FIFA's revolving door policy; Super League by stealth; Facebook's Meta mark-up; Karen Carney was right; StepUP to WePlay; FIFA plus and minus; Philip Larkin; Oscar Wilde;

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Apr 14, 2022

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Found: Drone footage of FIFA’s commercial office

Oscar Wilde: “To lose one Chief Commercial Officer may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose four looks like egotistical micro-management.”

The FIFA CCO Timeline via the medium of screenshots:

February 2016:

2. September 2016:

3. September 2019:

4. July 2022: From SportsPro:

5. March 2022: Madati fronts comms around FIFA’s big new Crypto.com deal.

6. April 2022: From Martin Ross in SportBusiness this morning:

FIFA+/-

There’s fun to be had trying to have strong opinions about the launch of FIFA+, the governing body’s new D2C play launched this week.

Fwiw, I’m liking where Tariq’s going with this:

tariq panja @tariqpanja

The roots of some of this can be found in the failed $25 billion sell off to SoftBank in 2018. Had that gone through, FIFA would have become a hugely different organisation. New competitions that could perhaps be sold direct to consumers on a platform that might resemble FIFA+

They fuck you up the Premier League, they don’t mean to but they do

Two literary references in the same newsletter... Credit @jondrytay

Super League by stealth

When the Super League broke cover on that Sunday night in April, the fans took to the streets.

It felt like a glorious moment for people power.

Billionaires begged forgiveness.

Academics wrote papers referencing new paradigms.

Now UEFA is back talking co-efficients and weighted arithmetic means, that favour big clubs over small.

It’s the Super League argument without the drama.

Does this make it harder to fight against?

Now and Then: Facebook

Alternative headline roulette: Meta Tax; Zuckerberg’s Mark-up; Open Seizure

Remember that video of Zuckerberg in the metaverse?

Turns out Facebook are gonna be Facebook, wherever they are.

Pranksy 📦 @pranksy

The 'pretty competitive' 47.5% sales fee for @Meta's planned #NFT platform is perhaps the greatest example of being completely and utterly out of touch with something that I have ever witnessed. #ZuckBux #Hopeless - article via @BusinessInsider

businessinsider.comMeta will charge creators fees of up to 47.5% to sell virtual wares in its metaverseMeta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have previously criticised Apple for charging developers a 30% fee for in-app purchases via the App Store.

It’s almost like the ultimate techno-neocapitalists haven’t bought in to the whole web3 hopey-changey ethos after all.

"If a creator sells an item for $1.00, then the Meta Quest Store fee would be $0.30 and the Horizon Platform fee would be $0.17 (25% of the remainder), leaving $0.53 for the Creator before any applicable taxes," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider.

Now and Then: Leeds comms and Karen Carney

Now: Leeds Utd’s new manager Jesse Marsch discussed the issue of tired players, injuries and the training methods of previous coach Marcelo Bielsa.

'These players were overtrained. It led to them being physically, mentally, psychologically and emotionally in a difficult place to recover from week to week, from game to game….'From afar, you could see it in their faces,' Marsch continued on talkSPORT about the struggling side he inherited. 'You could see in the 15th minute that some of them were already at the max. That shouldn't be the case.

Leeds United Live @liveleedsunited

🤔👇 Jesse Marsch on Marcelo Bielsa's training methods... #LUFC

Then: Leeds’ social team (and owner) start a misogynistic pile on

Jan 2021: Speaking after Leeds’s 5-0 victory over West Bromwich Albion Karen Carney, an England international with 144 caps to her name, commented on the winning side’s intense playing style and suggested it could cause fatigue over the course of a season.

“I actually think they got promoted [last season] because of Covid, in terms of it gave them a bit of respite,” she said.

Taking an 18-second clip of Carney’s remarks from the Amazon Prime Video broadcast, Leeds’s social media team then posted it on Twitter. They added the caption: “‘Promoted because of Covid’ Won the league by 10 points”. They also tagged Amazon on their message, but Carney’s face was the central image.

Up in the director’s box, Leeds United’s owner Andrea Radrizzani saw this and retweeted the clip a couple of times.

What happened next was depressingly obvious. Karen Carney’s Twitter account was trolled by hundreds of anonymous Leeds fans hurling vile misogynistic abuse, to the extent that Carney later deleted her Twitter account, cutting off her valuable communication platform enabling her to talk directly to her 67000 followers.

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