Whoa-oh-oh, it's magic!

  

In my other avatar (soccer punditry on the topic of Portland's women's soccer team, the Thorns, and you can read that stuff here if you have a mind to; it's under "Thorns FC:", it's good stuff, and there's not even a subscription fee, so, go, read!) I've been constantly running into this person who is violently opposed to the way the U.S. women's soccer is set up.

Because, you see, it screws over the players; the ur-scream about this comes together in a piece entitled Drafted and Shafted: Life in the NWSL in the online magazine Twentytwo.

And here's the thing about that; yes. I totally agree. 

The way American women's soccer is set up, the rules under which it operates, is designed to keep player salaries low, in much the same way that the rest of the U.S.'s economic life is designed to keep a thumb on the pay scale of everyone outside the C-suite.

But in the National Women's Soccer League the thumb is brutally visible because there's a side-by-side comparison that isn't as brutal to the players, and that's the big European women's leagues; the English FAWSL, the French D1F...in fact, most of the European leagues work very differently from the one here.

And I keep pounding on her about that. The primary reason that the U.S. leagues and the E.U. leagues are different is because the U.S. leagues and the E.U. leagues are different. 

Not better. Not worse. Just different.

The European leagues came together through a long period of accretion, and the primary factors that dictates their forms, and drives their economics, are 1) the ubiquitous nature of soccer in Europe, and 2) the promotion-relegation system.

Europe is soccerland.

Across the continent no sport is as popular, no sport is as rich, as soccer. That's where the money is. That's where the best athletes go. That's where the fans are.

There's a huge pot of cash sloshing around there...and...there's about a gajillion teams sucking it in.

Because the other part is that there's no way for some Richie Rich to "create" a team out of nothing. There's no empty place waiting for soccer; every little town and city has its own team playing in whatever league it plays in, from the megalopolis - usually the capitals - where there may be half a dozen huge clubs, to the tiny little villages where the baker is the goalie and the local gigalo is the star striker. 

There's no way for a team to come into a soccer league by "expansion" the way, say, American hockey or baseball or football leagues "expand".

So what you do, if you're a Russian criminal oligarch or a grubby Tuscan plutocrat or an Emirati oil sheik looking for secondhand sporting glory, is you buy into an existing team and turn on the firehose of money to buy good players and fancy facilities and take advantage of "promotion"; the system where if you finish on top of your little podunk-y league you move up to the next bigger one.

And up, and up, until finally you're in whatever your country calls your top flight, "Premier League" or whatever.

And then you keep splashing out the cash to win trophies (and money from broadcast fees and endorsements and everything that goes with being a Big Side) and get spots in "Europe"; the UEFA Champions League that brings you even more money.

One problem with this - for the sheiks and oligarchs - is that there's a downside - "relegation".

Your team has a shitty year? Down you go! Back to the second division, where your TV money is less and your endorsements are crappy and you're out of "Europe". If you're really unlucky you might have to sell your good players to cover expenses. You might go out of business! It's rare, but it's happened.

And the other downside is that because there's no league-wide rules on pay for any of these leagues...you're in an open bidding war with the other owners for those good players. You have to pay them the heavens and the Earth. The last figures I read suggested that a typical US soccer team in Major League Soccer passes on something like 40-50% of the revenues in the form of salaries, while a typical top flight English club (a Premier League team) has to pay out something like 70-80% to the players.

The recent attempt by the big European clubs to form a "Super League" was largely about changing all that.

The idea was to create a structure more like American sports. No promotion or relegation, no risk of losing out on the big paydays. What do you bet that the next step for the SuperLeague would have been a pay cap?

 

Right now, the way they're set up, the European leagues are good for the players, not-bad for the owners and the league, and not all that great for the fans.

Outside of their passion for their clubs, a lot of French and British and Italian fans will tell you about the way those clubs, desperate for money, strip-mine their wallets. Punitive ticket prices. Broadcast rights - many of the biggest E.U. clubs have set up their own streaming channels that you have to pay for if you want to see the away matches. You're gouged on matchdays and away days both.

We do things differently here in the U.S.

Here things are set up for the owners (well...sorta except in Major League Baseball, where the owners were too stupid to realize that the Reserve Clause was a fiction until the Messersmith Case tore down the free agency wall and set the players loose upon them. But the collusion the baseball owners replied to Messersmith with shows that they haven't given up trying to regain the whip hand over those damned players, and though MLB doesn't have a hard cap it has a "luxury tax" that tries to do the same thing).

Every other U.S. league has a hard cap. Every league restricts free agency in some form. Every league has a "draft" system by which players are brought in not through negotiations between the player and all the clubs in the league but through a system that funnels players at the drafting clubs. Every league is a closed system into which new clubs can come only through "expansion" - meaning cash on the nail.

That puts the players behind the owners in line for the lolly, which sucks for the players.

It also puts the fans in a weird position; dependent on the largesse of the owners for a way to be there to support the professional team of their choice. Their ticket prices don't depend as much on the paydays of the players as the profits of the club. And there's the problem of access; unless your city has a rich person who wants your sport in that city...you don't have it. Most U.S. leagues prevent fan ownership of professional sports clubs in that league.

IT also kind of sucks for the fans because the relatively low pay in the U.S. soccer leagues is a big incentive for the best soccer players - who have the option that the baseball and football and basketball players don't, of going outside the U.S. for a bigger paycheck - to leave the U.S. teams and fans behind for greener playing fields.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because in my conversations with this person they kept crying out with anger at the way the U.S. women players were being screwed and demanded that change to the way the European leagues work.

And I kept repeating that to change the way the players got paid you'd have to change the way the U.S. leagues work to the European model, and that was exactly what the people who controlled the league didn't want and wouldn't allow, so that this person might as well demand that we all get rich, be cute, and get a pony. 

Nice idea, not gonna happen.

And that as a fan this person might also want to be careful what they wished for, because if that change that isn't gonna happen DID happen the competition within U.S. women's soccer league would also very likely change to what the way the competition in the European leagues work, or, more accurately doesn't work; a tiny handful of top clubs bankrolled by criminal oligarchs and plutocrats and oil sheiks would win all the time, and a collection of impoverished tomato cans would constantly lose to the rich fatcats.

In the top French women's league the fatcat is Olympique Lyonnais Féminin, owned by some plutocrat named Aulas. This outfit has won their league fourteen years - fourteen fucking years - in a row (their rivals, Paris Saint-Germain, finally kicked them off the top step this past season to stop them going to fifteen) and that's not uncommon.

So alongside the chance that such a change would be financially good for the players but not the fans, the chance that such a change would be also not be good for the fans of most of the clubs who want their clubs to actually win something worth a shit is pretty high.

We bang on about this every time the subject comes up, every time we do I say all these things, and every time it makes absolutely no impression on this person. 

They insist that the magical solution is just to change things! Change things! Then everything - for owners, players, fans - will be better! Change is better! Just change things in the U.S. women's league to be more like Europe that in some magical way can totally just happen regardless of the social and political and economic differences and the utterly incompatible priors and all.

Not only can't I convince them that the change they're demanding aren't just improbable but impossible...but that if they could happen they might not be good for them. Good for the players, good for the league, good for the owners...but not for them.

They are completely certain that the something they want is both just a matter of wanting to do it bad enough and when it happens it will make the magic and everything will be better for everyone.

And the reason I went through all this?

Is because I'm seeing more and more of this sort of magical thinking on all kinds of subjects other than soccer.

Climate change?

Even if you don't slam head-on into the Great Wall of Republican Stupid, there's a crap-ton of people, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, that somehow think that we can have the Late Holocene Thermal Maximum without changing our Netflix viewing habits.

The idea seems to be that somehow we'll all magically be juuuuuust fine when the oceans rise three feet. The idea that our Pacific Northwest forests might burn? Yeah, well...ummm...

A third of our citizenry refuses to be vaccinated against a global pandemic? Sure! That'll be fine!

Allowing private equity execs the freedom to further advance the Second Gilded Age? Sure! What could go wrong?

Auditing votes all over hell? Sure! That'll Stop The Steal, which is totally a thing, and just needs the right magic and you people will see!

Look.

I get it. I mean, religions are concrete proof that humans ever since Olduvai indulge in vast amounts of magical thinking. It's not that I don't understand that people still cling to seeing the world around them as what they want it to be.

But, silly me, I thought that the whole point of the Enlightenment and the primacy of the hard sciences was an indication that the practical alternative to all this magical thinking was actual observation-analysis-deduction-conclusion. That the point of universal education was to make the vast majority of us comfortable with the idea that we don't have to believe in "belief"; that we can examine physical conditions and evidence draw the most-logical inferences from them.

But apparently not.

The problem here is that in the 14th Century us humans had a lot less raw physical power. We could change things; cut down trees, dig canals, build cities...but only to a fairly limited extent.

Now?

Christ, we can destroy ourselves and our planet if we choose to with the push of some buttons.

We're insanely far above and beyond the global Apex Predator. We're an unstoppable force. We're the gajillion-pound gorilla. We're on track to change everything from our climate to our ecology, and we seem unable to get past the way we thought 10,000 years ago when thunder was a message from the gods, in everything from soccer to social order.

That's...probably not good.