The Money Issue
A look at the buckets of cash being thrown at the Super Bowl, the IPL, Premier League and PGA Tour - meanwhile, The BYC continues to flourish on the smell of an oily rag.
Judging by the feedback from yesterday’s Bounce, there are a lot of grumpy Winter Olympic watchers.
It’s nice to know I wasn’t just one old man shouting at clouds1.
The coverage has been dire and it continued last night as the broadcaster and commentator got completely blindsided in the men’s 20km biathlon. So obsessed were the cameras with the apparent battle between Norwegian JT Boe and Russian Maxim Tsvetkov, they didn’t realise until the last couple of kilometres that there were two others on the course doing better than them - French winner Quentin Fillon Maillet and Belarusian Anton Smolski.
It was bad enough they didn’t once show Kiwi Campbell Wright but the whole thing was a shambles, which was a huge shame because the biathlon is my favourite Winter Olympic event.
Anyway, I promised not to spend all day whining again so I’ve turned my attention to something that most of us wish we had a bit more of - money.
The Super Bowl kickoffs at Monday lunch time and I’ll point to some great American football yarns in Friday’s newsletter but right now let’s focus on what really matters - the ad revenue.
The apex predator of the sport’s commercial world, the Super Bowl’s entire ad inventory has been sold by broadcaster NBC Universal, with some 30-second slots selling for a record US$7 million.
According to a report in Deadline, a number of movie studios have bought slots, as have your usual suspects like tech and insurance, cars, beer and snack foods. More promisingly from a global perspective, “travel has bounced back”, indicating that the sector is preparing to come out of a long, Covid-enforced hibernation.
“The NFL has never been stronger and has led us to new records this year,” Mark Marshall, president of advertising and partnerships at NBC, told Deadline. “We’ve seen an increased appetite for fans to watch the NFL across all our platforms. This multi-platform consumption has attracted even more advertisers who have the desire for the immediate scaled reach of sports.”
A few companies have released their Super Bowl offerings to YouTube already and, as usual, there is some serious star power.
Ninety seconds at $7m per 30s, with Scarlett Johannson and Colin Jost. Hate to think what Amazon’s outlay for this is.
If there is a collection of literature I wish I’d kept from my childhood it’s my Shoot! Annuals. I remember one, possibly 1979 or 1980, had a prominent article about Trevor Francis moving from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest, in the process becoming “Britain’s football’s first million-pound man”2.
It was a jaw-dropping moment for the sport, given that only a couple of years earlier Kenny Dalglish had set a British transfer record fee by moving from Celtic to Liverpool for £440,000. He replaced Kevin Keegan who had been sold to Hamburg in Germany for, sharp intake of breath, half a million pounds!
It all sounds so quaintly ridiculous now, like those stories you hear about how your colleague’s cousin’s father-in-law bought a house in Ponsonby in the late-70s for $25,000.
After the needle moved to seven figures in the 70s, Jean-Pierre Papin was sold for eight figures in 1992 and Neymar shredded the nine-figure mark by going from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain for £198,000,000 five years ago.
There are no jaws to drop any longer.
It’s a fascinating tool that outlines the crazy spending in Europe’s five biggest leagues, but the Premier League numbers stand out in particular.
Of the 20 most profligate clubs in Europe over the past 10 years, 14 are English, with the two Manchester giants leading the way.
The figures are calculated in euros and Manchester United have spent more than €1.5b on players since 2012 while reaping just €470m in return, a net loss of €1.075b. City’s net loss of €974m is not much better, although they have a boatload more trophies during that time to show for it.
Only one Premier League club, newly promoted Brentford, have made a profit (€43m) on the buying and selling of players in the past 10 years.
As further evidence that money can’t always buy you happiness, United, they of the huge outlay, drew 1-1 with Burnley this morning, who have spent €251m on players in the same amount of time.
American golf is awash with trust-fund brats with appalling dress sense but when they go at each other - Brooks Koepka v Bryson DeChambeau, for example - it is worth the price of admission.
The barbs shared between those two are mild compared to what Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee served up for Phil ‘Figjam3’ Mickelsen in an excoriating column.
Mickelsen gave an interview to Golf Digest in which he labelled the PGA Tour obnoxiously greedy for controlling the players’ image rights. It’s a really weird charge because how, in effect, would sports leagues make any money and be able to offer prize money if they didn’t?
Chamblee is an interesting guy. He had four children with his first wife and named them Brandel Jr, Bergen, Braeden (who died as an infant) and Bergen. The former tour pro has courted controversy with regularity including his hot take that Tiger Woods is the biggest underachiever in golf history - a claim that he backs up with math.
Anyway, it’s Phil, not Tiger in his crosshairs in the piece titled “Mickelson's statements inaccurate and ironic: Obnoxious greed? Et tu, Phil?”
It is epic.
If you cannot be bothered clicking through - and I know most of you don’t - I urge you to think again and offer these opening two paragraphs as a teaser.
Phil Mickelson cares a lot about his media rights, but apparently not so much about human rights.
Delivering a salvo from Saudi Arabia, where he – whether he knows it or not – is just a highly paid ventriloquist puppet involved in a sportswashing operation for a murderous regime guilty of human rights atrocities, Mickelson said the PGA Tour was guilty of “obnoxious greed”.
The PGA Tour is worth an estimated $2 billion, despite being officially a not-for-profit organisation (got to avoid those taxes somehow).
One burgeoning sports league that is definitely a for-profit organisation is the Indian Premier League, which last year welcomed two new teams to the tournament for a combined sale of $1.7b.
The IPL is valued at $6b and this piece in the Financial Times outlines how it plans to get bigger and bigger, especially with the broadcast rights held by Star Asia expiring at the end of the year and at least three giants - Amazon, Sony and Reliance Industries - expressing an interest.
A bidding war will increase the value of the IPL exponentially and along with huge injections of capital from private equity behemoths CVC Capital, this will increase the pressure to extend the current two-month window for the tournament.
“The league has to become bigger,” [N] Santosh insists. “It can’t just be a two-month affair. It has to be a four- or six-month affair.”
Given the fact that the IPL is no longer the grease for the wheels of the global game, but the wheels itself, it seems like a matter of time before it is international cricket that is fighting for windows, a la football.
FROM THE POD
In the latest episode of BYC we talk about the startling omission of D Cleaver from the test team to face South Africa, discuss Australia’s refusal to play at McLean Park, ponder when a ball is dead or alive and have a really nice chat with Michael Bracewell (who tells us why he’s had to kiss and make up with James Neesham).
We didn’t discuss the White Ferns win against India in their first T20I in Queenstown today as it was taking place while we were recording. I was made aware of one extraordinary fact, however. Suzie Bates, who is 34 and made her international debut in 2006, has never played for New Zealand in her hometown of Dunedin.
Think about that for a second: Elton John has played Dunedin more often than one of New Zealand’s all-timers, with more than 250 internationals to her name.
Giuseppe Savoldi, in 1975, was the first footballer to be sold for £1m when he moved from Bologna to Napoli.
This is a nickname an older generation of players bestowed upon Mickelsen when he arrived on the PGA Tour. It stands for “F*** I’m Good, Just Ask Me.”
