Staying in the problem; Amaechi and Bhandari on racism; Rick Parry is a Maoist, pass it on; Trickle down economics vs the useful rich; Why unions are 2022's hot sports biz trend; Lee Elder RIP
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The staying in the problem problem
Aka, learning vs moving on.
From this week’s UP podcast with Sanjay Bhandari and John Amaechi.
The context was Yorkshire CCC, Aseem Rafiq and racism.
The general vibe was one of scepticism.
Specifically, the ability of Yorkshire CCC, the ECB and other stakeholders to turn this moment in to substantive and lasting change.
The Rafiq moment is an opportunity to listen and learn, in a scientific way. To gather rich data, recognise barriers that settle ‘like permafrost’ in every organisation over time.
This is really hard to do in practice as there’s enormous incentive to move on, and be seen to move on, to get ahead of the story, control the narrative, to move to the neutrality of a clean slate.
Sanjay Bhandari: Whenever you get an issue like this, the temptation is to jump into the solution. And that's because we're so uncomfortable with the conversation, and race is the most taboo subject, right? Of all the isms, people would much rather be called a misogynist or they'd much rather be called homophobic than be called a racist.
It has the strongest stigma attached to that word. And so what that means is people feel uncomfortable. And so they've jumped very, very quickly to the solution.
The term institutional racism is now applied to Yorkshire CCC.
Ian Leslie has a problem with the imprecision of that term.
Our most toxic debates exist as a kind of fog of imprecise terminology and unexamined assertions, in which one or both sides cannot even be said to be wrong, since it’s never clear what they’re arguing.
Recently, the controversial Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson appeared on Question Time, and Twitter had one of its meltdowns.
Peterson put the word ‘racism’ in to air quotes. This suggested he didn’t think racism was a thing. But this was a very partial reading, according to Leslie.
It was clear Peterson knows nothing about the Rafiq story and hasn’t bothered to get briefed on it, and that is annoying. But it doesn’t mean what he says here is stupid or mad, as you’d assume from the reaction of the audience, panelists - even the presenter- and Twitter. He has at least half a point, half more than a lot of guests on QT.
Peterson is right when he says that as you move up the abstraction chain, your arguments become more “low resolution” - increasingly fuzzy to the point of meaninglessness. He is right that terms like ‘institutional/systemic racism’ get thrown around without people being clear about what they mean. And crucially, he is right to suggest that moving to a loftier level of abstraction can be a way of avoiding the difficult stuff of engaging with actual problems in actual places at actual times.
RIP Lee Elder
Elder was the first black man to play at The Masters in 1975.
From The Courage of Lee Elder, Sports Illustrated:
For months the hate mail had said he would never make it to this day in April 1975. Watch your step when you get to Augusta, other letter writers warned him. There will be blood. To be safe, he had rented two houses in town and kept moving between them.
I agree with Gary Van Sickle. The cynicism of The Masters tournament committee still rankles; elevating Elder to ‘official starter’ this year felt like a tactical response to BLM rather than the historic moment he deserved.
Left Right Left Right pt 1: Trickle down economics v Rick Parry’s Bolshevik tendencies
The Premier League team owners were never going to like the Tracey Crouch review.
But their line of attack has been revealing.
In his programme notes for Tuesday night’s clash against Crystal Palace, Leeds Utd chief exec Angus Kinnear’s wrote that the government’s fan-led review of football had elements of “Maoist collective agriculturalism”. The rest of the piece read like a Warren Buffett investor note.
Football is a private sector business and has flourished that way. Enforcing upon football a philosophy akin to Maoist collective agriculturalism (which students of ‘The Great Leap Forward’ will know culminated in the greatest famine in history) will not make the English game fairer, it will kill the competition which is its very lifeblood….
Teams further down the pyramid do not need their means artificially inflated, they need to live within them.
On Talksport, Villa CEO Christian Purslow made the same point with his ‘Tesco v the corner shop’ analogy.
Purslow and Kinnear are pushing trickle down economics, a theory beloved by rich people since the Thatcher Reagan era, mainly because it lets them off a big hook: that cutting taxes on rich people will encourage them to work and invest more, ultimately creating jobs and benefiting everyone.
In reality, this increases inequality over time, while study after study suggest it not having any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.
But it’s a catchy term which is usefully imprecise, bracketing all rich people as wealth creators - ie useful - and all poor people as parasites sucking from the teat of the state. The difficulty is designing policies that distinguish between those rich people who generate wealth for the rest of us and rich people who hoard their money off shore.
It just might be coincidence that the early opposition to IREF comes from clubs in the group we might uncharitably call the undeserving rich; defined as those Premier League clubs who benefit from the media rights of the collective, but whose sudden absence via relegation would not register on the market price for those rights.
Transpose this line of argument to the recent US rights bonanza: would NBC have paid less than £2billion were Villa, Leeds and Crystal Palace replaced with Middlesbrough, Birmingham and QPR?
I’d wager no, and I suspect Angus Kinnear, Christian Purslow and Steve Parrish would agree with me. So their solution is to move from the specific to the abstract, and wage culture war, hoping to catch the ear of Tracey Crouch’s fellow Tory devotees of trickle down who’ll quietly move to scupper IREF as ‘anti competitive’.
Capitalists hate competition, which is why the NFL looks like it does. Day one of investor school is to find or create sustainable monopolies. “We buy barriers (to entry), said Charlie Munger, “even one competitor is enough to ruin a business running on small margins.”
Closed leagues are the ultimate sporting moat, but one that’s proved culturally unattainable, even for a generation of Reagan-worshipping American club owners.
Parachute payments have evolved in to the next best thing. They are in effect a bail out for clubs - such as Leeds, Villa or Palace, say - that may sometimes need to be protected from the cliff edge risk of relegation, otherwise known as competition.
Compare Angus Kinnear’s programme notes with the views of that infamous Maoist revolutionary, the EFL Chair Rick Parry, talking on UP 183 a couple of months ago.
Angus Kinnear: “Redistribution of wealth will simply favour the lowest common denominator, clubs who excel in recruitment, player development or commercial enterprise will be punished, while less capable ownership will be rewarded for incompetence.
And here’s Chairman Parry:
Everything flows from redistribution in our view. What we need is fundamental redistribution and enhanced cost controls. We have decent cost controls in the EFL. We need to enhance them. We need to change them. Clubs are willing to do that. Once we have those two things, then we have 72 sustainable clubs almost overnight.
Further reading: Elon Musk is a dick
Left Right Left Right pt2: Unionisation is 2022’s hot trend
More than 800 Activision Blizzard employees are calling for CEO Bobby Kotick to resign in an open letter following revelations in the Wall Street Journal.
Via Axis: "The information that has come to light about his behaviors and practices in the running of our companies runs counter to the culture and integrity we require of our leadership — and directly conflicts with the initiatives started by our peers," the petition continues.
Activision Blizzard has yet to acknowledge the existence of ABK Workers Alliance, the growing collective of employees pushing for better conditions within the company.
The company’s 3900 employees are left with a familiar dilemma.
"We can't really afford to just say, I'm willing to put my entire job on the line, or be blacklisted from the industry as a whole in order to support the union effort...a lot of us are living paycheck to paycheck."
A union for fighters
Previously discussed with Jennifer McClearen on UP 171, MMA fighters are seeking to organise themselves. Last year, 80% of fighters surveyed by The Athletic said they would support forming a union to collectively bargain with promoters and “would be in favor of organizing with their peers in a way comparable to the professional unions and associations in other sports”.
This won’t be easy given Endeavour-owned UFC’s aggressive approach to political lobbying.
From The Ringer: Of course, there is no fighters’ union in the UFC. The company keeps the lion’s share of the estimated profits ($700 million in 2017)—about 85 percent according to most estimates—and president Dana White wields dictatorial power over UFC fight cards, cutting contracted fighters at his discretion while barring them from competing for other MMA outfits.
The Athletic has more on the political axis between Dana White and Donald Trump.
Until recently, one major thing the UFC had in its favor was a close personal relationship between UFC President Dana White and President Donald Trump. White campaigned for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and spoke in support of him at the last two Republican conventions. The UFC also produced a video praising Trump as the “combatant in chief,” only to remove that video from its Fight Pass streaming service in the days following a violent insurrection led by a pro-Trump mob in Washington D.C.
See also: How Labour Unions Changed Pro Sport
Adtech ruined webs 1 and 2, no reason to suggest it won’t ruin web3
Pick Guru: An Unofficial Quid Pro Quo*
From the people who brought you StatsPerform, DAZN and Pitch International, comes PickGuru, a ‘social gaming disruptor’ that’s just secured an enterprise investment of £2.6 million.
WhatsUP member Oli Slipper leads PickGuru’s enterprise team formed by Paul Cobley the ex founder of Matulo Software as CTO and former Sportsquake and Stats Perform financial lead Paul Watkins as COO.
Pitch International founders Jon Owen and Jon Youell and Masomo Games, alongside Adam Perrin, co-Founder of Masomo Games and ex-brand director at Paddy Power.
“With a concept built and refined by some of the most successful sports entrepreneurs in the UK, PickGuru will allow users to test their knowledge to win big cash pots for small stakes in nationwide leagues or compete with their friends in mini-leagues,” – read PickGuru’s press statement.
Completing its successful seed round, PickGuru secures a £6 million valuation, as the business is backed by investors including Paddy Power (Ex-Communications Director, Paddy Power), Simon Wear (Founder and Chairman of Global Cycling Network), Oliver and Alexander Kent-Braham (Founders of recent unicorn, Marshmallow) and Will Neale (Founder of Grabyo).
Small Print:
*Full disclosure: Pick Guru is The Unofficial Partner Official Party Partner (Christmas), on account of them coughing for the bar tab at Ho Ho Ho Etc, our private xmas do, formerly known as The Unofficial Christmas Knees UP.
**Please note: Pick Guru’s rights give them exclusive use of the words ‘Christmas’, ‘Party’ and ‘warm Liebfraumilch’ for the duration of the festive period, as defined by the Bible, pages 2 to 8.