Soccer

[Dalty]

This is where me and Mal can talk about football, and the rest of you wonder WTF we are going on about.

[Dalty]

There is a bit of a tradition in UK football that when it gets right in the title race the Managers of each side start to engage in a some dogs at each other. Sir Alex Ferguson, last manager at Manchester United, was held up as an expert in this. Supposed to be to undermine the other Boss.

Looks there is a a humdinger brewing between the manager of Chelsea, Jose Mourinho, and Arsenal, Arsene Wenger, as the title race this year enters the final stretch.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/26188451

[Dalty]

And after a really good draw against Man Utd and taking Liverpool to the wire giving Fulham fans and observers the thought that they might just climb from the bottom of the table and avoid relegation, Fulham respond by firing their manager!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/26200035

[Mal Shot First]

Mourinho is usually full of it, but that one was right on the mark.

Re: Fulham - And here I thought that German clubs' executive boards are trigger-happy when it comes to sacking managers. I appreciate the urgency of the situation, but when you can see that the team is still giving it their all and is losing narrowly to top clubs, the manager is probably not the issue. But you have to make some kind of change, and the person in charge is always the easiest target.

[Mal Shot First]

By the way, I've always wondered why managers are called that in England. In the U.S., we use the term "head coach" when referring to the person in charge of tactics and training. In Germany, they call this person "trainer." Are head coaches in England also in charge of the financial side of things and are thus called managers? I ask because these duties are usually split across several people in German clubs. There is a coach, who is responsible for the athletic side of things, and a so-called sports director or manager, who is mainly responsible for hiring and firing players (usually with some input from the coach), but also deals with other financial aspects of the club. The coach usually also answers to the sports director.

[Dalty]

Because in Europe they traditionally have others in the club who make transfer decisions etc. and they only coach and pick the team and do the tactics on match day.

In the UK, until a few years ago, the Manager ran all aspects of the club to do with football. Transfer dealings, youth team development, hiring and firing of all football related staff etc etc. So he managed that side of the business of the club completely.

Changed now with foreign owners. Managers take more of a coach role and traditionally have a Director Of Football or similar over them.

Interestingly, the most successful Manager of the modern game, Sir Alex Ferguson at Man Utd, would never tolerate such an inconvenience over him. He ran the football at the club, end of!

[Dalty]

Mourinho is usually full of it, but that one was right on the mark.

Re: Fulham - And here I thought that German clubs' executive boards are trigger-happy when it comes to sacking managers. I appreciate the urgency of the situation, but when you can see that the team is still giving it their all and is losing narrowly to top clubs, the manager is probably not the issue. But you have to make some kind of change, and the person in charge is always the easiest target.

Yeah. They win and it's the players. They lose and it's the managers fault. Doesn't help that a top player earns 5x what a top manager does.

[Dalty]

So Chelsea got their asses kicked by Man City in the Cup.

[Adam54]

http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/s216/wwe/n ... ed-fc.html

Either of you have any thoughts on this bit of news? Dalty, how would a new owner like this go over in the UK?

Actually...there are other American owners of clubs, right? Don't the Boston Red Sox owners also own one of the Manchester clubs? Are American owners considered a black mark on the game, or do y'all just take it in stride?

[Dalty]

The Boston guys, Fenway Sports, own my club Liverpool FC. I have no problem with that. They are doing well.

Unlike the US though, if they do badly they can't just run away from the fans by upping sticks and moving to a different city. Wimbledon tried it. Didn't go well!

If he has money and wants to invest in the squad then the fans will welcome him.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

NFL teams don't move cities because they are doing poorly. If that were the case, the Buccaneers and Bengals would have left their cities a long time ago.

They usually move because another city offers the franchise a shit-ton of money.

[Adam54]

I always figured they don't move because there's nowhere to go. LA is still quite a way from having a viable NFL stadium again and London is probably a few years away from supporting a team full time. Where else does that leave? The Buffalo/Jacksonville/Cincinnati/Tampa Bays of the league are kind of stuck in a bad situation.

[Dalty]

NFL teams don't move cities because they are doing poorly. If that were the case, the Buccaneers and Bengals would have left their cities a long time ago.

They usually move because another city offers the franchise a shit-ton of money.

Even worse. No loyalty, no history, no community ties. What about the fans from the city left behind? What about the fans in the new city? How do they feel an affiliation with their new local incumbents?

[Adam54]

I worded myself poorly on my initial reply, but I feel like Goiter is exaggerating a tiny bit here. I can think of two teams moving in the last 20 years. Cleveland moved to Baltimore, which was deplorable, and LA moved to Oakland, which I know less about. Before that I can think of maybe two more teams moving in the 1980s? Or did the LA Rams move to St. Louis in the early 90s?

What I'm trying to say is that it's FAR from an every day occurrence.

[Adam54]

Are there a lot of foreign owners of soccer clubs? As I think about this, I can only think of a small handful of examples in any of our major sport leagues of teams that are owned by people who aren't American.

[Dalty]

But none of your sports are really global.

[Mal Shot First]

I think it's a phenomenon limited mostly to the English Premier League (I don't know if all those rich Eastern European clubs are owned by local oligarchs or Arab sheikhs). Foreign owners have bought clubs in other countries, too (most recently Paris Saint Germain), but they just seem to be up for grabs in England.

There are rules against that type of thing in Germany, but some clubs have gone public and have stocks that can be traded. In those cases, big companies can buy shares and invest in clubs that way. Just last week, Allianz purchased about 8% of the Bayern Munich shares, allowing the club to pay off its "new" stadium (built in 2006) right away instead of doing it gradually over the next decade(s). There are other German clubs that are tied to companies or business entrepreneurs, but in those cases, they are all domestic: Wolfsburg is largely financed by Volkswagen money, Leverkusen is backed by Bayer, Hoffenheim (a village with about 3,000 inhabitants) has a top-tier team sponsored by an entrepreneur from that area.

[Adam54]

The NFL and MLB are definitely global. There used to be an entire NFL Europe for fuck's sakes.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I was exaggerating. There are a number of reasons why teams move. It often does involve money in some way. A move can be something like a bailout. If the team's not filling the seats at home and another city without a team wants them, it can lead to a move.

St. Louis acquired the Rams in the mid-nineties. (The Rams were with Cleveland before they were in L.A., but that was ages and ages ago.) I think the Rams left L.A. the year after the Raiders left L.A. I can't remember the circumstances behind the move for either team, but maybe they were kinda cancelling one another out. L.A.'s a big place, but it has so many different big teams for so many different sports that maybe it was making it hard for two NFL teams to make decent bank.

I do remember L.A. fans being pretty upset about the loss of their teams, but I know St. Louis was pretty excited to gain an NFL franchise. The Rams started out all right at St. Louis, too. They won the Super Bowl a few years after the move, won the NFC a couple years after that, won the NFC West a couple years after that, then sorta petered out. They've been iffy or downright awful ever since.

There are some die-hard fans in St. Louis, but it's still a baseball city. I'd only ever lived in a football city before (Tuscaloosa), so it was strange to live in a place where football took a backseat.

The US, as you know, is pretty spread out. Every big city can't have an NFL team. It would make the seasons insanely long, and the playoffs would be a nightmare. Expansion teams happen on occasion, but not as often as you might think. If a team can bolster the economy of a place without a team, it might just get moved there. It's seen as easier and less devastating to shuffle teams around a bit than it is just to disband a team in one place and start a new team entirely from scratch in another place.

* * *

Part of why the US is so insular when it comes to professional sports is because of just how many teams these sports already have. The whole of Europe takes up just under four million square miles of space. So does the US. If you cut out Alaska and Hawaii, the contiguous US still takes up over three million. Granted, Europe's population more than doubles the US's. I'll also grant that the Midwest US is a damned wasteland with the slightest scattering of souls imaginable.

Do I think it's obnoxious that MLB calls its championship the "World Series"? Sure. Then again, it's not as though every country in the world is swimming in a surplus of baseball teams and is routinely challenging the US's claim. When they first started calling it the World Series back in 1903, it wasn't an exaggeration. Baseball wasn't really being played anywhere else at the time. Baseball has since developed a pretty big presence in Japan, but I don't know how feasible it would be for both countries' teams to play one another with regularity. That's a hell of a plane flight.

Soccer's the only truly global sport I can think of--at least in terms of being open to competition from most of the continents. I guess there's also gymnastics, figure skating, boxing, and other Olympic-type events, but they pale in comparison to soccer's reach and appeal. Soccer's picking up in the US--as is hockey--but the US is also pretty happy with its big three (football, baseball, basketball).

I guess the US could invite non-US teams to compete alongside our established MLB, NFL, and NBA teams, but it would require a massive restructuring, and it would require that other countries build up programs in these sports. It would also require these countries' teams (and the US) to be willing to make a bunch of transcontinental flights. When France wants to play Germany, it's a pretty short trip. If a Munich team wants to play a Zurich team, it's a 200-mile trip. If a Dallas team wants to play a Houston team, it's a 240-mile trip.

[Dalty]

The NFL and MLB are definitely global. There used to be an entire NFL Europe for fuck's sakes.

Not even close. Minor sports on minor TV channels that were flash in the pan spectacles, a curiosity at best. Few people watch them and fewer play them.

[Quasar]

The teams that I can remember moving are:
Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, renamed the Ravens
LA Raiders moving back to Oakland
LA Rams moving to St. Louis
Houston Oilers moving to Tennessee, renamed the Titans
St. Louis Cardinals moving to Arizona
Baltimore Colts moving to Indianapolis

NBA teams that moved are
Charlotte Hornets to New Orleans, renamed the Pelicans
New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn
Vancouver Grizzlies to Memphis
Seattle Supersonics to Oklahoma City, renamed the Thunder
Moves from before I was aware of the NBA (Minnesota Lakers to LA, New Orleans Jazz to Utah, St. Louis Kings to Sacramento)

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

It looks like some countries outside the US are picking up US sports. In some cases, though, it seems almost like these countries are being used like recruiting mills and talent pools for potential transferal to established professional teams in the US. The NBA, for example, appears to be the hoped-for destination for a lot of non-US basketball players.

In this way, maybe, basketball is a global sport. It appears that the home base is still the US, but US teams are picking up a bunch of non-US-native players.

[Mal Shot First]

The NFL has 32 teams - that's the number of soccer teams that play in the first and second German leagues. There are at least five more leagues below that with about 1,000 teams. According to Wikipedia, about 33,000 teams competed in the German league system in the 2012/13 season. Sure, only the first three levels are considered professional, but that's still 52 professional teams in a country with about 85 million inhabitants.

I'm pretty sure the NFL could handle more than 32 teams if the league were structured differently.

[Mal Shot First]

...but that's still 52 professional teams in a country with about 85 million inhabitants.

Now that I think about it, it's probably more than that. Because of the promotion/relegation system, there are five teams every year that leave the third league (which is considered professional-level) but also five that join it. The ones that leave aren't automatically considered amateur teams, after all.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

With that many teams, you'd think the Germans would be better at soccer.