earliest, nine months after the initial announcement. Progress has been slowed by potential other, whiter sources of investment that might undermine the need to have so much bloody oil money involved. The final product might still fall foul of anti-trust regulations.
LIV, even though it has found no audience, does not generate world ranking points1 and surely has no future as part of the merged tours, has signed #3 John Rahm to a half billion dollar deal and will play a third season in 2024, mostly as a cudgel to get an agreement of what the merged entity is actually going to be across the line. The PGA will continue in its typically disheveled state, and is now asking event sponsors to pony up more money, so the purses can grow, which will likely come at the expense of charities that would otherwise receive money. Rory McIlroy’s demand to be made whole, i.e. receive the money that he would have gotten from going to LIV from the new merged entity for his loyalty to the PGA, seems decreasingly likely. McIlroy resigned from the PGA Tour board and the roof on the arena for his new virtual TGL competition collapsed, likely delaying it for a year. To summarise, we don’t know what’s going to happen but nonetheless, a lot has happened.
Manchester City followed up their Premier League title by winning the Champions League final, which I am given to understand is a substantive achievement for the Emiratis. That means Newcastle United, you’re up. The USA won both deaf basketball world titles. Denver Nuggets won the NBA Finals. Kazakhstan won the Socca - a real thing, apparently - World Cup. Vegas Golden Knights won the Stanley Cup. Connor Bedard and Victor Wembanyama were drafted first in the NHL and NBA drafts respectively.
July
The 2026 Commonwealth Games has no host. Victoria gave up on their attempt to pull together a regional games to replace Birmingham, which had moved up four years to replace Durban, who were stripped of 2022 hosting duties due to financial issues. The Queen died and before the official mourning period was complete, the whole thing went to shit. This surely has to be the end of the road for the Comm Games, a multisport event that has had its moments but lacks a reason to continue, given the wokeist agenda to undermine the historical greatness of the British Empire - the Monarchists had a normal one - and there’s maybe two countries that care and neither want to pay for the Aldi-brand Olympics.
Georgia won the European Mixed Team Judo Championships. Kamui Kobayashi and the Toyota Gazoo Racing team won the 6 Hours of Monza. Switzerland claimed gold in the men’s middle distance, women’s long distance and the men’s relay at the World Orienteering Championships. China topped the medal tally at the World Para Athletics Championships.
August
The Matildas went as far as any Australian team ever has in a FIFA tournament that matters and more importantly, absolutely destroyed local TV ratings records, staking a claim to being Australia's pre-eminent national team. I think that used to be the Wallabies but that doesn’t sound right. It may have been the Cricketroos but beating India, England and another half dozen countries isn’t anywhere near as impressive as making the semis in a sport the rest of the world actually cares about.
The tournament was won by Spain and their associated dickheads (“First, a recap. Rubiales is a pig and a moron; this was established long before the kiss.”). In the US, 92,000 people watched Nebraska women's volleyball play Omaha, setting a new world record attendance for a women's sports event. In South Africa, Australia won the Netball World Cup as the domestic league did its best to tear itself apart.
There may be something in this women’s sport business. It means there can be twice as much content associated with your favourite sporting brands. Want two Tours de France? There it is, turning what was a huge sporting commitment of three weeks into a mammoth one of four-plus. Want two Brisbane Broncos teams that fail to win their final game, each giving you an aneurysm? Here you go, I have reserved a bed for you at the local hospital. It seems weird that the Olympics have had female athletes since - the IOC claims and I’m not fact checking further - 1900 and no one worked out a way to monetise it until the AFLW invented professional women’s sport in 2017.
September
College football, easily the dumbest sport in the world, delivered once again. The Connor Stallions manifesto. Texas A&M will pay $75 million to Jimbo - yes, a man named “Jimbo” - Fisher to not coach there anymore. Florida State had a 13-0 season, were not invited to the playoff for a one-loss Alabama, and then turned around and sued their conference to see if there was a way to get out of their binding agreement worth hundreds of millions of dollars so they could join another conference that hasn’t invited them yet. Michigan State employee suspended in wake of video quiz showing Hitler image on scoreboard. Somehow it’s like this every year and oh yeah, there’s some average to good football to watch.
Meanwhile, one of the pre-eminent conferences was systematically dismantled over the course of a week by its own member schools. After a disastrous search for a broadcast deal, somewhat snookered by rival conferences and their own previous failings, most of the Pac-12 schools fled to other conferences. In their haste to leave, they forgot to wind up the conference so now the two remaining universities, Oregon State and Washington State, have control of a two-team conference and its current financial distributions. If nothing else, it was proof that sports leagues are nothing more than broadcast inventory with some traditions pasted on to make it look worthwhile. Maybe the new football subdivision that will sort of pay athletes will resolve this and definitely not trigger another round of consolidations to eject smaller market teams from the top tier of the sport.
Germany (?) won the FIBA Basketball World Cup. Sepp Kuss completed a clean sweep of grand tours won by Jumbo Visma. Rhein Fire won the European League of Football Championship game. Oliver Zeidler and Karolien Florijn won single sculls gold at the World Rowing Championships. Egypt defeated Algeria to win the men’s African Nations Volleyball Championship. The Fox sisters and Kate Eckhardt won gold in the women’s K1 team event at the ICF Canoe Slalom World Championships.
October
The men’s marathon world record stands just 35 seconds outside of the two hour barrier, lowered by Kelvin Kiptum in Chicago in just his third marathon. Most of the recent improvements in long distance running records are being attributed to shoe technology. specifically the Nike Vaporfly, which has a carbon plate built-in to improve running efficiency and is good for one race. The usual complaints are out, none of which could possibly mount a non-arbitrary argument rooted in the fact that the interlocutor happens to be alive right now, as to why x level of technology is good but y level of technology is not. Insofar as sport is a reflection of its contemporaneous society, clothing constructed of horrifying post-industrial materials, to eke out a couple of basis points of improvement, that can only be used once in the midst of an ongoing environmental catastrophe, to achieve entirely arbitrary goals, to sell stuff to people who don’t need it seems about right.
The women’s mark was lowered by three whole minutes in September by Tigist Assefa in Berlin. Sifan Hassan, who won the 5k and 10k gold medals and bronze in the 1500m at the Tokyo Olympics, only won silver and bronze at this year’s World Championships but still managed to fart out the second best women’s marathon time in October, and would have been a new world record had she run it a bit over two weeks earlier. Let’s Run is speculating how many events she will compete in at the next Olympics: “Hassan is now the 7th-fastest woman in history at 1500 (3:51.95), the 9th-fastest in history at 5000 (14:13.42) and 2nd-fastest in history in the 10,000 (29:06.82) and marathon (2:13:44).” Hassan was once coached by Alberto Salazar, which is important context if you know.
Flag football and cricket are in the 2028 Olympics. The former is a potent symbol of the NFL’s power, which given its parochiality is ironic to see deployed on the wolrd stage but is part of a broader push to internationalise the sport and make more money, sweep up more attention and crush any cultural artefacts that might try to not be crushed. The latter just seems welll overdue, given the popularity of the sport in the second biggest TV market in the world and ‘Cricket’ was voted Australia’s favourite episode of Bluey. South Africa won the World Cup of bad rugby. Every nation bar Saudi Arabia has pulled out of the host bidding process for the 2034 FIFA World Cup, proving that no one has learned anything from Beijing or Qatar 2022.
November
Cycling wants to be more like F1. Tennis wants to be more like F1. F1 had one of the least competitive and entertaining seasons in a decade, unless you count the farces in Australia and Qatar, although Las Vegas seemed to go well in the end. While F1 is going through a golden age commercially and culturally, F1’s annual revenue is less than a quarter that of the NFL or the EPL. Perhaps its time for athletes to change sports if they want better conditions? A ‘learn to block’ or ‘learn to goalkeep’ corollary to ‘learn to code’.
The lack of imagination shown by those in charge, as well as the callous disregard for the charm of their existing quaint structures, and the ignorance that these sports have managed to sell themselves for more than a century without being more like F1, is exasperating. Given the LIV experience, these potentially seismic changes are either a lure for Saudi funding or a bulwark to protect against this threat to the existing power structure.
Unlike a traditional business arrangement, where it’s clear who owns what and to whom they are selling that product, it’s not clear that these organisations trying to do the selling have what they’re claiming to have. Even if they succeed in making the sale, it’s not clear who is meant to benefit or what the surplus is meant to achieve other than lining the pockets of people no one cares about.
The drabness of what’s being offered - they’re going to Grow The Game by homogenising it to be just like every other sport and they’re going to reduce athlete workload by creating a handful of really special events while cutting out 95% of the pyramid below - speaks to the laziness involved in trying to eke more money out of a society that simply does not see the value, and so they become a ploy to diversify the revenue of an oil-rich religious autocracy.
Australia won the World Cup of cricket. The Texas Rangers won the World Series. New Zealand won the good rugby Pacific Championships by pantsing a lack lustre Australia. Montreal won the Grey Cup. Manchester City also won the World Club Cup.
December
GCN+ was shut down. This was a streaming service that carried all of Eurosport’s cycling coverage where a pre-existing rights conflict didn’t exist. For cycling fans in Australia, where the broadcast rights to very few cycling events are sold, especially after Eurosport exited Australia at the end of 2020, it was amazing how much content $65 a year could buy. Despite apparently being a reasonably liquid operation, Warner Brothers-Discovery decided to kill it off and put the content behind other, less successful paywalls. It’s a big fuck you from the corporate world to ordinary people and while I understand why it was done (and I wouldn’t care if it was a different sport), it doesn’t make me want to [redacted] any less.
It seems likely that as streaming offerings get much worse, no longer funded by zero interest rate money and fueled by the same hot air inflating the bubble around anything Silicon Valley-adjacent, more of this will happen. Unless SBS or Fox pick up the slack, then there's no way to watch these events in Australia. That just leaves piracy, which I figured large multinational media companies were not in favour of but they’re not leaving a lot of options on the table.
Meanwhile, the group behind soccer’s Super League - mostly Barcelona, Real Madrid and a cast of shady marketing Eurotrash professionals - won a ruling that UEFA and FIFA have to act fairly and transparently in their role as regulators of soccer, lest their actions to stop other potential competitions fall foul of European law. Kudos!
I think when the history of the Super League is written, likely in a 5,000 word “oral history” in a few years’ time, it’s going to be apparent that the dozen or so top clubs that had planned to breakaway had a vague idea that they were going to do something like it at some point but had no minuted action items to that end. The pandemic and catastrophic black holes in the clubs’ financial forecasts was the impetus to bring it to life. That it was rushed, during a pandemic, in order to secure JP Morgan’s funding and use that to address the looming crises explains most of what followed. The poor messaging and sheer lack of imagination has probably killed the idea for at least a generation. A Super League will happen eventually because there is money to be made and the incentives are no different now than they were a few years ago, but as the project of European political integration was stalled by the Global Financial Crisis, so has the project of European football integration been stalled by the 2021 Super League.
The grace, the beauty of sports
Mondo Duplantis set a new pole vault world record at 6.23m at the Eugene Diamond League in September. Second place was more than 40 centimetres behind and Duplantis has moved the record up seven centimetres over the last few years, so spare a thought for the other elite pole vaulters competing at this particular point in history.
“Hey, congratulations, man! Way to go…”
“…oh for fuck’s sake, fuck me…”
Conclusion
There is no future in which the fan experience improves. I believe most of this genre of complaints are naive at best and whinging for its own sake at worst and I’ve generally believed that sports making themselves richer is an obvious good for its own sake, at least within the context of the current economic and political system. More money brings more power and more prestige, both of which can be wielded to secure the future of that institution, if not higher incomes for the athletes that create the entertainment and the potential to fund expansion, to Grow The Game.
If nothing else is apparent at the end of 2023, sports are run by people who believe that getting richer is not only good but necessary for survival. It is as if there’s a ladder and at the top is heaven and survival, and at the bottom is hell and extinction. There is an unknown but limited number of sports that can climb the ladder and the auction for the tickets to the ladder climbing experience is currently underway. Once the last sport has climbed the ladder, it will be kicked out. Tough luck if you missed out. The NFL and EPL are already at the top, throwing rocks and boiling oil on everyone below. The desperation to amass as much wealth as possible and throw overboard anything that doesn’t make a profit to get on the ladder is palpable.
We live in a winner-takes-all cultural economy. The middle class of music and of movies has already been eliminated, in favour of capital buying sure bets on superstars, eschewing full-time middle class musicians and the middle tier of movie we used to get in the 1990s as being unable to generate enough funding to satisfy the loan sharks that power Hollywood. Sport, with its inherent conservatism and appeal to the kind of men who have generally run business and society, has managed to resist this for longer than other cultural institutions but its clear that sport’s time to face the music, to pay the piper, to swallow the pill has come.
A friction exists between the palpable desperation of sports accumulating as much money as possible and an inability to acknowledge or verbalise an understanding of the cultural economy. This may even present as a cognitive dissonance in the brains of the kind of suit wearing chuds that have put themselves in charge of professional sports. The money from Saudia, and to a lesser extent, the other Gulf states, has driven the insanity to a new level. The chuds need their cut, otherwise what was the point of attending and then sleeping through the general assembly meeting?
But this money is not sustainable. It’s real, although it is likely that figures have been inflated in the media by including equity in things that don’t exist or, if they do exist, don’t have value that can be exchanged for Joachimsthalers, but it will dry up. It might last longer than China’s money did. It will definitey outlive the crypto/NFT wave. But eventually, Mohammad bin Salman will realise that putting pools into the backyards and cocaine up the noses of various athletes and faceless bureaucrats in back offices of Switzerland and the US hasn’t bought him shit. The tap will be turned off. Makers of enormous luxury cars and the Sinaloa Cartel will be devastated.
Now I’ve lived through enough epoch-marking events - 9/11, the GFC, covid, the inevitability of the Australian housing market - to have a pretty firm understanding that while I believe there should be some connection between the fundamentals of reality and the prevailing behaviour of those in charge, and that if the two don’t align, they will be made to align, that that isn’t really true. Some people can seemingly live in fairyland forever. The pandemic offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to just stop and rethink a few things. The only improvement that came of this is that some people can work from home now, a thing that will almost certainly save businesses money in the long run once holdout managers get over their egos. If the novel coronavirus didn’t change anything, then we may as well strap in because this train has a while to run yet.
Notes
The format of this newsletter was loosely borrowed from Max Read. Read’s annuals are like reading fever dreams and the past ones are worse. If this seems more backended, that's because I didn't think of doing this post until about a month ago and only started in earnest after Christmas.
I don’t hear about pickleball anymore, which was getting semi-regular write-ups in The Athletic at one point. I assume that it will eventually going the same way as NFTs, and that the rise to prominence of both is symptomatic of some venture capital-cum-sports marketing agency trying to make it a thing.
If you've read a few of my newsletters, you might be able to guess my AI take but I don’t see how it will be as revolutionary as people trying to sell it claim (see also: cryptocurrency), or as functional and there are only diminishing technological returns in the future. It might provide some sludge for society (e.g. creating more spam, making call centres worse, poorly summarising documents) and I could see applications for what is currently called AI around the margins, but AI lacks experience, judgement and discernment and the technology shows no signs of being able to develop these features.
I gave NASCAR a go this year and I just can't do it. It's so stupid. Speaking of, given yet another weekend format tweak, I'm surprised there isn't a sprint race at every F1 grand prix yet. The folks at Liberty are consulting acturial tables to work out when enough of the old guard will have died out that they can push it through without anyone caring.
The Qataris are invested in padel, an Iberian cross between squash and tennis, which is a little less glamorous than the Saudis investment in golf and begs the question why they didn't just go direct to tennis, given the money the women's tour is looking for.
Modern pentathlon has survived to 2028. It’s impossible for me to tell whether Pentathlon United and the other cretins associated with the classist insistence on maintaining horsey riding have accepted that Ninja Warrior is the future of their sport.
Reading
Diana Nyad’s Swimming Brought Her Glory, Fame, And An Adversary Dedicated To Exposing Her Lies
WSL, Championship clubs back NewCo to run women’s football top tiers from 2024-25
Will a new women’s hockey league succeed where others have failed?
Not sports: Substack has a Nazi problem. Substack wouldn’t be the first online network where I have had an active account and also there have been Nazis but previously, management has at least pretended that was a bad thing. That does not appear to be the case for Substack’s management, which is not great.
Also not sports but if you’re looking for recommendations, I listened to a lot of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions and Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcasts this year. I didn’t read much that wasn’t a re-read or a kid’s book this year but of those few books, the Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is good but showing its age, The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud was fine and The Verge by Patrick Wyman, which is great if you want nine seemingly unrelated profiles that tie together the themes of how a blood soaked capitalism drove Europe forward in the early modern period. I still haven’t seen Barbenheimer and I haven’t listened to any music released this decade.
Thank you for reading Sick, Sad World of Sports.
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This never seems to matter to anyone.