Free Market Sports
Malcolm Gladwell ponders the idea of free market sports leagues:
Or how about eliminating the draft altogether? I’m at least half-serious here. Think about it. Suppose we let every college player apply for and receive job offers in the same way that, oh, every other human being on the planet does. That doesn’t mean that everyone goes to L.A. and New York, because you still have the constraints of the cap. It does mean, though, that both players and teams would have to make an affirmative case for each other’s services. So you trade for Steve Nash or Jason Kidd, because they make you instantly attractive to every mobile big man coming out of college. Instead of asking the boring question — which team is going to be lucky enough to draft Derrick Rose? — we ask the far more interesting question: Which team, out of every team in the league, should Derrick Rose play for? [...]
The bigger point here is that what consistently drives me crazy about big-time sports is the assumption that sports occupy their own special universe, in which the normal rules of the marketplace and human psychology don’t apply. That’s how you get the idea of a reverse-order draft, which violates every known rule of human behavior.
I would go further than this. My understanding is that in Europe, soccer leagues operate without all this active labor market policy aimed at driving parity. Teams can basically do what they want in terms of hiring personnel. But at the same time, the teams really need to compete against one another. A team isn’t permitted to just monopolize a large media market by planting its flag down and saying “I forbid you to move anywhere near my franchise.”
Right now, the New York City Designated media area contains 6.5 percent of households. LA has 5 percent. Chicago has 3 percent. Philadelphia has 2.6 percent. Dallas, San Francisco, Boston, and Atlanta all have about 2.1 percent. And things taper off from there. But considering that New York City has a media market three times the size of large cities like Dallas and Atlanta (and especially considering that it’s nearby to the Hartford media market with 0.9 percent of the population) why doesn’t New York have three baseball teams instead of two? There’s no iron law written that the number of teams in a given area should be directly proportionate to its population. But it seems like a reasonable strategy to try. Except in baseball there is an iron law saying you can’t try this.
I think our sports would be a lot more interesting with more free movement of teams, more freedom to negotiate salary arrangements, more freedom to sign whichever young players you can persuade to join you, promotion and relegation of teams that can’t cut the mustard, etc. The free market, just like they have in Europe.
116 Responses to “Free Market Sports”
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May 16th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Malcolm Gladwell is our deepest thinker about everything related to sports. Consider his recent New Yorker article about how underdogs should full court press, for which one of his major examples was the 1996 U. of Kentucky team that had only 9 future NBA players on it. I’m surprised he didn’t mention other underdogs who used the full court press, like John Wooden’s UCLA teams with Kareem and Walton, or Red Auerbach’s teams with Bill Russell.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Could we be seeing the first baby-steps in this direction with the Buffalo Bills playing “home” games in Toronto? Perhaps in the future, more smaller market teams will be splitting time between two or more cities.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I live in a small market city. The only reason my teams survive is because professional sports leagues have embraced socialism.
Now I must be deprived of my sports teams because the Free Market must be served.
Is this a progressive blog? My world has turned upside down.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Clearly, the NFL should hire Malcolm Gladwell to restructure it fundamentally, to get it out of its current state of impoverishment where practically nobody pays attention to the NFL. The guys who run the NFL are obviously too low IQ to have ever thought about things like not running the draft in reverse order and not rigging the schedule to promote parity. They need a giant brain like Malcolm’s to show them what they are doing wrong.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
RE: Steve,
I don’t think any team with kareem, walton or bill russell was ever an underdog or for that matter any team coached by wooden or auerbach.
Re: Matt’s post
Do you really want a league similar to the one’s in Europe. As a member of the fandom community that does not happen to support a team hailing from NYC or LA or to support a team controlled by some billionaire a la Portland, I am visciously in support of salary capped systems that strive for parity – furthermore, the degradation of the different european leagues is apparent by the fact that they have had to throw their full support behind european leagues because there is absolutely no competition in the league of any country. Parity is what makes the NFL consistently the most entertaining sport on television.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
The bigger point here is that what consistently drives me crazy about big-time sports is the assumption that sports occupy their own special universe, in which the normal rules of the marketplace and human psychology don’t apply.
The whole point of sports, games and human playfulness in general is to make little toy universes and see what happens.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
my initial quick glance failed to notice steve’s obvious irony – i apologize and I second his second ironic post about the pallorous state of the nfl – what an incompetently run league, if only they would take lessons from the premiership and get russian billionaires to buy championships
May 16th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
But considering that New York City has a media market three times the size of large cities like Dallas and Atlanta (and especially considering that it’s nearby to the Hartford media market with 0.9 percent of the population) why doesn’t New York have three baseball teams instead of two?
Size of total population doesn’t necessarily mean those people will be fans who will pay to attend games.
As cities/states are increasingly unwilling to pony up $500million to build arena/stadium to attract teams and I don’t see too many team owners willing to foot the bill, most teams are going to play in existing markets -with fan base and infrastructure.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Tyler writes:
RE: Steve,
I don’t think any team with kareem, walton or bill russell was ever an underdog or for that matter any team coached by wooden or auerbach.
Are you daring to question the omniscient sports wisdom of Malcolm Gladwell? If Gladwell says that the full court press is the right strategy for underdogs and if the Celtics won 11 of 13 championships while pressing and the Bruins won 10 of 12 while pressing, then they must have been underdogs every year. To say otherwise is to doubt the insight of Malcolm Gladwell.
Don’t you know they have fact-checkers at The New Yorker? So, everything Gladwell says is 100% verified.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Well, I do support three teams for New York. One for Long Island, one for New York City, and one for Westchester County. Right now there is no MLB or NFL team for Long Island, not to mention Westchester County, despite the fact that the Island is probably one of the richest parts of the country (the Mets don’t count).
May 16th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Yeah, this makes no sense. Euro soccer leagues are utterly boring – the EPL has had a grand total of three different teams win the league in the last 10 years, Serie A is won by some iteration of Juve, AC Milan, Inter and Roma every year. The Spanish league is even less competitive; Real Madrid or Barcelona win the title every year with the occasional intrusion of Valencia. So while these leagues might be closer to some golden standard of free marketism, the product on the field is demonstrably less competitive and exciting than more socialistic American major leagues.
Promotion/Relegation is a neat sounding thing, but really, only hockey and baseball (and maybe soccer) have the kind of minor league depth necessary to have a robust system. Our #1 and #3 most popular sports train their players in the collegiate system and it’s unclear how you could ever really transition those teams to professional leagues.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I believe it was in a book by famed sports economist Andrew Zimblast several years ago that I read a really significant stat with respect to the free-market and sports teams. Specifically, the data was on the correlation between team payroll and winning percentage. Among the American sports, there was about the spread you’d expect with the capped sports (NFL and NBA) showing more parity than the uncapped (especially MLB, but also pre-lockout NHL), but all the correlations were relatively low, with the range, IIRC, being something like 0.10-0.25. European soccer leagues, on the other hand, were in a completely different stratosphere, with correlations north of 0.5.
Simply put, if you care about parity, or the impact of team spending on winning, the completely free market is NOT the way to go.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
This point is well-taken; it should probably be acknowledged that a “free market” in sports is generally consistent with the idea that good teams that perform well should be rewarded for their good performance, and that the goal of a sports league is to promote the victory of good teams over bad ones. This goal, however, is completely inconsistent with the extremely small-c conservative goals of US sports leagues, namely, (1) fostering a sense of community identity by binding teams tightly to their historic homes, and star players tightly to the teams that make their name, and (2) making sure individual matches are “good” and “entertaining,” at the expense of being “rewarding” or “decisive,” keeping the handicapping lines relatively close and giving everyone the dream of one day seeing their little hometown team win the world series.In the end, Americans are generally very libertarian and capitalist, but they don’t let this get in the way of their hatred of the Yankees.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
The NHL’s current, desperate effort to keep the failing Phoenix Coyotes in Phoenix, contra Jim Balsillie’s effort to move them to Hamilton, Ont. (in Maple Leafs territory, but at the edge of a metropolitan region with, oh, 7 or 8 million people, most of them hockey mad) is a good example of why such a ‘free market’ is necessary.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
@Corey: “Our #1 and #3 most popular sports train their players in the collegiate system and it’s unclear how you could ever really transition those teams to professional leagues.”
You’ll never see a real NFL minor league system, mostly due to the high injury risk in the sport, but don’t think for a second that David Stern wouldn’t throw the NCAA under the bus and turn the NBDL into a real minor league if he could actually turn a profit on the enterprise. Whether or not he can get the ownership support necessary to do so remains to be seen, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Seriously, when Gladwell writes:
“The bigger point here is that what consistently drives me crazy about big-time sports is the assumption that sports occupy their own special universe, in which the normal rules of the marketplace and human psychology don’t apply.”
Gladwell is quite right. There’s much to learn about the real world from sports.
I’m always amused when people start off complaints about Gladwell by saying, “I really like most of what he writes, but his latest article is on a special field of knowledge of mine and it’s really not up to his usual standard.”
The reason Gladwell writes such utter bilge about sports is not that he knows less about sports than about the real world, but because he writes utter bilge about almost everything.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
because he writes utter bilge about almost everything
In this sense he’s a lot like you, except that he’s a multimillionaire and you’re just a racist crank.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
“My understanding is that in Europe, soccer leagues operate without all this active labor market policy aimed at driving parity.”
And as a result, if you’re not one of the four great teams in your league, your season is over with the first match every year; the only drama is whether you’ll be relegated to a lower division or not, or how far you’ll get in the League or UEFA Cups. The most absurd example would be the Scottish Premier League, where one of two Glaswegian teams—Celtic and Rangers—have won the championship every year going back to 1985. If it works for fans there, great, but it’s not what I want to see in sports here.
Beyond which, what is with this obsession with applying free-market principles to a totally artificial field of competition? By Gladwell’s logic, why shouldn’t the Yankees be able to change the rules of baseball to their advantage when they’re playing at home? Hey, if the other teams don’t like it, let them find another stadium to play in. Free market, baby!
May 16th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Sports do occupy their own special place in the universe. They teach the uber-competitive about rules and fairness.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Compared with the rest of the world, US major sports does look really screwy. After all, what other sports system punishes the most successful teams with tougher schedules (NFL) and later picks of next year’s intake of players?
Not only that, but stars of the multi-billion dollar college sports programs get a pittance in compensation (a scholarship) for all their hard work and are expressly forbidden from cashing in on their success in any way, save the hope that they might play for a professional team one day.
Is it really fair for a star college player to help his college rake in millions of dollars a season only to have a career ending injury before any chance of making any money as a professional?
May 16th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Sometimes I wonder why Gladwell and Yglesias seem so outraged by the state of things generally. From where I sit, there are a lot of well managed and successful industries and institutions, and a smaller number of troubled or failing ones. But apparently, if you believe this blog, there’s no system or institution in the country that couldn’t benefit from a little of Yglesian and Gladwellian tweaking. They’re both like mad scientists who failed elementary chemistry and had to turn their busybody passions to punditry. Overhaul the NFL! Build suburbs in Florida swamps! Redesign the toilet!
God help us if they’d grown up to be geneticists.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
There’s an epistemological aspect to this question. The things we’re most interested in are the things that are hardest to predict. For example, tere’s no betting market on when the next solar eclipse will be. Being able to predict solar eclipses is a remarkable achievement of the human race, but it’s not interesting because it’s not uncertain. Similarly, nobody bets on whether school achievement test scores will be higher in the future in Beverly Hills or Compton. It’s an important question, but it’s not interesting because we all know the answers already.
In contrast, there is a huge amount of interest, as expressed in money wagered, in the NFL, in part because the NFL’s management rigs the system in various ways to make outcomes highly uncertain.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
In this sense he’s a lot like you, except that he’s a multimillionaire and you’re just a racist crank.
To be fair, Steve Sailer’s thinking (from what I’ve seen posted here) is always linear, although I almost always disagree with his conclusions. Gladwell’s general method of telling an engaging anecdote and then extrapolating a completely arbitrary generalization from it is just really f*cking annoying. Sailer is at least sort of intellectually honest in his own way.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
…and let me add, I am 100% in agreement with Sailer’s comments in this thread.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
The really interesting question about market failure in a free market system is Malcolm Gladwell’s enormous financial triumph, both as a writer and as a motivational speaker at sales conferences.
No text journalist in America makes a fool of himself more regularly than Gladwell, but nobody (that I’m aware of, television personalities excepted) makes more money from being a print journalist.
The University of Chicago economics department should call an emergency all-hands-on-deck meeting to come up with a rationale for explaining that free market outcome.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Matt, do you know that much about European Soccer? Or anything really? Listen to what tyler said above. The same few teams dominate the national leagues and only really get worty competition at the european level. In fact, while I lived in Germany a clever progressive wrote a piece arguing to institute our draft system on progressive grounds (and to have a more interesting soccer league).
May 16th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Yea, because the NFL really needs improvement.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
In contrast, there is a huge amount of interest, as expressed in money wagered, in the NFL, in part because the NFL’s management rigs the system in various ways to make outcomes highly uncertain.
Well, the whole reason NCAA football is such a big money business is because NFL is junk. At least NCAA has an element of rationality behind it: richer, better schools = more wins. What is the basic element of rationality underlining NFL? None. Every year it’s some random idiot team who wins, and I just scratch my head. It just throws me off.
Have you ever seen horse betting? Horse betting has more rationality than NFL, for God’s sakes.
In sport, as in war, and in life, parity is piece of shit. As Nietzsche would have said, parity is for losers. Survival of the fittest. The triumph of the strong and glorious, over the weak and the inglorious. That is the ethos of war, of life, and that should be the ethos of sport, which more than anything else is harmless war-play. It used to be said of rugby that it was war without the bullets.
Let’s unleash the noble savage within the athlete.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I suppose one solution to the problem Matt mentions of some cities being underrepresented in sports is to have each sport’s North American governing body (i.e. USA Football, USA Hockey, or Hockey Canada) sponsor a North American championship of any and all teams that want to enter, amateur, semi-pro and professional. I’m vaguely aware of something similar in Euro countries (isn’t there an “FA Cup” in England?).
So if an area like Toronto wants another hockey team, there’d be an opportunity for any beer league team there to take on the pros. Obviously 99 times out of 100 they’d get blown out, but that one win could translate into pretty serious attention and dollars for the players on that team.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Non-basketball centric sports blogging by Matt not good.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
The really interesting question about market failure in a free market system is Malcolm Gladwell’s enormous financial triumph, both as a writer and as a motivational speaker at sales conferences.
No text journalist in America makes a fool of himself more regularly than Gladwell, but nobody (that I’m aware of, television personalities excepted) makes more money from being a print journalist.
The University of Chicago economics department should call an emergency all-hands-on-deck meeting to come up with a rationale for explaining that free market outcome.
Come on, Steve. Look at the utter hacks writing for the NY Times and other major newspapers. Look at all the talking heads on TV (of both parties). They all get paid massive amounts of money for doing awful work.
What’s the logical conclusion? That the American public, by and large, are exceedingly dumb and desires and rewards vacuous people like these over real investigative journalism. And that, my friend, is race-blind.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Is this a joke?
May 16th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
To be fair, Steve Sailer’s thinking (from what I’ve seen posted here) is always linear, although I almost always disagree with his conclusions. Gladwell’s general method of telling an engaging anecdote and then extrapolating a completely arbitrary generalization from it is just really f*cking annoying. Sailer is at least sort of intellectually honest in his own way.
Heh. Gladwell’s formula of “rotate between story about sports, story about war, story about academic researcher, while making dumb analogies and drawing spurious conclusions” in every article he writes is incredibly annoying.
But another difference is that despite this Gladwell actually makes for a good read, while Sailer is just annoying as hell. I mean, am I really going to have wade through 50% Sailer comments if I want to read this thread? He’s not even talking to anybody. You’re right that he does think and argue linearly though.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
The idea that soccer leagues in Europe are better because of the free market is nonsense. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. How fans of the English Premier League long for “socialised” sport.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
In sport, as in war, and in life, parity is piece of shit. As Nietzsche would have said, parity is for losers. Survival of the fittest. The triumph of the strong and glorious, over the weak and the inglorious.
I mean, theoretically, yes. But the fact remains that the people running these leagues are interested above all in the bottom line. And when 32 teams all have fans, if 28 of those teams never have a chance at success because they’re perennial losers you’re going to have less money coming into the league. Cities where all the teams are usually bad (my Atlanta comes to mind) generally have very tepid fan bases, which isn’t good for sports.
Anyway, I’d hold NCAA basketball up as a shining example of your theory more than football anyway. In basketball every team, no matter how bad, at least has a chance of winning the championship. And even the bad conference champions get their chance to upset a major team and get their day in the sun. NCAA football, on the other hand, starts with half the conferences having no possible chance even if you go undefeated (see Utah, the best of many). And often times how you finish in the polls is in part based on where you start. I guess that goes along with the conservative logic as to why we should eliminate the estate tax.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Well, the whole reason NCAA football is such a big money business is because NFL is junk.
Also, the NFL to my knowledge is by far the most popular and most money-making sport in America.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Stop with the myth of parity in the NFL. There is not much parity. Every team has the same chance to become elite, but that isn’t the same thing. We usually see more or less than the same group of teams on top, the same on the bottom, and the same in the middle that can go either way depending on injuries, schedules, and luck.
Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, New England, and to a lesser extent Philadelphia are the class of the NFL year in and year out. They may not always win the championship, but they are usually right there barring injuries. These teams have been on top for a decade, more or less for some.
Similarly, there is a group of completely inept franchises that includes Detroit, Oakland, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Cincinnati. They suck. They almost always suck. It doesn’t matter that they pick high every year.
Then of course there is the great mass of mediocrity, for whom if things break right they can have a strong year. But they are just as likely to be bad. Tennessee, Jacksonville, Baltimore, Washington etc etc etc.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Yeah, this makes no sense either. New England didn’t make the playoffs last year and Indy was also a disappointment. And yet, one of your “mediocre” teams was in the AFC championship last year, the other finished the season as the first seed in the AFC, and one team you left off the “inept” list won the NFC and played in the Super Bowl.
In the NFL, in any given season, any team can rise to prominence. Could any of us have predicted Atlanta’s playoff run this year? Or Arizona’s NFC championship? Or the fact that the Ravens went from one of the worst teams in the NFL to one of the best? That just doesn’t happen in foreign soccer leagues.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Let’s unleash the noble savage within the athlete.
Quoted for WTF. You do realise, Miley, that you’re going to be the runt of the freshman bankster class wherever you go, right?
May 16th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
If Oprah was on the Supreme Court, then maybe we could get the NFL draft declared unconstitutional.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Let’s see…
In the English Premier League, 5 of the 20 teams are in London and 4 are in Greater Manchester. Not only has Manchester United won 11 of the 18 championships the Premiership has had since it came into existence in 1992, which has only been won by 4 different teams, but if you look at the past 12 years, only 4 different teams have managed to come in as high as 2nd place.
Meanwhile, in Major League Baseball, the existence of a team is almost perfectly correlated with the population of a Metropolitan area*, and the last 18 World Series have had 12 different champions, with only the Yankees having as many as four (The Blue Jays, Marlins, and Red Sox have each won twice). Over the past 12 years, 17 different teams have participated in the WS (i.e., they’ve come in 1st or 2nd place).
So we can see that the two systems create very different results. But how on earth can it be argued that the British system creates better results? From Wikipedia: In May 2008, Newcastle United manager Kevin Keegan said …, “This league is in danger of becoming one of the most boring but great leagues in the world.”
*The 23 most populous metropolitan areas in the continental USA have at least one team, and the only other US team is in Kansas City, the 25th-largest metro area (#24 is Sacramento, which is within easy driving distance of SF-Oakland). The five metro areas with two teams correlate exactly with the five most populous metro areas.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Slightly different issue: Another free market aspect of European soccer leagues is the meritocracy. If a team is good enough to move up from the ‘minors’ to the ‘majors’ they can. I’m thinking of the soccer leagues where small town teams can move up and down the different divisions (1st division, 2nd division, etc.) That can’t happen here.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Corey
I specifically said that in a particular season, events happen that can cause a team to deviate from their normal performance. But that, in general, the same teams stay on top and the same teams stay on the bottom.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Anyway, I’d hold NCAA basketball up as a shining example of your theory more than football anyway.
Well, check out college lacrosse. DUKE and JHU all the way, baby!
And in any case, NCAA basketball is almost always UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, Maryland, and (more recently) BC. Which makes it actually realistic, and the strong wins and the weak loses.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Sport is war without the guns. That we should be subsidising the weak is and preventing their deserved, and habitual defeat is, frankly, ludicrous.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
“Well, the whole reason NCAA football is such a big money business is because NFL is junk.”
I know—the NFL wishes it could make the money that the NCAA does.
As for the fairness/rationality argument: the NFL is so unfair that the teams that win the most games play in a playoff against each other, where the best teams get to progress to the next rounds and eventually the championship. Meanwhile, the Nietzchean juggernaut that is college football is determined not by mere “wins” and “losses,” but by a poll system in which a team can win all of its games and yet have no chance to win the championship. How Randian!
I like NCAA football, but you know less about this than you do about anything else, it seems.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
let me just say for basketball, i fully embrace the uberteam theory: the great, entertaining teams always have an absurd embarrassment of riches.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Take a look at the NBA 08-09 team salaries and the regular season winning percentages. If you cut out the top 3 (Knicks, Mavs, Cavs), the correlation looks pretty close to linear with a lot of scatter (about 11 games rms). The slope is such that an extra win costs, on average, about 700K.
The presence of a correlation does vary by season…there’s basically no evidence of one for 06-07, for example.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
I hesitate to disagree with Steve Sailer, but his first comment is off. The reason Alcindor went to play for John Wooden was because Wooden had established himself as a winning coach with two NCAA titles with teams that had Gail Goodrich, Walt Hazzard, and Keith Erickson, but no one taller than six foot five. Those teams pressed all the time, and beat good teams like Duke with Jack Marin and Jeff Mullins and two six ten post players to become champions. A lot of the point of Alcindor picking UCLA (a surprise at the time) was the thought that if Wooden could win with that kind of a team and press what could he do with a genuinely good big man. (Also the issue that while there are some unpleasant things about Wooden he simply isn’t a racist and Alcindor was eager not to be treated like a freak because of his size or his race.)
By the way, as someone who used to play catch in the street in front of his with Y A Tittle when I was a kid, let me just say that the current version of the NFL is unwatchable.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
yea, uh matt… the soccer leagues in Europe are boring due to their lack of competition. Arsenal, Man U, Liverpool and Chelsea in England… Barcelona and Real Madrid in La Liga… AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventus in Serie A… it never changes
May 16th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Oh, and for hockey — the paucity of Canadian teams relative to its popularity there is entirely a function of the free market, as owners determined that they could make more money playing in Phoenix instead of Winnipeg, even though hardly anybody in Phoenix cares about hockey. If there were any justice in this world (i.e., more socialism in sports), half of the NHL would be in Canada and the other half would be in the U.S., almost entirely in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest.
May 16th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
soccer leagues operate without all this active labor market policy aimed at driving parity.
The major North American sports leagues have long promoted the draft as some sort of parity creating device, but the reality is that it has long served primarily as an instrument for suppressing salaries (by eliminating bidding between teams).
~
And Myles, go take your ranting fascist fantasies over to Stormfront, where you belong.
May 16th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
If there were any justice in this world (i.e., more socialism in sports), half of the NHL would be in Canada and the other half would be in the U.S.
Actually, the NHL is currently preventing the operation of a free market, by both prohibiting the establishment of another team in Toronto (which could likely support at least 3), and preventing the relocation of the Phoenix team to Hamilton.
It is entirely baffling to me. At the moment, the NHL has propped up the Phoenix franchise, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, in addition to providing a number of the other weak (unsupported) southern teams like Atlanta, Nashville and Tampa through revenue sharing. If you’re the owner of a profitable NHL franchise, why would you want part of your profits going to markets that aren’t supporting a team, *instead* of allowing teams to go to places where they would be a net positive to the NHL balance sheet?
By way of further example: Jim Balsilie, the owner of RIM (maker of Blackberry), has offered $212.5M for the Pheonix team on the condition that he be allowed to move it to Hamilton (where it will prosper). Phoenix has lost $73M over the last 3 years – it’s so bad that the NHL has been bailing it out to such an extent that it currently claims it *owns* Phoenix. Rather than take Balsilie’s money to the bank, the NHL is instead promoting Jerry Reinsdorf’s conditional offer of $130M to keep it in Phoenix. Is this nuts or what?
May 16th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Right, and by and large, those events don’t happen in Euro soccer leagues. That’s why we say American sports have more parity, better competition and a more entertaining overall product than those leagues.
May 16th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
@Myles
And in any case, NCAA basketball is almost always UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, Maryland, and (more recently) BC. Which makes it actually realistic, and the strong wins and the weak loses.
Maryland and BC? Maryland maybe 20-30 years ago, BC never was on the same level as the others. Today the third team would be UCONN.
If you get simple stuff like this wrong, it’s hard to view your posts on other topics as “informed opinion.”
May 16th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Champion’s League football also helps to destroy parity in the individual European leagues. Some citations were already given. But CL helps to concentrate the big money on those teams who participate. They can then go buy the big time players and then those teams again dominate domestically.
It would be more interesting to see a centrally controlled league. I recall Bain making noises about buying the NHL. I think it would be very interesting because it would acknowledge that the competition is less between individual markets in the sport, but for the dollars spent on entertainment. Movies, basketball, concerts, etc are what compete with hockey.
May 16th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
I think the Coyotes should probably go back to Canada somewhere, but I don’t think Bettman’s position is nuts, exactly – especially when you consider the overall growth of the sport. In Canada, any kid who wants to play hockey is likely playing hockey, and the vast majority of the athletic talent in that country turns into hockey players. Not so in Phoenix. There’s pretty good evidence that Gretzky’s trade to the Kings in the late 80’s led to, 20 years later, more prospects coming from Southern California. If even one of those kids turns out to be a Gretzky/Hull/Ovechkin-caliber player, it could be a huge boon to the league as very few elite NHL players are American, something that many say hinders this country’s acceptance of the sport.
So basically, hockey is not a growth market in Canada, as popular as it is. It is a growth market in Phoenix, and Atlanta, and Miami, and pretty much everywhere else in the US.
May 16th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Actually, the NHL is currently preventing the operation of a free market, by both prohibiting the establishment of another team in Toronto (which could likely support at least 3), and preventing the relocation of the Phoenix team to Hamilton.
I guess there’s socialism in the NHL, but not the right kind. It’s like they’re deliberately foisting hockey on areas of the U.S. that don’t want it in the hopes that somehow Bubba Goodolboy is going to grow up wanting to strap on a pair of skates instead of hitting the gridiron. It’s not going to happen.
Meanwhile, if they relocated a bunch of warm-weather teams to Canada and set up the divisions so that the Stanley Cup finals would always be U.S. vs. Canada, that would be pretty awesome.
May 16th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
“In this sense (Gladwell is) a lot like (Steve Sailer), except that (Gladwell is) a multimillionaire and (Sailer is) just a racist crank.”
Hear, hear!
Two guys who are wrong about pretty much everything walk into a bar…
May 16th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
That’s amazingly ignorant of the NFL preceding 2003. The Raiders were in the Super Bowl as recently as 2002 and has won 3 Super Bowls. San Francisco has won 5 Super Bowls and was a dominant team from the 80s until Steve Young’s retirement. Until Parcells joined, the Pats were largely incompetent as were the Colts from the post-Unitas days until Peyton Manning’s arrival. The Bengals were a great team in the late 80s as well.
If anything, there is a great deal of flux in the NFL between eras, largely predicated on stars and coaches. After Belichek and Brady leave, the Pats will likely return to the middle (or bottom) of the barrel again. If Matt Ryan continues to build on his success from his rookie seasons and becomes a dominant NFL quarterback and Smith solidifies their defense, lfv of 2015 will talk about how the NFL is boring because Atlanta is the class of the NFL year in and year out.
May 16th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Every commenter here pointing out lack of year-in-year-out competitiveness of european soccer is totally ignoring a key phrase in the OP:
That doesn’t mean that everyone goes to L.A. and New York, because you still have the constraints of the cap.
Top flight soccer is anticompetitive because AFAIK, none of the best leagues have imposed a salary cap. There are other forces at work, too. Lucrative Champs League games and the formation of the Premiership for the express purpose of NOT subsidizing lower-flight teams also screw the minnows.
May 16th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
The problem with European soccer could/will be solved when they finally bite the bullet and set up a full-fledged pan-European Premier League.
The current system is the equivalent of having a New York League consisting of the Yankees, Mets, Buffalo Bisons, Syracuse
Chiefs, Rochester Red Wings, and Binghamton Mets, with the Yankees and the New York Mets occasionally playing teams from other states in a knock-out competition.
May 16th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
European soccer is not boring! It’s the best! You get all the best players on the top teams. You see the best players play the best. You never have talented players doomed to bad teams for years and years. Bad teams just sell their world-class player for cash.
Promotion and relegation is also a great system. If your team is the 50th best team in the sport that means they’re competing for the championship in the 3rd best league and the chance to move up a league. Also, teams NEVER move cities. In America your small market teams are always in danger of leaving. I’d rather keep my team and have it play in the 2nd or 3rd level than have it leave forever.
That said, the whole corrupt foreign billionaire thing in English football is pretty unsavory.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Matt B.
That is a reasonable point, but Matt seems to ignore it to:
I think our sports would be a lot more interesting with more free movement of teams, more freedom to negotiate salary arrangements, more freedom to sign whichever young players you can persuade to join you, promotion and relegation of teams that can’t cut the mustard, etc. The free market, just like they have in Europe.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
The great thing about the British Premiership is if you are a fan of teams like Fulham, Hull City, or Portsmouth, you know there is always a chance your team could win it all! The wonders of the free market prevent a few select teams from dominating every other team in the league
This is much better than the US system where lowly poor teams like the Rays, Rockies, Royals or Marlins have absolutely no chance at ever beating the big teams like the Sox or Yankees.
The NFL is even worse. Why do we even HAVE a season when its readily apparent who will win year in and year out? The outcome is always SO predictable.
It is nothing like the great Premiership where even if you are a fan of a team like Chelsea, Arsenal, or Man Utd. you know there is always a huge risk of some small team coming up from out of no where to win it all.
OK. Sarcasm over. But seriously, what makes sports GREAT the hope that your team always has a chance and that no outcome is written in stone. One can hardly say that about the premiership where 4 teams have completely and utterly dominated all the others, who have zero chance of winning, for a very very long time.
I’ll take a sports league where the Rays can oust the Yankees any day. I’ll take a league where in only a couple years, a joke of a team like the Cleveland Cavs can come to dominate the game by being given the chance to draft one great player.
This is the very essence of the American Dream.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Two guys who are wrong about pretty much everything walk into a bar…
Petey’s lack of self awareness in this comment is almost charming.
Also, Gladwell has brown people in his ancestry and Sailer thinks he’s stupid. There’s a shocker.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
But the Premier League is fair! I mean, Man U will lose Ronaldo and they’ll probably have to settle with Zlatan as a replacement. Poor sods.
Structure US sports like European football, and you’ll get in each league four all-star teams and everyone else will be the Kansas City Royals.
Matt: (not that he reads his comments) Here’s another model for you that we don’t have here. Tevez at Man U isn’t owned by a club, he’s owned by an agent. He’s always a free agent in all important senses, and his playing at a club is contingent on some club paying his owners tons of cash for him. That’d be another wonderful thing to bring over from European football.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Structure US sports like European football, and you’ll get in each league four all-star teams and everyone else will be the Kansas City Royals.
I wouldn’t mind at all. Four super-loaded squads equipped to the max, with embarrassment of riches, would be far more entertaining to watch and much easier to cheer for than this current parity bullshit.
I am having a difficult time cheering on mediocrity here.
What would Nietzsche do?
May 16th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Eliminating the draft might work in every sport except baseball, where there is no salary cap, and players take time to really develop. a team that can simply purchase every prospect and then select the dream of the crop will create the most boring, unfair system on the planet.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
“European soccer is not boring! It’s the best! You get all the best players on the top teams. You see the best players play the best. You never have talented players doomed to bad teams for years and years. Bad teams just sell their world-class player for cash.”
There’s something to be said for allowing temporary concentrations of talent. But there’s a permanent stratification in European leagues. Nearly every team in the major leagues knows it never, ever will win its championship (nor the UEFA CL).
Allowing talent mobility that permits the existence of the 1990s Bulls is good. Allowing talent mobility that allows the permanent existence of a few 1990s Bulls and then a league full of also-rans is unsavory.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Myles: What about the idea of allowing temporary pooling of talent (like there is at Man U, say), and then after some time having some sort of redistribution whereby other clubs have a chance to build a Man U? There are various mechanisms for doing this, the most obvious being a redistribution of money away from better-performing teams after some period of time.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Myles SG:
I really don’t see what Nietzsche has to do with it.
Nietzsche was brilliant and wonderful. But he had a damn disgusting idea of ethics if you ask me, and who the fuck knows what he thought of sports.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
There are various mechanisms for doing this, the most obvious being a redistribution of money away from better-performing teams after some period of time.
Salary caps.
a team that can simply purchase every prospect and then select the dream of the crop will create the most boring, unfair system on the planet.
Unfair does not equal boring. In fact, in sport as in life and war, it is the reverse. The most entertaining things are also the most outrageous. And I am not the only person frustrated by great talent stalled in piece-of-shit teams in the middle of nowhere.
One team with 5 awesome players is more entertaining than 5 crappy shitty teams with one awesome player each.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Nietzsche was brilliant and wonderful. But he had a damn disgusting idea of ethics if you ask me, and who the fuck knows what he thought of sports.
He would have found the reverse order draft an abomination, in imposition of the value-system of the weak on the strong.
May 16th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
You might be interested in this article, which is something of a mirror image of Gladwell’s prescription. Steven Wells, who lives in the United States and has seen the advantages of the American “socialist” sports leagues, is calling for the British government to nationalize the premiere league. A cursory look over the comments section indicates that about 75% of the readers agree with him. With the same four teams getting richer and richer, the EPL is getting less and less competitive, resulting in not only less interesting sport, but also the financial endangerment of several old and storied teams, as they try and spend in order to keep up.
American sports, and really only baseball and hockey, need to borrow exactly two things from Europe: a promotion/relegation system and an F.A. Cup style knockout tournament where every team in the country can play. The first will never happen in the USA because of entrenched financial interests, but the second would be possible. You could run a Cup tournament with all the minor league teams, provided you had a rich sponsor for the tournament to make it worth something. This could really invigorate the minor league structure, as well as provide an extra event for the major leagues. (In fact the US Soccer federation does run a tournament like this. Although MLS teams almost always win, minor league teams often do well, and not so long ago–1998 I think–minor league Rochester won it.)
May 16th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
How ’bout a knockout tournament for college football.
Forget health care, Obama! Enough already. Get to work on something important, a college football playoff.
May 16th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
I’m surprised that nobody has yet mentioned the National Resident Match Program for graduating medical students (aka “the Match”), which may be the closest thing we have to a “sports draft” in the non-sports labor market.
The NRMP was sued for alleged antitrust violations a few years back, but they successfully fended off the lawsuit by getting Congress to pass a statutory exemption specifically earmarked for the NRMP in 2004. Really, you can look it up.
May 16th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
No, it means that the top prospects will all go to LA and New York (and Boston and a handful of others).
Um, they used to, but the “free market” prompted two of them to move.
This discussion reminds me of the episode in Ken Burns’s “Baseball” in which he solicits the opinions of several New Yorkers on how wonderful it was to grow up in New York in the 1950s and enjoy the Golden Age of Baseball when New York teams won every year. Of course, the opposite is the case. The 1950s were a Dark Age for Baseball when you compare attendance to general population and economic growth of the period. Baseball saved itself by relocating franchises and expanding into the hinterlands and giving somebody other than the 6.5% of Americans in The Big Apple a team to root for. That may not be the unfettered “free market” but it is sensible capitalism.
May 16th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
People like uncertainty in sports and other forms of entertainment.
I’ve been a fan of social science statistics (e.g., test scores) for 37 years, but almost nobody else is. One reason is because nothing much ever changes: Beverly Hills always beats Compton. People find that boring and depressing, so they don’t think about its public policy implications (e.g., by allowing a lot of illegal immigration, we’re depressing our school achievement test scores). They’d rather think about how something more interesting like how far Cleveland can go in the playoffs (which is solely due to reverse order drafting in the case of Lebron James).
When they do think about public policy, they’d rather not think about the numbers, they’d just engage in fantasy and ethnocentric bragging. (e.g., “When my greatgrandfather arrived in the Lower East Side in 1909 …:”). And they just get mad at the handful of people who actually do know the numbers and do know what they’re talking about.
Of course, the people who get mad at those few of us who point out the implications of test score trends over the last 37 years would never make the mistake of buying a house in Compton themselves. But they don’t want their personal reasoning in private affairs spelled out in public policy debates.
May 16th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Why don’t the Phoenix Coyotes move back to Winnipeg? Seriously, Winnipeg’s lacking a hockey team is ridiculous.
May 16th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Right about baseball in New York in the 1990s. Baseball writing was long dominated by people who grew up in New York and didn’t move away, so much about what you read about how wonderful baseball was in the 1950s is pure New York-centric bias.
May 16th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
“Beverly Hills always beats Compton.”
Do you think you’re making some grand incisive point by observing that rich kids outdo poor kids on tests?
May 16th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
“Beverly Hills always beats Compton.”
Do you think you’re making some grand incisive point by observing that rich kids outdo poor kids on tests?
Yes. Don’t import more poor people and their kids.
That bleedingly obvious “insight” is fundamental to having an intelligent immigration policy like Canada’s rather than a stupid one like America’s.
May 16th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
“This discussion reminds me of the episode in Ken Burns’s “Baseball” in which he solicits the opinions of several New Yorkers on how wonderful it was to grow up in New York in the 1950s and enjoy the Golden Age of Baseball when New York teams won every year. Of course, the opposite is the case. The 1950s were a Dark Age for Baseball when you compare attendance to general population and economic growth of the period.”
A very good point, and one which I wish was made more often. That was a good documentary, but the New York centrism was one of its weak points. (It led to odd things like Bob Costas claiming that DiMaggio was clearly better than Mantle or Mays, when in reality both of them were probably better.)
May 16th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
“A very good point, and one which I wish was made more often. That was a good documentary, but the New York centrism was one of its weak points. (It led to odd things like Bob Costas claiming that DiMaggio was clearly better than Mantle or Mays, when in reality both of them were probably better.)”
And to include many of the same New Yorkers grumbling about how disappointed they were when the 1960 Yankees lost to the Pirates. But never a word about upset native Clevelanders were for the 1954 Indians losing or Philadelphians for the 1950 Phillies losing, etc. These were cities that had only one chance in a generation to see their team come out on top, and it didn’t happen.
And that is the best which could be hoped for if parity weren’t a goal of sports leagues. More likely would be something like the 1916-48 Phillies, which in a third of a century finished above 5th place once.
May 16th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
More likely would be something like the 1916-48 Phillies, which in a third of a century finished above 5th place once.
So what? Some teams are inherently shitty. There is no point propping them up at the expense of the strong and glorious.
May 16th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
I feel like it’s obligatory for someone to mention that L.A. doesn’t have an NFL team. And that that’s a fucking scandal.
May as well be me . . .
May 16th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
LA, for all its problems, at least is not insecure over whether or not it’s a big league city. Thus, it hasn’t let itself be blackmailed by the NFL into wasting huge amounts of money to attract an NFL team just to prove its big leagueness.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Steven Wells, who lives in the United States and has seen the advantages of the American “socialist” sports leagues, is calling for the British government to nationalize the premiere league.
On the other hand, Swells (as anyone who remembers his NME days knows well) basically delights in trolling his audience. If only Popeye were doing the same.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Big time sports are in their own special world. Winning and losing is erratically connected with the rewards to the players and the profits of the owners. The leagues whether a single entity or a cartel of its constituent teams and the players unions are the ones that live in the real world. A player is totally free to offer his services to another league or cartel or a union could set up its own league.
If you are going to criticize how odd the internal rules of the cartel are, you really ought to be able to show some evidence that its current rules are not maximizing its goals. It is not saying much that the current rules are not sufficiently interesting to a casual observer.
By that token, if you really want to see the free market in action, why can’t owners pay the opposing team directly to lose? It would be cheaper in many cases that trying to make you own team better.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
What an asshole thing to say
May 17th, 2009 at 1:00 am
Myles, your argument about how “inherently shitty” teams should be forced to wallow in mediocrity is idiotic even by your standards. For the first forty years or so of their existence, the Steelers were the laughingstocks of the league. Now, they’re one of the league’s marquee franchises. In another example, the Bulls were perennial also-rans before Jordan came along. Are these really bad things? It’s the same with war. How many empires have crumbled from their own hubris? And how many mighty armies have been laid low by so-called inferior powers? These are the things of which history is made.
Wait a minute. Weren’t you saying that the Nazis weren’t that bad? And now you’re saying that the most profitable sports league on Earth is junk? Why should I give a flying fuck about what you think about anything?
May 17th, 2009 at 1:42 am
The salary cap and the reverse order draft are devices that increase the market reach and appeal of a sport. These restrictions force GMs and team executives to be creative. They reveal true genius.
Otherwise you have a concentration of resources in a few areas of the country. We see this with major league baseball especially. Even if the Red Sox or the Yankees aren’t in the World Series, the two essentially purchase their way into the playoffs every year. The rest of the league serves as a farm operation for those two franchises. Where is the fun in that for fans that aren’t located in those areas?
The NBA has true dynasties, but even in the case of the NBA, there is some unpredictability and flux. The NFL is the grand-dadddy of them all. Most sporting fans who are honest with themselves can appreciate what the Patriots have achieved in recent years. Even with the equal distribution of talent, the Patriots have still found ways to outmaneuver and out-scheme opponents without always resorting to the use of videotaped hand signals during live game action.
What these restrictions do is that they accelerate the process of rise and decline.
Is the goal of a sport simply to find out which cities have the most resources to invest in entertainment activities, or is the goal to see who is the best competitor when given roughly the same set of tools to work with?
Personally, I think real competition makes for the best spectacle. Watching an NBA team play the equivalent of a good high school basketball team week in and week out would probably get boring for the fans and the players.
May 17th, 2009 at 1:57 am
“Watching an NBA team play the equivalent of a good high school basketball team week in and week out would probably get boring for the fans and the players.”
Not for Myles, who would find it to be a thrilling reinshrinement of the Nietzschean principles of strength and weakness. Or something.
May 17th, 2009 at 3:36 am
Well put tomemos. Of course, the real question is whether anyone would pay to see Nietzsche’s sporting exploits, or for that matter Malcolm Gladwell’s.
Speaking as a former, non-professional athlete, I think we diminish the overall quality of the product if we limit real competition.
Real competition happens when there is something close to a level playing field — not when outcomes are essentially predetermined.
Even in the case of the NCAA men’s basketball, I think some of the growth of the sport has happened because the field of competition has opened up.
You can have a team like George Mason make a run, because top-level talent doesn’t stick around the college game. Teams that traditionally were at a talent disadvantage, now can compensate for that disadvantage through the advantages of continuity in less-talented veteran players who have played together for a few years.
These teams have the ability to compete against the traditional power-houses who now have the mixed blessing of one or two future star athletes who spend the one-and-done season learning a new system and developing timing with new teammates. This new world in the NCAA was especially true a few years ago when the best high school talent bypassed the NCAA altogether. That had a real leveling effect on competition.
Also, in reference to the above comment about the NFL’s relative unpopularity — based on what? The NFL is the top revenue generator in the United States based on information that I’ve been able to find. If anything this speaks to the value of its model.
http://www.thesportjournal.org/article/economic-values-professional-sport-franchises-united-states
The real challenge with football is that there is a high bar of entry to participate in the sport in the non-professional level. Even though the ball itself isn’t a economic major hurdle for many beginners, the padding and safety equipment used in organized leagues can be costly. The complexity of the rules and the scoring system also limit its exportability.
Still, as far as the U.S. market is concerned, there is a lot to recommend the NFL model — especially as it has leap-frogged MLB. It’ll be interesting to see what happens if the NFL salary cap goes out the window next season — I think it could be bad for the sport if it becomes a long-term fixture.
May 17th, 2009 at 4:22 am
You guys are all looking at this the wrong way. Conservatives claim to abhor any system that even has a whiff of socialistic tendencies, and yet they number amongst the legions of rabid fans who live and die by every victory and defeat of their favorite major league teams—the same teams who, by all measures, operate within one of the most socialist sports structures in the world.
I mean, punishing teams that succeed by putting them at a disadvantage to their competitors next time around? How much more socialist can you get?
Right or wrong, the sports industry in America is thriving within a system that his highly regulated and promotes parity at every opportunity, so why can’t this be used as a fine example of how sensible regulation and oversight—including controls to promote a level playing field—could actually help build a healthier, more competitive free market economy?
After all, tighter regulation of broadband services in Western Europe have actually served to create more competition amongst ISPs within an artificially created level playing field (the monopolistic carriers like British Telecom had to open up their lines to the competition). As a result, consumers are paying only half as much as we do in America for broadband access, where the companies who own the wiring are not required to share access.
So next time you talk to a conservative about free market economics, ask them if they are a sports fan, and go on from there!
May 17th, 2009 at 4:24 am
As for those who praise NCAA Football for being more profitable than the NFL…
Not hard to do when you don’t have to pay any of your stars a single penny in wages. Not exactly a glowing example of capitalism at its finest.
May 17th, 2009 at 7:58 am
“As for those who praise NCAA Football for being more profitable than the NFL…”
Those people should stop – the NFL is far, far more profitable than NCAAF. Most football programs in the NCAA lose money.
May 17th, 2009 at 11:09 am
“Even in the case of the NCAA men’s basketball, I think some of the growth of the sport has happened because the field of competition has opened up.”
Which is why the NCAA needs to do something about how the power conferences are coming to dominate the tournament selection process. Power conference teams are, to a great extent, simply refusing to play against the top teams from mid-major conferences, preventing the smaller schools from building up their “power rankings” and resulting in the 6th or 7th best team from the Big 10, ACC and Big East getting into the tournament instead of the 2nd best from the Missouri Valley.
It’s not quite as big a scandal as the BCS, but it’s bad.
Mike
May 17th, 2009 at 11:21 am
The obvious missed point here is that the “socialist”/”free market” divide is an illusion. The real difference is that there are many big market soccer leagues (and rugby to some extent), but only one big market league in America’s big 4. This allows them to function as a monopsonist for labor, and thus bid the price down. The govt. grants antitrust exemptions to, for instance, the NFL because this practice also leads to more entertaining leagues, and we’re all better off for it. How does a draft work when you have Serie A, Bundesliga, Premier League and La Liga all interested in the players, and not interested in collusion?
(* With very few exceptions: a few Euro basketball players, and perhaps Yu Darvish in the future, are really the only US-league quality players that we haven’t been able to bring over.)
May 17th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Because the Giants moved to San Francisco, the Dogers moved to LA, and they didn’t want to dilute the talent pool any further by adding two expansion franchises in NYC, instead of just the Mets. When teams began to travel by plane rather than train, the whole country opened up for expansion. Note that Boston, Philadelphia, and St. Louis also lost 2nd teams. The point is, it wasn’t so much that the local markets were inadequate as that thee were other markets available that promised more.
May 17th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
How does thinking that a Yankee centerfielder was better than a later Yankee centerfielder or a centerfielder who played for the New York Giants show NY centrism? Other than the fact that he was not discussing whether Magglio Ordonez was as good as Al Kaline . . .
May 17th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Speaking as a former, non-professional athlete, I think we diminish the overall quality of the product if we limit real competition.
Real competition happens when there is something close to a level playing field — not when outcomes are essentially predetermined.
Even in the case of the NCAA men’s basketball, I think some of the growth of the sport has happened because the field of competition has opened up.
Has golf decreased in appeal due to the absolute dominance of Tiger Woods, or increased? Has golf become less of a popular sport?
Has Formula One decreased in appeal due to the excelling greatness of Schumacher, or increased? Have less people taken to watch Formula One because of the glory of Schumacher, or more?
Competition, let’s be clear, is great. It releases the noble beast within the human. But any sort of leveling, athletic, economic, social, are all abhorrent to the idea of excellence. To try to equalise the inherent inequalities of appeal and power and resources of teams is no less abhorrent than trying to equalise the inherently unequal talents of human beings. It extinguishes the glory of the victor.
Let there be real competition, without such boondoggles as the reverse draft. Let the best player for the best team. And let the worst player play for the worst team.
May 17th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Myles, those are sports where individuals compete. We are talking about teams competing. That may sound like an academic distinction, but it’s not. It’s possible to distribute talented players among different teams through various means, but it’s impossible to somehow distribute fractions of Tiger Woods’s talent among different players. Tiger Woods didn’t become as dominant as he is by buying up all the other players’ talents.
May 17th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Myles are you having an post-having-read-Atlas-Shrugged-for-the-first-time rush? Or perhaps Ecco Homo? The chapter entitled: Why Sports Teams Should be Like the Blonde Beast.
May 17th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
“Has golf decreased in appeal due to the absolute dominance of Tiger Woods, or increased?”
“Absolute dominance”? What in the world are you talking about? Wouldn’t that imply winning all, or even just an overwhelming majority, of competition? This whole discussion you’ve been talking like the guy who only knows about sports from seeing various covers of Sports Illustrated in the checkout aisle.
May 17th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Formula One has a very long history of inequality. There has rarely been more than one or two teams with a legitimate chance of winning the drivers’ title.
In the last 25 years (1984-2008), 22 of 25 championships have gone to:
* someone in a Williams
* someone in a McLaren, or
* Michael Schumacher.
May 17th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
The pie is bigger because of the way the NFL and NBA are currently set up, so I imagine that even super-agents like Leigh Steinberg and Drew Rosenhaus are on balance happy with the way the leagues ensure competitive balance.
May 17th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
[...] In a recent post on his blog at Think Progress Matthew Yglesias quotes Malcolm Gladwell and wonders why the professional sports industry is still run in such a closed manner. [...]
May 17th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
And by the way, NFL is not the world’s most profitable sports franchise. The most profitable is Formula One. Look it up.
And I think no one would suggest that Formula One bothers much with parity.
May 18th, 2009 at 2:18 am
I agree, especially the superbowl!
May 18th, 2009 at 4:17 am
An NBA minor league that the best prospects actually went to in lieu of colleges would be the best thing to happen to collegiate athletics, its spectators, and perhaps American higher education itself, in a century. NFL too, though it has been suggested it would never happen.
May 18th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Myles,
To say that F1 doesn’t do anything to encourage parity is ridiculous. All engines have to be 2.4 liter naturally aspirated V8s. There are limits to materials and technologies. There are no turbochargers or active suspensions allowed. The aerodynamic design is also highly regulated. If it was an anything goes, best technology wins league, parity would be significantly reduced. However, all of these restrictions are done in the name of improved competition or safety. Yes, there have been a few dominant teams/Schumie, but to say they don’t bother with attempts at parity is false.
May 18th, 2009 at 11:54 am
But considering that New York City has a media market three times the size of large cities like Dallas and Atlanta (and especially considering that it’s nearby to the Hartford media market with 0.9 percent of the population) why doesn’t New York have three baseball teams instead of two?
New York used to have a lot of baseball teams, actually. The Giants and Dodgers used to be the teams from Manhattan and Brooklyn, respectively, and there were Negro League teams as well I believe. The Yankees actually started in Boston (under another name), as did the Braves. But the owners correctly decided they could make more money moving to less-contested markets. This market situation Matt proposed would be bad for owners and they’d never go for it. But bad for fans, too – some amount of parity is necessary for a league to be exciting, and I don’t see how small market teams could compete. Obviously, unlike the NFL, Baseball does not have a lot of parity now. Actually, the NFL was more fun back where there were actually good teams, so I could be wrong about this. But I’m guessing the market would eliminate the ability of smaller maket teams to thrive, and reduce sports to a few major metro areas. Which is fine for me as a Chicagoan, but would break a lot of hearts around the country.
May 18th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
[Nietzsche] would have found the reverse order draft an abomination, in imposition of the value-system of the weak on the strong.
He also said that while the best thing in the world is a good friend, the second best thing is a good enemy. You can’t prove your greatness without worthy competition.
May 18th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Wow, 101 out of 115 comments, before someone posts the words “Giants” and “Dodgers”?
MY, don’t you claim to be from New York City?