EL FLACO YANQUI
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Cosmos pay MSG and Wpix to air their games.. PIX nor msg are paying cosmos to broadcast their games....
New York Cosmos surive & move to Coney Island
- Thread starter NYCFCfan
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I do like them because you can simply drag things around. Note though that overlapmaps.com does also resize the countries when you move them up and down on the map. It's a bit of a pain as you can only use the arrow buttons though.
Personally my favorite world map is the Fuller projection. It preserves shape and size so it's pretty much the most accurate flat map around.
I beg to differ. Sure, unlike the US the majority of teams hug the westernmost quarter of the country, but the following are the clubs based in Siberia (or even further east) in just the top two divisions of Russian football. Bear in mind that, being in a minority as the eastern clubs of their leagues, these clubs have to pay for 2,000+ miles of travel for the majority of their games, they don't benefit from having a dozen local(ish) games a season like we do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Tom_Tomsk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Luch-Energiya_Vladivostok
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Sibir_Novosibirsk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_SKA-Khabarovsk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Tyumen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Yenisey_Krasnoyarsk
Could you imagine the complaining that would take place if Jose, Arsene, Pep, or any of the other coaches had to travel to those clubs for a midweek Champions/Europa League match??? The amount of complaining that takes place traveling to the western locations is already toddler level. Going to the east would be closer to them being full-on colicky.
Looks like Russian football is regionalized below the second level of the pyramid. And if I'm reading Wikipedia correctly, the second level was regional at some point in the past, but it's confusing because everything got reorganized after the USSR fell and component countries split off.
But I'd be curious to know why Russia adopted pro/rel at all. England adopted it as a way to solve competition among multiple different leagues and clubs that had formed independently and who couldn't otherwise agree which league would be considered the best. So the deal was to agree on a tiered league structure and allow clubs to earn their way to the top*. As best as I can tell, most of the world's soccer leagues adopted pro/rel not because they were independently solving the same problem England faced, but because England spread soccer and its culture worldwide and everybody adopted the English way, with modifications here and there for local customs. The world has pro/rel because England has pro/rel.
The point is, I'm guessing pro/rel in Russia never solved any problems, and Russia just copied how everyone else did it. In fact, pro/rel in Russia created problems England never faced and they had to retro-fit pro/rel with regionalization to make it work. That's kind of a backwards way to run things.
And so my ultimate point is this: just because Russia figured out a bass-ackwards way to make a pro/rel system fit where it wasn't needed, and was arguably more trouble than it was worth, doesn't mean the US should try to do the same. In the US, The National League in baseball solved and won the issue of competition between leagues by rigidly enforcing stability among teams and creating a closed shop. This allowed and encouraged it's owners to invest in the best grounds and best players. It also covered only about a third of the country despite calling itself "national." They beat down multiple attempts at competition, and co-opted the American League who basically imitated everything the NL had done, and since then every professional sports league in the US in every sport has followed the same roadmap.
Pro/rel has some side benefits like creating interest at the bottom of the table, but also has additional costs. The US system works fine here. Pro/rel doesn't solve any problems that have to be fixed, and so has no point here.
* This is simplified and I'm sure Falastur could provide more details and even show I'm wrong but I'm fairly confident it's accurate in ways that matter to my point: pro/rel in England was created to solve a specific problem.
But I'd be curious to know why Russia adopted pro/rel at all. England adopted it as a way to solve competition among multiple different leagues and clubs that had formed independently and who couldn't otherwise agree which league would be considered the best. So the deal was to agree on a tiered league structure and allow clubs to earn their way to the top*. As best as I can tell, most of the world's soccer leagues adopted pro/rel not because they were independently solving the same problem England faced, but because England spread soccer and its culture worldwide and everybody adopted the English way, with modifications here and there for local customs. The world has pro/rel because England has pro/rel.
The point is, I'm guessing pro/rel in Russia never solved any problems, and Russia just copied how everyone else did it. In fact, pro/rel in Russia created problems England never faced and they had to retro-fit pro/rel with regionalization to make it work. That's kind of a backwards way to run things.
And so my ultimate point is this: just because Russia figured out a bass-ackwards way to make a pro/rel system fit where it wasn't needed, and was arguably more trouble than it was worth, doesn't mean the US should try to do the same. In the US, The National League in baseball solved and won the issue of competition between leagues by rigidly enforcing stability among teams and creating a closed shop. This allowed and encouraged it's owners to invest in the best grounds and best players. It also covered only about a third of the country despite calling itself "national." They beat down multiple attempts at competition, and co-opted the American League who basically imitated everything the NL had done, and since then every professional sports league in the US in every sport has followed the same roadmap.
Pro/rel has some side benefits like creating interest at the bottom of the table, but also has additional costs. The US system works fine here. Pro/rel doesn't solve any problems that have to be fixed, and so has no point here.
* This is simplified and I'm sure Falastur could provide more details and even show I'm wrong but I'm fairly confident it's accurate in ways that matter to my point: pro/rel in England was created to solve a specific problem.
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I would suspect (though this is intuition alone and not based on any evidence that I know of) that promotion and relegation was added to Russian football mainly as a way of showing (or pretending) to the various non-ethnically-Russian populations of the USSR that their teams weren't being deliberately penalised as part of the various Soviet measures to suppress the will of the minorities. Many Soviet bloc clubs were run entirely publicly by various instruments of the Soviet government. Any team labelled CSKA is or was a Soviet army team. Any team called Dinamo was run by the KGB. If an Eastern European club sounds like an industry - Lokomotiv Moscow, Metalist Kharkiv, and so on - it almost certainly was formed from workers in that field. This, from what I recall reading some while back, tended to cause a fair bit of resentment and frequent accusations of certain teams being blatantly favoured.
Originally, the Soviet Top League only had a handful of teams from outside of Russia, and it's my guess that promotion and relegation was basically brought in as a way of saying "look, Lithuanian/Kazakh/Ukrainian/Estonian/etc comrades, your team might one day end up playing in Glorious Top Division of Motherland Football, too!"
As for the comments on the introduction of pro/rel into English football - that's broadly accurate, and I'd agree that most countries probably introduced it themselves as it was seen as "the way football is done", but I wouldn't necessarily say that it didn't solve any problems in those countries. I would, for instance, suggest that in quite a few countries where the transition from amateur football to professional was slow and awkward, the idea of pro/rel gave a powerful incentive for amateur teams to make the switch.
I mean, what is the point of turning professional if your only method of doing so is by joining a league which has been designated to forever be the (say) fourth highest level of football, on the sole basis that there have already been three waves of clubs making the switch, and very sorry blokes but they got there first. Even if your standard of football ends up being better than those above you, no chance of rising because our leagues are closed shops. No club is going to be attracted by the idea that the only way to better themselves is by waiting for a bigger club to potentially go bankrupt and leave a gap in a tier above you - bear in mind that the idea of super-sized leagues and of franchise systems is a US concept, so the idea of simply buying your way into the higher tier isn't viable in Europe/S America.
Originally, the Soviet Top League only had a handful of teams from outside of Russia, and it's my guess that promotion and relegation was basically brought in as a way of saying "look, Lithuanian/Kazakh/Ukrainian/Estonian/etc comrades, your team might one day end up playing in Glorious Top Division of Motherland Football, too!"
As for the comments on the introduction of pro/rel into English football - that's broadly accurate, and I'd agree that most countries probably introduced it themselves as it was seen as "the way football is done", but I wouldn't necessarily say that it didn't solve any problems in those countries. I would, for instance, suggest that in quite a few countries where the transition from amateur football to professional was slow and awkward, the idea of pro/rel gave a powerful incentive for amateur teams to make the switch.
I mean, what is the point of turning professional if your only method of doing so is by joining a league which has been designated to forever be the (say) fourth highest level of football, on the sole basis that there have already been three waves of clubs making the switch, and very sorry blokes but they got there first. Even if your standard of football ends up being better than those above you, no chance of rising because our leagues are closed shops. No club is going to be attracted by the idea that the only way to better themselves is by waiting for a bigger club to potentially go bankrupt and leave a gap in a tier above you - bear in mind that the idea of super-sized leagues and of franchise systems is a US concept, so the idea of simply buying your way into the higher tier isn't viable in Europe/S America.
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In a way you've just described the MLB league structure, except maybe with a few extra levels than just the four.
And note that it evolved over a period of over 100 years, and had many mergers, splits, new leagues formed, etc. over that period of time. We're kind of a huge country roughly the size of Europe, who has of course a separate league structure in each and every country. We may just be too big a place to have a single large league system work well, at least without splitting it up into regions.
Can you superimpose Red Bull Arena on top of that?
Shawn Ryu
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But they don't compete for money with multiple sports leagues.
Closest thing is probably rugby and as far as I can tell, club rugby can't touch football.
Not sure why but for some reason I find attendance statistics somewhat fascinating. Anyway, for last season the Premier League played 380 games and had an attendance of 13.9 million. The Premiership played 130 games and had an attendance of 1.8 million. If you multiply that by just under 3 to make the number of games roughly match you get 5.1 million. Note that there's 20 teams in the Premier League compared to 12 in the Premiership. Assuming the same number of teams they'd be darn close. I'm also ignoring things like TV viewership for the simple reason that this isn't actually my doctoral thesis so I've only done 3 minutes research but I'd have to say that the relative level of interest between the two sports is about even, although given there's more teams and more matches for soccer the absolute numbers are higher.
There's also cricket but it doesn't seem like there's all that much of a domestic cricket league compared to the other sports. So maybe that's more of an international TV sport or something but I'm not really sure about it.
Just for grins, baseball here has 30 teams, 2,425 games, and 73.2 million attendees. The NFL has 32 teams, 256 games, and 17.5 million attendees. And finally MLS has 20 teams, 340 games, and 7.4 million attendees. (Note that all numbers are for the previous full season.)
One additional thing to think about in all those numbers is the population. US and Canada is about 350 million, compared to England and Wales which is 56 million. So if you want to consider relative sports popularity you've got to multiply the England numbers by a bit under 7 to have the same base population. So for EPL vs MLS they've got double our attendance with only 1/7 of our population.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attendance_figures_at_domestic_professional_sports_leagues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom
It's because they sell meat pies and we don't.
Don't blame me, man. I've tweeted at the Pukka Pie people *begging* them to come here and take over the country but as of yet they haven't, alas.
I wouldn't put too much truck into the popularity of sports based on attendances alone. Rugby is far and away a less-supported sport (except during the 6 Nations tournament, whereupon anyone who likes beer and pubs instantly becomes a diehard fan of the country in the UK they are from) but its supporters are far more ardent in their fandom.
In football supportership you will find your dyed-in-the-wool season ticket holder types who can count more than 1,000 games since they last missed a match (home or away), your "attend as many as I can make" keyboard warriors, your occasional attendee fans who are probably not too different in method of support from your typical foreign PL fan, right down to those who plasticly wear a United shirt around town but would struggle to name three players from their last match and literally only claim to be a fan for the reflected glory they think it bestows on them.
In rugby, you are much more likely to find that any fan you get talking to is a regular attendee or is an active player at the amateur level. Top level clubs probably have somewhere between a fifth and a tenth the number of "fans" of a comparative football team while still getting the same attendance. The thing with rugby is that it'll never challenge football because it's about 20 years behind in the commercialisation stakes, meaning sponsorship and TV money, and while it is starting to grow in that regard it's not really catching up. Also, there's far more of a conscious reluctance amongst rugby fans to "sell out" to the money in the same way that football has.
Cricket is kind of an interesting anomaly in sports, in that in many parts of the cricketing world international games are far bigger of a thing than team competitions, and the international season takes up a far larger part of the year. There's relatively few international games to actually attend so the viewing figures look low, but they can pull far higher crowds than even top Premier League teams for a high-profile test match. The County Championship is the domestic cricket league, and it pulls very low attendances because it's basically just a feeder league for the international team, even though the counties sign a number of foreign players too (ironically, since they are also supposed to be representative teams, like mini-international sides).
All that said, Indian cricket right now is pumping crazy money into club cricket, basically doing what China is doing to football right now, in an attempt to make club cricket a bigger thing. It's working, too, because the Indian Premier League is 5th on the list of highest average attendances in all of world sports, and they've just announced that they're going to make a new franchised cricket league in the UK on the same basis.
That is some serious shade you're throwing at non-English fans. Surely ManCity's tie today couldn't have left you in that sour of a mood???
Um, I think you've misread my comment? My comment was breaking down types of support into a vague four, very arbitrarily drawn-up categories, but I think you've somehow mixed up where each description started and ended. My categories were, and I directly quote myself to avoid further confusion (and to save time, I'm lazy):
- your dyed-in-the-wool season ticket holder types who can count more than 1,000 games since they last missed a match (home or away)
- your "attend as many as I can make" keyboard warriors
- your occasional attendee fans who are probably not too different in method of support from your typical foreign PL fan
- those who plasticly wear a United shirt around town but would struggle to name three players from their last match and literally only claim to be a fan for the reflected glory they think it bestows on them
So I was in fact grouping foreign PL fans into the same broad category that I myself would likely fall under, since I live far enough away from Manchester that I can't attend PL games more than once a season without bankrupting myself. I made no analogy to foreign fans with my fourth group, which I consider to be a primarily British thing.
Got it. My bad - missed the comma separating #3&4
It's all good.
Me too, so I found it an odd grouping.
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