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| Robert Indiana was off by a letter |
• Think your team is having a bad year? Parma F.C. is have a worse one. The club currently sit bottom of the table of Italian Serie A with only 10 points from 23 matches, and have had to postpone their past two matches because they are broke. Their home match with Udinese was scrapped because the club couldn’t afford to pay for the electricity and security at their home football grounds. Faced with playing a game behind closed doors in a browned-out stadium, players from both clubs balked. This past Friday’s match with Genoa was postponed as well – there was no money available to pay for the travel and lodging. The players were planning, at first, to drive to Genoa in their own cars, or hitch a ride on a coach hired by some traveling club supporters, and a $22,000 advance from a sponsor appeared to have been hastily arranged to cover the costs. But the players finally decided they’d had enough, and threatened to strike in protest of the failure to have the club’s tenuous, and quite ludicrous, financial situation resolved.
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| Parma F.C. are Friends of The Lose. These guys are awesome. These guys
need some love. That, and a paycheque. Pay them, for heaven’s sake! |
Read that again. The players haven’t been paid all season. The Italian Players Association are, suffice to say, not amused. All Serie A games are starting 15 minutes late this weekend in protest. One of the golden rules of The Lose states that in any dispute involving soccer players and wages, the players are always right. The game is a bastion of shysters and would-be kingpins and tycoons. Far too many owners have far too many delusions of grandeur while being wofully undercapitalized as they attempt to compete in an arena where the cost of doing business is often determined for you by the actions of other clubs. There are megaclubs which serve as idle playthings for the preposterously rich, for whom money is no object, and even some of the game’s most storied clubs have wound up drowning themselves in red ink while vainly attempting to keep pace – the most notable in that category being Rangers, who have spent the past three seasons working their way back up through the Scottish league system after going bankrupt and being relegated to the fourth division.
It’s all an utterly impossible mess which can’t possibly end well – although sadly, for Parma F.C., there is precedent in this, as they were under administration from Italian authorities from 2003-2007. The club was a beacon of attractive play in the otherwise defensive and grey Serie A of the 1990s, winning several European trophies at the time, but their fate was inexorably tied to their parent company Parmalat, the Italian dairy conglomerate that decided to try their hand at derivates trading and other fraudulent acts and wound up becoming the largest bankruptcy in European history.
Amazingly, the club’s players have tried to maintain some sort of professionalism and dignity through all of this. Given all they’ve had to put up with this year, it’s somewhat remarkable Parma has taken any points at all, much less 10. Actually, they took 11, but the club was docked a point for not paying the players. Pretty stiff penalty, that one. No wonder the players blamed the Italian FA’s “lack of interest” in refusing to play this weekend. Pay the players! Seriously. Pay these guys already, and/or let them find work elsewhere. They’ve more than fulfilled their contractual obligations. The FA says they can’t do anything until the club enters administration. In the meantime, other Serie A clubs have contemplated trying to find a way to run the club for the rest of the season, in part because having a club go out of business in the middle of the season makes a mess of the standings and the schedule. Pay the players! Free Parma F.C.! Enough of this nonsense.
• And now for something completely different, I give you the New York Knicks:
The actual ESPN play-by-play of this was “Alexey Shved misses 6-foot.” Note absence of the words ‘shot’ and ‘pass.’ I’m not sure what this was, but the likes of it has never been seen in an NBA arena before.
• I’ve never seen so many confounding, head-scratching trades all at once as I saw at the NBA’s trading deadline. I would have better luck explaining Quantum Physics than I would trying to explaining all of those deals. The Warriors wisely made no changes at the deadline, as their front office brass likely got on the phone with some other NBA GMs, decided that everyone on the other end of the line was cuckoo bananas, and promptly put down the phone and sent all the ensuing calls straight to voicemail. Deals in the NBA are almost all inherently, laughably lopsided in this day and age, given that the considerations are almost entirely driven by cap and contract considerations, and thus deals are being made from a position of significant weakness. It was pretty apparent that a good number of franchises involved in the wheeling and dealing were doing so for the purposes of essentially giving up on the season. It speaks to just how cool the game of basketball is that so many fans will still actually turn up to watch games even though their team has basically decided to throw in the towel.
From a financial standpoint, I know that the league is doing fine, and the product on the floor this year has been pretty good (and from a San Francisco viewpoint, it’s been remarkable), but from a competitive balance standpoint, the NBA model is broken and has been for years. But I don’t know what the answer is. History has shown us, time and again, that the coveted #1 pick in the draft is really, if ever, a panacea, and so many of the league’s franchises seem interminably mired in this “Wait ’Til Next Year” mentality which is never proven out. But being an 8-seed in the playoffs isn’t much better than being a 25-win team. Unlike their winter counterpart, the NHL, where you can seemingly luck your way into winning the Stanley Cup, you can’t do that in the NBA. Remember another Rule of The Lose: the lower the score, the easier to pull the upset. You can’t park the bus in front of the rim. Your fatal flaws get exposed mercilessly in the NBA on a minute-to-minute basis. If you’re bad in the NBA, you’ll lose and lose and lose some more.
In the end, as much as I’m enjoying watching the Warriors pound people into submission on a regular basis, I just find it impossible to invest that much of myself in a product where so many of the entities seem to have little interest in succeeding. (Not the players, mind you, but the organizations who employ them.) Not merely attempting to assemble a winning club and failing at it, mind you – Warrior fans endured about 30 years of that – but not even attempting to put forth a legitimately competitive product. There is this air of artificiality to it. Fake fun. As fake as all of the bells and whistles which go off constantly in an NBA arena in an effort to keep you entertained. Hey, I have an idea. WIN THE DAMN GAME! I think winning is pretty entertaining, don’t you?
• Read this article. The Lose believes analytics are an important part of the business of sports, and using data and a logical approach can pay long-term dividends. The Lose also believes that most of the amateur stat nerds who dominate the conversation on sports message boards don’t understand that you cannot take the laptop with you out onto the field. You can put players in positions to better succeed through analytics, but those players better have some fucking talent to begin with. The Philadelphia 26ers can be branded analytics darlings all they want, but all Sam Hinkie has done in his tenure as GM is create a sub-replacement level roster with a sub-salary floor payroll which only does one aspect of basketball well, which is lose at it.
And I never quite understand what stat nerds think the point of the sport is that they actually follow. The objective is to win. I came across an amusing argument on a Seattle Mariners fansite the other day, where they were revisiting an off-season trade where fan favourite/WAR darling/constantly injured OF Michael Saunders was shipped to Toronto. (The impetus for this discussion being that Saunders had just torn up his knee at spring training by stepping on a sprinkler head in the outfield.) A stats disciple made a point on there where he said the process involved in trading Saunders to the Blue Jays for pitcher J.A. Happ was a bad one – even though the trade is presently slanted heavily in the Mariners favour with Saunders hurt, and that he “would rather have GOOD PROCESS = BAD RESULTS instead of BAD PROCESS = GOOD RESULTS.”
Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. I want good results regardless of good process, bad process, dumb luck, miracles, acts of God or anything else. The objective is to win the game, and ultimately win the last one of the season after which they give you a shiny trophy and you get to have parades. If all we cared about was assembling a team on paper with the biggest WAR, we wouldn’t care a whole lot about watching the actual game, now would we?
• As I mentioned previously, The Lose is a worldly individual and I find the ICC World Cup of Cricket to be quite entertaining. Most of the excitement in the 14-team tourney so far has been generated by the ‘associate’ nations participating – Ireland, Afghanistan, UAE, and Scotland – winning a few games and scaring the dickens out of some of the established nations in the process. The minnows should enjoy it while it lasts, since the International Cricket Council, in a move laced with greed and protectionist interests, is actually contracting the tournament the next time it occurs four years from now. This doesn’t make any sense from a competitive standpoint – the minnows have been entertaining and mostly competitive, whereas a lot of the games between established sides have been awful blowouts.
But this excellent New York Times article explains what’s going on: it’s far more important to keep Indian viewership, and Indian sponsorship dollars, flowing in than actually attempting to grow the game worldwide. I’ve labeled this similar phenomenon in the soccer world The Zusi Effect. When Graham Zusi’s headed goal against Panama saved El Tri’s ass a few years ago, he also saved League MX and the Mexican FA literally millions of dollars in sponsorships and broadcast rights which would’ve been lost by El Tri failing to qualify for the World Cup. From a financial standpoint, it would’ve been somewhat disastrous for Mexican soccer. They owe Graham Zusi more than he probably realizes.
Cricket is suffering from a Zusi Effect – depending entirely on the well-being of one particular team, and having them do well – and that’s the sort of loser thinking which ultimately dooms you. Even in a small group of nations like the 10 in the highest ranks of cricket, there is bound to be some ebb and flow, some give and take, and sometimes you’re just not going to win because others will be better. It’s the nature of most competitions. Not even the American basketball team has been immune to that over the years. And not even a self-contained entity like the NFL is content with having only a small marketplace – hence their constantly having games in London. (Which folks across the pond keep attending, even though they’ve been fed a steady diet of the Jacksonville Jaguars.) Sure, India’s cricket market is massive, but India’s market for everything is potentially massive. If they could ever develop some good footballers there – and with 1.2 billion people, the odds surely are in their favour – the place seems like a potential gold mine. And the beautiful game has always had a curious way of chip-chip-chipping away at a nation’s collective sporting psyche. It may take a few years, or even a few decades, but if FIFA wants it, eventually football starts to take hold.
For as many shots as I’ve taken at FIFA, they knew years ago that developing untapped markets was the key to further growth. The more good players there are, and the more good footballing nations there are, the better the game is as a whole. Their efforts at development included holding their most sacred event in a trio of baseballing nations – the U.S., Japan, South Korea – all of whom have now asserted themselves as legit footballing nations with strong domestic leagues that have produced a few world-class players. Rugby’s gotten in on the act as well, planning on holding their World Cup in Japan in 2019 and looking to grow the game in places such as the U.S., a huge nation where there is room for almost any sort of sport or pastime to thrive on some level or another. Given that the U.S. lost to New Zealand’s All Blacks 74:6 last fall in Chicago, the rugby folks clearly have a ways to go, but 61,000 turning up at Soldier Field for that match shows the potential interest to be there.
There is a big difference between being self-interested and short-sighted, with the foundations of failure very often rooted in the latter. And while there is and has been an abundance of graft, corruption and political in-fighting in institutions such as FIFA and the IOC, such behaviours are often far, far worse in smaller institutions, where there is a smaller pie and thus more incentive to be crooked. It’s best that the I.C.C., and entities in general, to continue striving for expanse, rather than simply turning inward and trying to protect that which (they think) they still have.
• Non sporting note here to close: RIP Leonard Nimoy. On the booze cruise that was the original Starship Enterprise, Spock provided the Shakespeare. His was the eye and the voice of the poet, the soul of the philosopher. It was the ethos of Spock which was at the heart of the rebirth of the Star Trek franchise many decades later, for it was that character – with his honorable characteristics of reason, humility, and grace – which truly resonated with people. Leonard Nimoy’s on-screen creation – a character founded within his own background and life experience – was proving it was cool to be smart half a century ago, and for that, we should all be grateful. He lived long and prospered. He has been, and shall always be, our friend.
