15 Super League hot takes; A billion quid question for women's sport; Buffett's moats; Perverse incentives on the PGA Tour; The Secret Strategist is back
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Anything happen this week?
15 things to say when asked about The Super League
It’s possible to both oppose The Super League and want to change sports’ structures, formats and institutions. These are not mutually exclusive positions.
The problem with The Super League is that it’s a flawed, boring idea; an old man’s plan, borne of a monocultural echo chamber.
The whole story conjures billionaires messaging each other on WhatsApp, never being told no, and clinging to strategic dogma that dissipates when it leaves PowerPoint and hits the real world, aka footy fans and Gary Neville with a microphone.
Ownership is not control. Fenway Sports Group might formally own Liverpool FC but they didn’t have the power to make the changes they craved. This must worry them.
Capitalists hate competition. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are the most influential figures in BillionaireWorld and central to their investment philosophy is the creation of sustainable monopolies. Berkshire Hathaway seek to build ‘moats’ around their businesses (castles). In essence, this means removing competition. “We buy barriers (to entry). Building them is tough…one competitor is enough to ruin a business running on small margins.”
The NFL is sport’s ultimate moated castle. The closed league system creates scarcity for franchise owners, driving up valuations.
European football might just be a bad business. “The difference between a good business and a bad business it is that good businesses throw up one easy decision after another,” said Charlie Munger. “The bad businesses throw up painful decisions time after time.”
Billionaires see themselves as victims. Today’s cadre of tech (and sport) billionaires are devotees of Ayn Rand’s ideas, which have shaped neo-conservative thinking, particularly in the US. George Monbiot:
It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.
Change ‘ungrateful poor’ for ‘Arsenal fans’ and swap ‘governments’ for ‘governing bodies’ and we’re pretty much there.
A Super League is coming to every sport. It won’t be called that, but it will be an attempt to build a moat. Some will work and be good. Others won’t. In many cases, the fan response will be swept away and the PR will be better.
The PGA Tour’s new reward system is a response to this threat. Rewind a year and golf was facing it’s Super League moment in the form of the PGL, backed by Saudi money and p/e. This week the Tour announced their Player Impact Program, a bonus structure skewed to keeping the big stars happy. A $40million annual prize pool distributed among the 10 most popular players that drive fan and sponsor engagement. (Shackelford hates it)
The Super League revealed what club owners really think of women’s football. And it wasn’t much. The women’s game was tagged on. An afterthought. What’s the response to be?
Fans want faster horses. Innovation in sport is harder to get through than in other business sectors. Because fans. And they’re usually a conservative force, fetishising the past.
Do the numbers still add up? If Super League was the plan all along, does this week’s failure undermine the rationale for investment in big European football clubs by American owners?
Was there ever a media partner? There were plenty of showy denials from Amazon, DAZN etc but it’s inconceivable that even the gang that couldn’t shoot straight (the 12 club owners) would launch without a central deal lined up. Surely it would be JP Morgan’s first question. And what happens to JP Morgan’s money now btw?
There was a deep seam of anti-American rhetoric to the fan and media response.
Ice skating very nearly became the most important precedent in sports law history.
Word of the week: Shibboleth
Definition: A shibboleth is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another.
Seen in The FT’s cricket editorial:
This is one possible future on offer to England’s cricketing traditionalists: a vibrant national scene, competitive and popular, appealing to fans of all classes and genders. All it will take is letting go of shibboleths, breaking taboos and for cricket to embrace, like so many other sports have before it, the opportunities of commercialisation.
DataWatch - Women’s sport
This week’s podcast asked what’s got to go right if women’s sport is to hit the £1billion mark by 2030, as predicted by Women’s Sport Trust and Two Circles.
Tammy Parlour, Zarah al Kudzy and Laura Weston were the guests. Listen here.
Two bits jumped out from the research (which is v.good and downloadable here).
The gap between strategy and execution
Many sports organisations believe they make female athletes more visible than they actually do: less than 30% of most prominent images on website and social channels of UK NGBs who have both male and female competitors feature female athletes according to Two Circles research. These trends are even more marked for clubs with both men’s and women’s teams, with football, cricket, and rugby clubs generally focusing more on male players.
Women’s sports fandom more ‘shallow’
Only 25% of those who follow women’s sport fans do so actively. Women’s sports audiences are also more siloed than those for men’s sports: more than 40% only follow one sport in which women compete in separate competitions from men. In contrast, three quarters of fans of men’s sport follow two or more.
The Secret Strategist is back, and has a plea to sponsors
Over on UP Yours, the guest blog:
Bad briefs have always been commonplace.
But, nowadays, there are more bad briefs than there are good ones.
The challenge isn’t the 80 pages of gobbledegook masquerading as, say, an RFP.
(Rights holders, agencies and media partners are well accustomed to wading through treacle).
It’s the lack of a clear and distinct ‘problem’ at the heart of the brief.
Or, more specifically, the business problem behind the brief.
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