OT - US Pro Sports Socialist, European Soccer Capitalist
I am an avid redditor and was just browsing thorugh r/soccer and found this interesting post comparing US sports to European Soccer and ulitmately concluding that US sports are much more 'socialist' in nature than European soccer, which trends 'capitalist/free market'. While I'm not convinced either way, there are some interesting points and would love to hear people's opinions! Thought this would make for a great May Day discussion.
"The point I would make is these same people continually espouse free market capitalism and rail against the "elites," but European club soccer better reflects these ideals, and the "American" sports they love more closely resemble their view of "Europe."
*In American sports, failure is rewarded. The primary means by which this is accomplished is the draft. The worse you do, the earlier you pick, and therefore presumably are rewarded with better new players. In European soccer, there is no draft and it is up to each club to develop / acquire its own talent.
*In American sports, there are a group of "Elites" that dictate rules and regulate all aspects of the sport: Salary caps, luxury taxes, max contracts, minimum contracts, trade exceptions, caps on cash used in trades, matching of player salaries in trades, etc. Not in Europe. You want a player? Buy him. Want to get rid of a player? Sell him. No need to work out a complex trade with another team, ensuring that the salaries are approximately equal as in the NBA.
*The NFL is socialist! (gasp!) 32 teams that all share revenue.
*Relegation. In the US, a team like the Pirates can suck for decades and still make money. Not in Europe. Europe has relegation and promotion. What is more American (in Glenn Beck's, etc. view) than that? Survival of the fittest!"
OP: http://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/t1f1k/why_european_soccer_is_the_most_american_of_sports/
"What is more American (in Glenn Beck's, etc. view) than that? Survival of the fittest!"
The MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA are all organizations that want to be "the fittest." The reason they have "socialist" policies regarding their teams is because thats how they stay the "fittest" in our capitalist system.
I would be very interested in a study of what % of Mgobloggers are also redditors. I believe it would be significantly over 50%.
Wtf is a redditor?
Wikipedia says its something about some kind of social blog / website thingy. I think the figure would be like zero point five percent, not 50%.
First rule of reddit is you don't talk about reddit.
Not because this is a parody of Fight Club; it's because how much time I waste on reddit and tumblr is mildly embarrassing.
You mean exremely embarrassing
Never visted the site before
govern different facets of the game, but some of these are arbitrary and some of them, more or less, historical inheritance. Socialism or capitalism has little to do with it. although those words are often used pretty loosely anyway. For some people, socialism is the historical legacy of various kinds of attempts to institutionalize equality through governance (rightly or wrongly, successfully or not); for some people it wears horns.
With that said, however, free market models have gained considerable hegemony in Europe over the last 20 years, especially with the advent of union; stringent "capitalist" austerity models are being imposed there in the current crisis that you couldn't get away with here. Politicians who use Europe as a socialist whipping boy at this stage talk through their hats. So I'd bet you'd find very different business models for sports that have been more recently on the rise there, like hoop.
Especially with the recent lawsuits regarding if the NFL teams are really competing or 1 entity that is the NFL. It came up regarding their monopoly status and "official" merchandisers.
I think that there aren't a lot of ways that teams could make less money than they do in the US, there isn't the competition. The NBA is already watered down talent wise, the NHL could use a couple fewer teams as well. College sports form a niche lower league that doesn't really exist in Europe.
I suppose if there were relegation certain teams would do worse attendance wise... If the bottom half of the NBA all had to play each other would anybody go? does anybody go already?
Relegation CANNOT happen here in the US.
Reason: TV contracts.
What network would commit to a multi-year deal when there is a possibility the NEW YORK OR CHIGAGO OR (insert other big city) MARKET gets relegated in later years? If the NBA had relegation, the Knicks and Nets would have been in the Second Division for years; and the Bulls too between Jordan and Rose eras. You could see an MLB or NHL team getting relegated while its farm team gets promoted -- how insane would that be (simply put, you can't have farm systems with relegation/promotion). All this moving up and down would destroy TV markets and contracts etc. How would Fox feel if the Detroit (top 5 city, population-wise) got relegated and Souix City promoted?
The way Europe avoids this, (1) the most popular teams never get relegated -- see my long post below; and (2) cities like London have MULTIPLE teams. Americans might not realize that Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham are ALL IN LONDON -- plus other teams like QPR. Of course those 3 would never be bad enough to be relegated, but, if one got relegated, you wouldn't lose the entire TV market.
That's a good point about multiple teams in individual cities. England has 20 EPL clubs crammed into a geographical area of only 50,000 square miles (England is actually smaller than the state of Michigan), so wherever you live there, you're never far from an EPL club. Here it's obviously very different.
This is kind of a weak argument, as there currently are TV contracts for the ELP even though, theoretically, even the biggest teams could face relegation. The problem I think has more to do with franchising, and a weak minor league system. I think that promotion/relegation could work great in baseball, as baseball already has a successful minor league system in place.
You could see an MLB or NHL team getting relegated while its farm team gets promoted -- how insane would that be (simply put, you can't have farm systems with relegation/promotion).
A glance at the tables of pretty much any European country outside the UK and Italy indicates that this is not true. The German third division includes Stuttgart II and Werder Bremen II; Bayern II was in the third division last year but was relegated. Debrecen II, Ujpest II and Honved II are in the Hungarian second division, four of the 10 (now 9 but that's another story) teams in the top Swiss league have farm teams in the third league, etc.
Typically there are rules on participation in these reserve squads--for example, in Germany I think they're required to be U23. That makes it unlikely the reserve team would ever get promoted up to, let alone above, the parent club, and there may well be rules to prevent it if it ever happened (if a reserve team were promoted to the top flight, maybe they pass it over and take the next club*). I can't think of an example of this ever happening.
*see next post.
Germany prohibits reserve teams from being promoted above the third division. Bayern's second team won its league in 2004 and was passed over because of this rule (or rather its predecessor because in 2004 the third tier consisted of a pair of regional leagues, north and south). Hungary and Switzerland have similar rules; I suspect it's common throughout Europe.
Instead of setting a uniform ceiling, Spain prohibits reserve teams from being promoted to the same level as the parent club, although when Malaga's reserve team won promotion they got around this rule by splitting the club in two and creating a new professional club out of their reserve team--oddly, only the reserve team survives as the current Malaga; the original Malaga having perished, bankrupt.
But OTOH, the European top leagues are all fixed at 18 or 20 teams, while the North American leagues keep adding franchises. The NFL has 32 franchises and MLB, NBA and NHL have 30 apiece. European sports leagues are all contained within national borders (or even sub-national borders, in the case of the UK) while three of the four North American leagues have franchises in Canada and they always talk about someday having franchises in Europe, Mexico or elsewhere. It's just two different business models.
America has 300 million people. Most euro countries have about 65 million.
But the point is, the North American leagues are steadily expanding their geographic base whereas the European leagues seem fixed in their national borders (which are generally pretty small to begin with). Expansion is supposed to be a hallmark of a successful enterprise in a capitalist system, but the European leagues are content to stay in their little bubbles.
European leagues are VERY international -- there are no "little bubbles."
For instance, the EPL is a HUGE hit in Asia. 650 million people worldwide watched the Manchester Derby yesterday -- !!! Just think about that. When do 650 million people watch a regular-season NFL game -- EVER?
Furthermore, Europe is more like the US than you are giving it credit for. There are like (what) 500 million Europeans, supporting about 1000 football clubs in multiple leagues in most countries. Players move across boundaries seamlessly. Teams play each other internationally in all sorts of competitions, e.g. the Champions League.
So actually European soccer has LOTS of room for growth / expansion. The US is obviously one market for them. But promoting their brands in South America and Asia is natural too, because (1) its a sport played there too and (2) players from other continents are stars in Europe. The NFL has no such luck. NBA, NHL and MLB barely do.
To say the European leagues are stuck in their own boundaries is simply, well, an entirely uneducated comment. The leagues don't cross boundaries because they don't need to -- every country has its teams / divisions. But with players, coaches, and money flowing seamlessly over the boundaries, the boundaries exist in name only.
I'm talking more about the individual European leagues than the popularity of certain clubs. The EPL is enormously popular, but it's content to keep its clubs within its smallish geographical area. Yes, you can watch their games at 3:00 a.m. on the other side of the globe, but you're never going to be able to attend an EPL game outside of England, unless it's some one-off exhibition. The league will probably never expand beyond England. Socio-political influences make that difficult. The two Glasgow giants would make more sense, from a business standpoint, in the EPL, but Scotland won't let them go - and England might be too territorial to let them in.
Yes, there is the Champions League and UEFA, but those are just tournaments - they're not full-fledged leagues (despite their names), and only a handful of teams per league get in. You will not see the EPL try to put a club in New York, which is essentially what David Stern and the other commissioners talk about with London. It will do all it can to sell merchandise, but its games will be played in merry old England.
I think the mistake you're making is, confusing the LEAGUE with the CLUBS. The league has basically NO POWER, given the power of the individual clubs.
If EPL said they wanted to annex NY Red Bulls and (my) DC United... Man U would flip a finger and say, if you do that, I walk. And half a nanosecond later, ELP would go, you're right what was I thinking?
Because no power team (Man U, Arsenal, etc.) that is happy to make hordes of money off of othe clubs willing to along with their noncompetitive system, is going to allow a change to the league system that suddenly makes it long-term harder to stay in the Champions League (and get the extra $100M a year it brings). If you add DC United to the EPL, then some billionaire will snatch us up and turn us into the next version of Manchester City.
The power relationship between club and league is definitely different over there. Here it's the leagues that have the upper hand. I guess in both cases, it's the side with the power that looks to expand.
There has been regular talk about the big clubs from the top Euro leagues breaking away to form a super league because of the potential profits involved. Indeed, the formation of the EPL itself was an effort to break the hold of the English FA over administration of the game and direct more TV revenues toward the clubs (particularly the big clubs). However, it will probably never happen because of the power of both UEFA and FIFA over the club game.
And while there isn't geographic expansion, there is expansion within the a huge number of teams that exist below the first division. The English leagues go four levels deep with professional players and then you get into a nebulous world of semi-pro leagues that can still earn promotion into the upper divisions. And new clubs are created and enter into this system. The most famous recently is probably FC United of Manchester, which was formed by ManU fans opposed to the Glazer takeover.
I think this is happening in the US too, just recently Detroit City FC became a club, and hopefully in a few years they will be able to join MLS as a franchize, which is what some other teams have already done.
is Relegation. I love it. Absolutely love it. If you want to suck as much ass as the Lions, Pirates, or Blue Jackets, there should be a B-league for them to be demoted to where they can sit in a corner and think about what they've done, and turn things around in. Relegation in Europes top-flight is a nerve-wrecking, but its also quite exciting and makes the late-season revivals of teams like Wigan in the EPL rather inspirational. I'd rather watch teams fight for the right to survive, as opposed to tanking to see who will get Anthony Davis in the NBA draft.
I'm not really a fan of the "capitalist" spending and transfers and all that, I guess. It's not something that truly bothers me, but it does get annoying when you know that the best players in a Brazilian or Danish league will inevitably be courted by Madrid, Barca or United - and there's no way any of those teams can say no the money those franchises offer them.
They are clubs not franchises. I think the sports franchise is uniquely american.
Relegation definitely adds in-season drama, but I don't think it's good for small-market teams in general. It's hard for them to rebuild sensibly when they always have to be good enough to avoid the relegation zone. If they are relegated, they're screwed from a financial standpoint.
It's a lot more fun to watch Wigan and QPR play their brains out in a furious attempt to stay up than it is to watch the Warriors, Nets, Pistons, and Raptors all suddenly discover injuries to their best players late in the season. Euro soccer teams already have a form of revenue sharing but it would probably be better if they had more. Maybe these new financial fair play rules will help, but I think a salary cap there is probably out of the question.
I wonder if a relegation model would work for the NFL: add 2 teams, then put 17 teams in the top league and 17 in the bottom and have everyone play each other once. Promote and relegate 4 teams each year. Have a higher salary cap in the top league and revenue sharing only within each league, but allow the teams in the bottom league for the upcoming year to draft earlier in each round than teams in the top league. Allow 8 teams to make the playoffs. Personally I think this would be more fun even though my Raiders would have been relegated a long time ago and probably stayed down, but it would probably not go over well as the Super Bowl is our de facto national holiday and I don't think people would like to change the old NFC v. AFC format.
The Pistons had found a few more injuries. Unfortunately, they did the opposite of that.
Doesn't the MLS own all the players in the MLS... so when Bolton bought Tim Ream recently, they technically bought him from the MLS rather than the New York Red Bulls.
Or am I mistaken in this?
MLS owns all the players in their league.
... is the notion that revenue sharing make the NFL a "socialist" enterprise. Well, no more than owning shares in a corporation is socialist. I've always thought of the NFL as one giant corporation, with each team representing a share. I.e., if I buy the Lions, I'm not really purchasing the Lions franchise as must as I'm purchasing a piece of the NFL, which is a giant money-making operation. Maybe I'm wrong, though.
The other points are fair, though I'm glad the MLB hasn't implemented relegation -- given the late 90s, the Tigers would have been in the Dominican Summer League.
If you own shares in a corporation, you're incentives are totally alligned with everyone else who owns shares. You aren't competing for resources or anything else. A better argument (which I still think is invalid) would be to compare it to a coop, where individuals or smaller businesses own a larger business.
Still, there's almost no competition in any coop I've ever encountered.
It's possible for franchises of one corporation to be in competition - sort of, anyway. If you own a McDonald's or Starbucks franchise, for instance, you could have a sister franchise just a mile or two away. They'll never really regard themselves as rivals, but they do essentially compete for the same consumer dollar.
They're both capitalist, just in different ways. The NFL is McDonald's. They own the League, and set the rules for the betterment of the company, not any specific franchise. And McDonald's do compete against each other. Some other franchise making money may be good for the company, but it doesn't do the franchisee any good if it means his restaurant is going to close. So yeah, it personally interests him to sell more hamburgers than the other guy.
The soccer league is more a State Street Association (or Main, or South U) where restaurants join to do things and accomplish things of mutual benefit, but are in direct competition with each other and wouldn't be afraid to pull out if it was better for their restaurant, because they own their shop, not the Association.
Both capitalistic...but different structures. The Cowboys aren't competing with the Lions for fans....the NFL is competing with MLB and the NBA.
What about the New Day Coop? Marlo was always trying to muscle his way to the top of that thing.
I was actually thinking of a forum topic like this -- but from the opposite direction.
I'm in my 40s but, with lots of free time on Saturday and Sunday morning while the kids and wife sleep in and I get up with the dogs, have had a chance to follow the EPL this year very closely. I now really understand the European model, and my evaulation as an American is, IT SUCKS. I'm not taking down the sport, I follow it closely -- e.g. I was laughing my butt off as Wigan took it to the Magpies 4-nil by half time, seeing how the latter are sorta close to the most "massive" accomplishment but choked bigtime. (Wigan are playing well, obv, and we'll see how serioues the Magpies are when they host the Sky Blues next. Of course, if Chelsea beat Bayern, it's for naught anyway b/c Gunners or Spurs will get EPL's #3 and last slot to the CL next year.)
So, demonstrating I'm not just knocking soccer but see the relative merits, here is my conclusion:
American sports PROMOTE COMPETITION. The "worst to first" syndrome is promoted here. We want competitive equality, we want bad teams to get good, we want dynasties to fall apart. Like, this fall, of the 32 NFL teams, fans in about 15 have semi-realistic hopes of seeing their team in the Super Bowl; maybe 25 teams hope to make the playoffs. Maybe more. Every year, a last-place team wins its division (like 13 years running now). But next year, how many teams' fans in the EPL will honestly think they can win it? Four? Five? And how many will have a serious thought of making the top 4 and a CL bid? Seven or eight? Newcastle is a total unexpected player here.
European sports promote STABILITY. Go back 20, 25 years, look at the top 4-6 EPL teams (well it wasn't called it then, was it) year after year. Same teams as now: Man U, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs. It took a billinaire to turn Man City around. Stories like Newcastle ALMOST NEVER happen. Same in La Liga (there are the Big Two and the rest), Serie A (there are Juventus, the two Milans, and Roma and lately Lazio), and Germany is basically Bayern and everyone else. Year to year, there are good times; but over 10, 20 years, its the SAME ones over, and over, and over.
I present: The St. Louis Rams. Went 3-13 one year, and the following year, 13-3 and won the Super Bowl. THAT CANT HAPPEN IN THE EPL or La Liga or Serie A etc.
Because each team in Europe it beholden ONLY to itself -- not even its own league. The 20 (23?) teams bolted to form the EPL. There has been talk of a "super league" with the top 20 teams. Etc. Why would Man U want to share revenue, etc. with QPR? No, Man U wants to keep its warchest, keep on top of everyone else.
That's not capitalism. It's not quite a monopoly, but it's close -- an oligopoly (do I have that right? engineering degree here). Most of the money controlled by a small number of dominant players.
If you like this system because its "capitalism," then I submit you are a Man U or Barca fan etc. who, like Yankee fans, wants a system that allows the best to ALWAYS be the best. But if you are fans of ALL THE OTHER TEAMS, you want a system were you have a chance to succeed quickly.
So, once again, America wins, Europe loses.
To some extent, I agree with the prior post. It is difficult to be a fan of a mid-level team in European soccer. I am a big Fulham supported in England, and for them, finishing in the top 10 is the objective each season. Once in a decade, you might get a great run in the FA cup, Europa League, etc. but it can be difficult.
What I will say about American sports, is that the playoff systems suck badly. In the NHL, NBA, and MLB, the regular seasons are WAY too long, and there is no prestige associated with winning the regular season. Therefore, you end up with Lebron James playing 82 useless games per season. I haven't watched an MLB regular season game for 5 years beause there are so damn many I can't find much significance. NFL does a much better job at this, with the BYE system, and fewer playoff spots.
In the soccer model, there are multiple competitions which leaves more teams with things to play for. In the EPL, there is currently a battle for first, then a battle for third and fourth (champions league spots for next season), and a relegation battle, plus teams in the Champions leauge and FA cup. Most of the clubs have something to play for, even though there are just 2 games left.
Says someone with a BUCKY BADGER avatar... I mean, talk about a school that puts LESS emphasis on the regular season, judging by the cupcake OOC schedule year after year after year. Schedule a top 10 team someday whydoncha.
I'm going to grad school there. I am and always will be a Michigan fan (and graduate). Bash Wisconsin sports as much as you want, but giving someone crap for their avatar is not exactly polite.
There are fewer playoff slots available than in the other sports.
Fixed it. Use "fewer" with countable things and "less" with uncountable things (like water, air, sand...)
/grammarsnob
using less in that case has been accepted usage for hundreds of years. The "rule" about countable and uncountable nouns orginates in 1770. It was simply the preference of Robert Baker. Here's Webster's on it: http://books.google.com/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC&pg=PA592#v=onepage&q&f=false
That's why we love American College Football so much. The regular season is vital - every game counts.
One loss and your National Championship hopes are severely damaged. Two losses and they are just about gone. I can only remember a single 2-loss team playing for the NC in my lifetime (LSU) and that was an extreme year. The CFB season really is a 12 game playoff.
Please, please, please don't screw that up NCAA with whatever "playoff" scheme you come up with.
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I think you're confusing athletic competition with economic/free market competition. The NFL is the non plus ultra of promoting athletic competition, at least in an "any given Sunday" (or rather, any given year) sense. It does not, however, promote free market competition between the teams. In fact, far from it. The NFL stifles free market competition by regulating salaries (in the form of rookie wage scales, salary caps, and franchise tags), regulating the number of teams, regulating the color/brand/length of socks that players must wear, whathaveyou. By comparison, European soccer does not have any such regulations.
As for the last place to first place turn around, this is true, in a sense. Of course Bayern will generally dominate the German Bundesliga. But there are (admittedly isolated) stories of turn around success, e.g. Kaiserslautern winning in '98 following promotion from the second league, Fortuna Düsseldorf being relegated from the Bundesliga to the fourth division and promoted (hopefully!) back to Bundesliga within a span of 15 years, or Hoffenheim challenging for the championship in 2009 ~10 years after playing in the sixth (!) division. To put that into perspective, that would roughly be the equivalent of your local rec team making the NFL playoffs in a decade.
So while you have turn arounds like the Rams quite often, you never get the extreme turn arounds either. That is to say, the Toledo Mud Hens will never win the World Series. Which system is better is really a matter of preference. Personally, I like a system in which there is no incentive for a team to tank at the end of the season, which is inevitably what a system like the NBA promotes. But I see the appeal for fans and the leagues of creating a system designed to promote parity among a limited number of teams.
/my $0.02
Any more than Ford Motor Company promotes competition between it's Marketing and Engineering divisions. There may be some internal competition to see who can produce the most, and be the most successful division, but they're not separate entities.
so I won't bore everyone with a repetition. Short version: When I moved to Switzerland in the late 90s the local club, which was almost 100 years old, had just been promoted from the top amateur league and was suffering through its first year in the Swiss second division with its first set of full-time professional players. They also had splurged and bought seats for a few hundred season ticket holders, for the first time. Every one else had to stand in seatless bleachers (there's a reason they're called "stands").
Eight years later they had qualified for the group stage of the Champions League and were in London, playing Arsenal, with a total team budget that wouldn't have paid the salary of a single player in the first Arsenal 11.
Nothing like that can happen in American sport. We make it relatively easy to go from worst to first in the top league, but this sort of small-town success, going from amateur competition to the top competition in the continent, is quite literally impossible here.
And I've resigned myself to the fact that nothing in the rest of my life as a fan of sport will ever come close to matching the excitement of it. It was a miracle that cannot ever be duplicated...and, to be fair, will probably never be duplicated in Europe either. (The most-similar recent examples have all involved somebody dumping a lot of money into a small club. Thun had no benefactor, just a brilliant manager and a scout scrounging up hidden gems in Brazilian provincial leagues and offering them a chance to play in Europe.)
But the possibility that your local semipro nine might someday be in the World Series--that changes everything.
There used to be one analogy for this in America: the Indiana HS basketball tournament. It used to be a free-for-all, with one state champion. Against the wishes of most of the fans, they recently dropped this in favor of separate classifications.
I present: The St. Louis Rams. Went 3-13 one year, and the following year, 13-3 and won the Super Bowl. THAT CANT HAPPEN IN THE EPL or La Liga or Serie A etc.
Wolfsburg was 15th in the Bundesliga in 2006 and 2007, avoiding relegation by one position and three points each year. In 2009 they won the league.
It's unlikely, but "can't happen" is a little strong.