Where the Big Boys Play #39

[JerryvonKramer]

Here is a picture of the character from Final Fight that Dick Slater reminded me of with his silly facial expressions:

 

 

One of the more bizarre performances I can recall.

 

Also, this is the first show we've tried with no play-by-play.

 

Where the Big Boys Play #39 – Clash of the Champions 8

 

 

Chad and Parv celebrate "Ric Flair Day" by watching Clash of the Champions 8: Fall Brawl. In this show: is it better to cater to core audience or try to expand to casual fans?, Jesse Ventura: colour commentator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, thoughts on both the Z-man and Tommy Rich, for the last time in a while ... it's Ranger Ross!, why would you ever ring the WCW hotline?, and (finally!) some listener comments.

[Loss]

I've been listening, and this is an excellent show. I like the way with flowed with no play by play.

 

So glad you mentioned Cornette's commentary in Luger vs Rich, which is tremendous.

[soup23]

Thanks Loss, I think it may take some time to get used to no play by play but hopefully it will allow use to expound upon other things revolving around these shows plus i think it may lead to more discussion/disagreements in opinions between Parv and me with the matches.

 

Also interested to hear other opinions on this show. I kept feeling like I liked each match less than most that I have seen review this show. Would still call it a good show overall but not a great one to me.

[Bix]

I am curious how in depth the yellow mist is discussed.

[soup23]

Did we ever get a comprehensive guide of the degree of damage each color mist can bring to an opponent?

[soup23]

Did we ever get a comprehensive guide of the degree of damage each color mist can bring to an opponent?

[JerryvonKramer]

I am curious how in depth the yellow mist is discussed.

We don't discuss the yellow mist on the show, but Ross and Cornette do run down what each colour means. Ross makes a big point about how we've seen green and red so far, but Muta has been holding back the yellow one, which is famed in Japan (or something along these lines).

 

With this show, I want to know if I'm basically the only person who doesn't like the main event. That match typically gets at least ****, I think it's a total mess.

[Loss]

Did we ever get a comprehensive guide of the degree of damage each color mist can bring to an opponent?

No, but if anyone is skilled at this sort of thing a Muta mist infographic would be OUTSTANDING.

[PeteF3]

Sid's "whirlybird backbreaker" = the sometime finisher for Al Perez, the Ally-coptor. I want to say Oz used this as well (the "Emerald City Twister"). Yes, that's my first feedback contribution.

[DocSarpolis]

I'm looking forward to this show and hearing how much you enjoyed this Clash. Knowing it was the next show I went ahead and watched it the other day as I don't think I had every seen anything outside of the main event and maybe Luger-Rich once prior. I was blown away and it's easily one of the 3 best Clash of the Champs I've ever seen. An immediate all-time favorite show for me.

[JerryvonKramer]

Did we ever get a comprehensive guide of the degree of damage each color mist can bring to an opponent?

No, but if anyone is skilled at this sort of thing a Muta mist infographic would be OUTSTANDING.

 

As well as reading the Observers before each show, I always make a point of cross-checking Meltzer's ratings with Matt Peddycord's and Scott Keith's. I just like to have a sense of "consensus".

 

Anyway, Scott Keith's review has this:

 

Green: Temporary weakness

Red: Bizarre and unpredictable effects

Gold: Permanent loss of drawing powers

Blue: Only affects WWF wrestlers

White: Kills plant life

[Johnny Sorrow]

Anyway, Scott Keith's review has this:

 

Green: Temporary weakness

Red: Bizarre and unpredictable effects

Gold: Permanent loss of drawing powers

Blue: Only affects WWF wrestlers

White: Kills plant life

That's actually witty. Jerry, did you read Superman comics when you were a kid?

[thebrainfollower]

Great podcast of a great show. I think this is 2nd only to the first clash as the best one of the decade actually. Rocksteady and Bebop getting a shout out was the highlight, I'm hoping JVK can find a way to work Krang into a discussion at some point.

[soup23]

Glad to hear some dissenting opinion on this show as currently I would probably have it 4th of the Clashes behind 1, 4, and 6. Parv's comic references will mostly go over my head.

[shoe]

From the parts of the show that I've listened to dumping the PxP has generated more discussion on the show.

[BrickHithouse]

Was interested in Parv's take on American Football being "communistic" in nature compared to the high leagues in European soccer.

 

Which system do fans of each sport prefer?

 

Would the EPL for example be a better league with some sort of salary cap or common draft that helps even out the competition for top players? Is it even remotely possible, with Main Event-level players and teams literally spanning the globe? How do fans of lower-card EPL teams cope year after year?

 

Would the NFL be a better league if it was an open "capitalist" system of player acquisition?

 

As an NFL fan, I think overall the salary cap UFA system is a good one. Nothing is ever going be totally balanced, large markets still hold advantages. The common draft is still where the majority of top talent is acquired.

 

I like the idea of any team in the league having the capability of putting together a championship team.

 

Does that idea appeal to soccer fans?

[PeteF3]

First off, I'm not an expert on soccer. I watch the World Cup, rather intently, every four years and that's it--even though I live in a relatively big-soccer city. But the differences between how international leagues operate as compared to American ones does interest me.

 

There are two other factors in the disparity between the top EPL teams and the have-nots that don't apply to the U.S.: the Champions League and relegation. A berth in the Champions League means a metric, heaping shit-ton of money for a team. While relegation is a devastating blow to a team, probably to as great of an extent. It hurts prestige and of course it hurts that cash flow. There's no Champions League for the top U.S. teams to aspire to (I think there is a CONCACAF Champions League equivalent but I'm not talking about that) and no way for them to be relegated either. A team can fall apart and still be in decent position to rebuild.

 

On the other hand, that means there's not a lot of "playing out the string" in the EPL. While Kansas City and Seattle are going through the motions in meaningless baseball games in September, lower-rung teams like Aston Villa and Wigan Athletic are playing incredibly tense and meaningful football at the end of the Premier League season. Fans of non-Big 4 teams can also be content to get the FA Cup or the local derby--if anything, the EPL is actually closer to college football than the pro leagues. No relegation but you have certain have-nots that can take years to reach championship level, who often have to content themselves with chalking up an upset win over a powerhouse or a rivalry game victory as a successful year.

 

That's not even getting into the notion of playoffs trumping the regular-season schedule, which is totally backwards from soccer where winning the league (by record only) is paramount and the FA Cup is basically a consolation prize.

 

As for the NFL and others being fully open...well, it'd obviously be a lot better for the players and a lot worse for the owners. That alone is enough for me to probably be in favor of it even if the Yankees and Cowboys being forced into a budget generally makes for a more aesthetically pleasing game. It would be incredibly, incredibly difficult for any American fan to accept the possibility of 4-5 teams (or fewer, as is the case in other non-EPL leagues) being the only ones realistically capable of winning a championship.

[JerryvonKramer]

I've been thinking about this over the past few days and from a certain point of view, American Football is capitalist genius. If someone could custom-design a sport for the fan at home or for TV, it's NFL.

 

Think about it: every fan can cheer for a team that has a realistic chance of winning the Super Bowl in the next 10 years. Every season, they get to see their team against the biggest teams. They all have the possibility of having the best players.

 

From a TV point of view, from a merchandising point of view, from a fan perspective, it's a consumerist dream right?

 

Can teams even TIE in American Football? Draws are very common in "soccer", I'm sure someone told me American sports doesn't have draws in general.

 

----

 

But from a sports structure point of view it is essentially communist. Everything levelled out, redistribution of wealth, heavy regulation. You couldn't get further away from the structure of European football and the gross inequality of power you find there.

 

A few things related to PeteF3's post:

 

- "Playing out of the string" in the EPL -- we call that "playing for time". And you're right you don't get it alot in English football. But it's a cultural thing, comes down to English ideals of good sportsmanship, grit and determination. In Italian football you see it much more often. Two sides with nothing to play for late in the season will happily play out a pedestrian 1-1 draw. From a certain point of view, it's a knock on the EPL and other top leagues that really outside of the top 4 who are playing for European places -- to an extent -- the teams from 5-20 are just playing to stay up. No one gives a shit about the Europa league (the secondary European cup), so it's not much of a consulation prize for coming 5th or 6th.

 

- The Champions League is the be all and end all now, then winning the league (EPL in England). Therefore, the FA Cup doesn't have the allure or romance it used to. In Spain and Italy, their cup competition are next to meaningless. It's been an ongoing talking point for about 10 years now about whether the FA Cup needs to have the promise of a Champions League spot attached to it for the bigger teams to give a shit. They often field their second strings in that competition now and then if they manage to strumble through to the finals then start taking it more seriously. People say that really devalues the cup, and it does.

 

- Another idea that swings round once in a while is creating an NFL-style "Super League" where you take the giants from each of the European leagues and create a closed elite trans-European league. I think that has got 0% chance of ever happening because you've got to remember that these leagues have been going for 100+ years and have long histories. There's a lot of resistance to change. Hell, they've been talking about bringing in video replays for close to 20 years now and it's still not got a hope in hell of happening.

 

- The cost of getting relegated from the EPL isn't as devestating as you might think because they get a "parachute" payment to soften the blow. Then the club that goes down will basically hold a fire sale where they sell all of their best players who are eating up salaries they can't sustain on Championship income.

 

The problem happens when clubs are badly run or gamble too much when they get promoted. QPR are in the process of doing it this season. The best example in recent years is Portsmouth. They went for broke and signed all sorts of big-name players on big wages they couldn't possibly maintain. They did manage to win the FA Cup in 2008, but ended up going down and then, because they were paying guys like £80k a week, nobody would take them off their hands. So they pretty much went bankrupt. The administrators came in.

 

What happens in that sort of scenario is that the FA acutally PUNISHES the club by taking points away from them. You can start the season on -15 points. So financial mismanagement leads directly to struggling in league.

 

- Finally, for most seasons there are only 1-2 teams capable of winning the league. In England, Manchester United plus -- depending on the season -- one from Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and now Manchester City. In Spain, it's Real Madrid and Barcelona. In Italy, Juventus, AC Milan, or Inter.

 

So year-on-year every fan knows the teams who will be in the mix for the title, and they are almost always the same teams. One of the special things about football though is that that DOESN'T stop people supporting smaller clubs.

 

You might wonder to yourself "What the hell is the POINT of being an Aston Villa fan?" They might well wonder the same thing themselves sometimes, but they keep going to the matches or watching them on tv because it's in their blood. That's just part of who they are. The best hope Villa have got in a good season (see when Martin O'Neill was the manager) is breaking into the top 4, in a bad season, it's struggle to stay in the EPL. They are one of those teams who never seem to go down but never seem to get much higher than the mid-table. I don't know if it says something about the difference between the English mentality and the American mentality. Would American fans stick with a team like that year on year? With only the tiniest hope of ever breaking out of it?

 

In Spain, as I understand, it tends to be the case that EVERYONE supports either Real Madrid or Barca but also may support another side. So, for example, you might be a fan of Zaragosa, but you'd also have a team you'd support in the titanic, perpetual struggle between Real and Barca.

 

In Italy, it's more like it is here in England, but I think we have a greater number of "small clubs" here. England is the only country that has 4 tiers of professional leagues which each have dedicated fans. The numbers down in League 2 aren't more than 10,000 or so, but you just don't get that in Italy. Italian fans also don't tend to travel to away matches as much as English fans.

 

Germany has very very dedicated and passionate fans. Probably the closest to the English that I can see. German football is on the rise at the moment, Italian football kinda in decline.

 

----

 

This post ended up being longer than I thought. But I've always been fascinated in WHY American sports -- NFL in particular -- have such a different structure from European sports.

 

I wonder if anyone has written a study on that, I'd love to read it.

[PeteF3]

This is stretching the definition of even "Pro Wrestling Mostly," but hey, let's keep going...

 

I've been thinking about this over the past few days and from a certain point of view, American Football is capitalist genius. If someone could custom-design a sport for the fan at home or for TV, it's NFL.

 

Think about it: every fan can cheer for a team that has a realistic chance of winning the Super Bowl in the next 10 years. Every season, they get to see their team against the biggest teams. They all have the possibility of having the best players.

 

From a TV point of view, from a merchandising point of view, from a fan perspective, it's a consumerist dream right?

 

Can teams even TIE in American Football? Draws are very common in "soccer", I'm sure someone told me American sports doesn't have draws in general.

[/qb]

 

This is all pretty on the mark, though actually an EPL fan would see the "top teams" more often--it's home-and-away against everyone else in the league, right? A team not in the same division as a New England or Green Bay will only see them every 2-4 years.

 

Since the NHL added shootouts/penalty shots in the wake of the season-destroying lockout, the NFL is the only league left where a tie is possible. It happens about once a decade, including a game last year. College football, which didn't have overtime at all for decades, has a different system that eliminates ties entirely.

 

And there's something we haven't even gotten into--I'm sure the concept of college athletics is something Europeans find completely baffling. The only equivalent is the annual Oxbridge boat race, now imagine a whole national swathe of universities competing in such a competition with millions of dollars and fans and greater popularity than the NFL depending on which part of the country you're in--both Chad and my respective necks of the woods, for example.

 

So year-on-year every fan knows the teams who will be in the mix for the title, and they are almost always the same teams. One of the special things about football though is that that DOESN'T stop people supporting smaller clubs.

 

You might wonder to yourself "What the hell is the POINT of being an Aston Villa fan?" They might well wonder the same thing themselves sometimes, but they keep going to the matches or watching them on tv because it's in their blood. That's just part of who they are. The best hope Villa have got in a good season (see when Martin O'Neill was the manager) is breaking into the top 4, in a bad season, it's struggle to stay in the EPL. They are one of those teams who never seem to go down but never seem to get much higher than the mid-table. I don't know if it says something about the difference between the English mentality and the American mentality. Would American fans stick with a team like that year on year? With only the tiniest hope of ever breaking out of it?

This is where I think college football (or basketball) is actually closer to the EPL/European model than the professional leagues. In the top division of college football you have about 120 teams divided geographically (sort of) into conferences of 8-14 teams. Each conference has certain teams that seem to be perennially at the top each year and have-nots at the bottom and a few in-betweeners who can contend for a conference title every so often but generally don't. It's still probably more fluid than the EPL, but on an individual conference level, the Ohio State University or the University of Alabama can be considered to be their respective conference's equivalent to ManU. They've had some low periods, and Alabama was pretty terrible in the late '90s and early '00s, but it's only temporary in most cases. The gap isn't quite as big now as it was in decades before, due to newer scholarship limit rules and the explosion of TV coverage, which gives the more minor teams a national stage presence that didn't exist in the early '80s and before.

 

And yet, the following of a team like the University of Minnesota or Mississippi State because it's "in their blood" is still there, just like it is for Aston Villa. With schools having a greater community presence than a professional squad, that and the alumni connection fosters even greater loyalty. The EPL teams have local derby games that carry great importance which are akin to the big rivalry games that every school big and small has. Ohio State fans would generally prefer to go 1-11 with a victory over Michigan than go 11-1 with a loss to Michigan. A lost season can be redeemed by spoiling the season of a rival.

 

This post ended up being longer than I thought. But I've always been fascinated in WHY American sports -- NFL in particular -- have such a different structure from European sports.

I think when it comes down to it, it's all about the size of the country.

 

Perspective time: the British soccer system--92 teams in the top 4 leagues that JVK mentioned--is confined to a territory that's about the same size as the state of Alabama (I know there are a few Welsh teams grandfathered in). Looking at an EPL map, in any given season you'll have 5 teams in the London area alone, as much as half the league in the Manchester-Liverpool area, a few teams in the North, and a couple of others scattered in various other parts of the country. The NFL has a team in Seattle and a team in Miami and at all points in-between. It's the equivalent of the theoretical Pan-European Champions League mentioned earlier.

 

The EPL has 20 teams for a country of 60 million. A similar team-per-3-million scale in the U.S. would result in a league of 100 teams, which outside of college football just doesn't work. So instead of several teams per metro area, only the very biggest metropolises (NYC, Chicago, LA) get multiple teams in any given league (acknowledging that LA has no NFL team at all, but they used to have 2). This size gap goes all the way back to the birth of professionalism in American sports, in the late 1800's. Back then the absolute widest gap between locales would involve an East coast team and a team in St. Louis or maybe Minneapolis--still a territory many, many times larger than England or almost any European country you'd care to name. Owners at the time realized that they could make more money establishing a monopoly of a sport in one particular city and "own" that city, with more than enough big cities to go around to organize a full league. As transportation made coast-to-coast travel possible and populations shifted to places like Florida and the Southwest, this brought the need for league expansion and the so-called "franchise" system that's completely foreign to leagues outside of North America.

 

There's some good discussion on the subject here, as well as the blog post that this link is a response to. Other big differences I hadn't picked up on are the distribution of TV money and foreign quotas or the lack thereof.

 

Country size, incidentally, is one reason (aside from sticking a genie back into a bottle that isn't going to go) why the idea of relegation in any U.S. league is a pipe dream. The NFL might--might--be okay with its once-a-week scheduling. But if a west coast team like Seattle or San Diego gets relegated and replaced by a Hartford or a Pawtucket, it's going to create scheduling chaos resulting in the new imbalance of eastern- and western-based teams. To say nothing of how devastating it would be if a league were to lose Chicago as a top-flight market and instead have to replace them with something like Des Moines.

 

Um, oh: I'd like to know if the Observer ever covered the fallout from TBS over the plastic bag angle. There were some people in charge who were really, really upset that WCW would air such a thing.

[tomk]

----

 

This post ended up being longer than I thought. But I've always been fascinated in WHY American sports -- NFL in particular -- have such a different structure from European sports.

 

I wonder if anyone has written a study on that, I'd love to read it.

 

There has been a ton written about the construction of the illusion of competitiveness and how U.S. sports do it vis a vis the rest of the world.

 

I do think this is worth reading:

 

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/27/uk-vs-...ation-analysis/

 

think my conclusion is that the American sports leagues achieve the illusion of competitiveness by severely restricting the number of teams – note that there is no promotion or relegation to the NFL, NBA, MLB or NHL. The UK system should probably be seen as one in which the real league is the European one – the Champions League – but in which the minor-league teams are allowed to play against the major ones. I guess it’s something of a judgement call whether this is better or worse for the fans of non-Big-Four teams than a league in which they supported a team which had a chance of winning, but much less local connection to them (for example look at the geographical map of MLB support). It is true that there’s only four teams in the Premier League that have any realistic chance of winning, but there’s only three teams that have any chance of being the top NFL team in California, because it only has three teams.

[JerryvonKramer]

Thanks for that tomk and he's absolutely right.

 

The equivalent of the NFL would be a European Super League featuring 20 teams, I could name them now (ok then! these 18 teams, plus Chelsea and FC Porto).

 

The thing is though that there'd be all sorts of outcry about the formation of such a league. For example, Man City are not one of the 20 teams I've named, yet they are the current Premier League champions, they've been bought by a billionaire, Sheik Mansoor, so they look set to be major players of the next decade. If you made that league right now, there'd be an argument for including them over Liverpool, who are historically one of the most successful teams in Europe (currently in a slump).

 

This is why it'll never happen. The system with The Champions League works quite well because while it's mostly the same elite teams year on year, upstarts like Man City can break into it and take another team's spot in any given season.

 

The thing I wonder about though is that in football, the big clubs just keep getting bigger and richer. Does that happen in NFL or is the growth of each franchise somehow capped?

[PeteF3]

The salary cap effectively prevents NFL (or NHL, or NBA, or to a lesser extent MLB which has a "luxury tax" on payrolls over a certain threshold) teams from getting too big. The Dallas Cowboys are the richest team in the NFL and one of the richest in the world but they only have so much money to spend on players, the same amount as Buffalo or Cleveland.

[JerryvonKramer]

So the rest of the money is just pure profit right?

 

I think that's one of the things that American owners don't get when they come over here and buy clubs. The Glazers at Man Utd, or John W. Henry at Liverpool.

 

A football club is not a profit making enterprise. It's just a massive money sink, a blackhole almost.

 

There are EPL players on £200,000 a week. At the bigger clubs even the squad players will be on £50k a week minimum. If an owner comes in and spends £100 million on players in transfer fees, and then something like £2.5 million A WEEK in player wages, he has to realise that probably he'll need to spend another £70 million the year after that and the same again the year after that if he wants the team to keep competing. And he'll never see any real return on his investment. And, if he does something the fans don't like, they'll boo him too. There are loads of foreign investors who have found this out the hard way. The only people who can make it work is people with money to burn to use the club as their personal toybox (e.g. Abramovich at Chelsea).

 

Therefore, very few EPL teams actually turn a profit.

 

The thing is though, that the Aston Villas, Fulhams and Evertons of this world are all in the boat only at a lower level. If one of them gets an outstanding player, they'll be snapped up by one of the bigger teams. But virtually all of them have big debts.

 

I might be wrong, but I'm not sure, but I'd be willing to bet that every single NFL franchise turns a profit. Is that the case?

[BrickHithouse]

So the rest of the money is just pure profit right?

Pretty much, aside from operating expenses.

 

I think that's one of the things that American owners don't get when they come over here and buy clubs. The Glazers at Man Utd, or John W. Henry at Liverpool.

 

A football club is not a profit making enterprise. It's just a massive money sink, a blackhole almost.

 

There are EPL players on £200,000 a week. At the bigger clubs even the squad players will be on £50k a week minimum. If an owner comes in and spends £100 million on players in transfer fees, and then something like £2.5 million A WEEK in player wages, he has to realise that probably he'll need to spend another £70 million the year after that and the same again the year after that if he wants the team to keep competing. And he'll never see any real return on his investment. And, if he does something the fans don't like, they'll boo him too. There are loads of foreign investors who have found this out the hard way. The only people who can make it work is people with money to burn to use the club as their personal toybox (e.g. Abramovich at Chelsea).

 

Therefore, very few EPL teams actually turn a profit.

Wow, had no idea. So prospective owners know this going in and STILL buy a team? Why? Just so they can say they own one? (These are legit questions, not arguments)

 

The thing is though, that the Aston Villas, Fulhams and Evertons of this world are all in the boat only at a lower level. If one of them gets an outstanding player, they'll be snapped up by one of the bigger teams. But virtually all of them have big debts.

Are players on yearly contracts, multi-year deals, or something different? How many years will a top player play for a lower team before being snapped up by a top team? Is there compensation of any sort given to the lower team? Player trades?

 

I might be wrong, but I'm not sure, but I'd be willing to bet that every single NFL franchise turns a profit. Is that the case?

The easy answer is "yes". Green Bay is the only publicly owned team, so they are the only team required to release financial info. They magically declared a loss a couple of years ago which just happened to be during the negotiations with the Players Union on a new contract. Even the lowest, most incompetently run franchise will turn a profit in the NFL, and more than likely get a publicly funded stadium built for them to ensure their private profits. Assume any NFL owner claiming a loss is complete bullshit.

[JerryvonKramer]

Wow, had no idea. So prospective owners know this going in and STILL buy a team? Why? Just so they can say they own one? (These are legit questions, not arguments)

I honestly don't know, but I think part of it is hubris along the lines of "I made money with the Boston Red Sox, so I MUST be able to make money with Liverpool FC". They won't make any money with it.

 

Are players on yearly contracts, multi-year deals, or something different? How many years will a top player play for a lower team before being snapped up by a top team? Is there compensation of any sort given to the lower team? Player trades?

Players are on multi-year contracts, from anywhere between £20k to £250k A WEEK. If a club wants a player who is under contract, they have to pay a transfer fee. Your average EPL striker might fetch something like £10 million, but players have gone for £50million and over. Real Madrid bought Christiano Ronaldo from Man U for £81.7 million. That's the current record, but transfers over £20 million are common place now.

 

If a player runs down their contract they can actually move to another club for free (look up "Bosman ruling"). Essentially this is to stop clubs holding players against their own will.

 

The money involved in football transfers and in player wages has been "crazy money" since the early 90s. You can probably pinpoint it to when AC Milan bought Gianluigi Lentini for £13million in 1992. It wasn't long after that that Newcastle United bought Alan Shearer from Blackburn for £15million, then they just kept getting bigger and bigger. See here:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_football_transfer_record

 

Bear in mind that those are only the records. There'll have been tons of £20+ and £30+ million signings not mentioned there. Off the top of my head, Chelsea bought Fernando Torres for £50million, Shevchenko for £30million. I think Man City spent £30million on Robinho. Man U spent £30million on Veron back in like 2001, then £30m on Rio Ferdinand the season after that.