标题: Local heroes [打印本页] 作者: tauringhuang. 时间: 2008-8-5 21:07 标题: Local heroes [attach]37502[/attach]Local heroes
Jul 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition
Sporting labour markets are becoming global. But what about sports themselves?
THE weather is perfect, with just enough breeze to freshen a warm June evening. Shea Stadium is bubbling this Friday night, with fans and food vendors, music and pre-game presentations. On the big screen the New York Mets introduce themselves: Jose Reyes, shortstop, from the Dominican Republic…Carlos Beltran, centre fielder, Puerto Rico…Endy Chavez, right fielder, Venezuela…Oliver Perez, pitcher, Mexico.
Mets fans have had a frustrating season, with rather fewer wins than losses. By Tuesday, the team’s manager will have been fired. But tonight they leave Shea unusually content. The Mets beat the Texas Rangers 7-1. Mr Perez pitches solidly and bats in two runs. Mr Beltran and Mr Chavez both score one and bat one in. The speedy Mr Reyes scores two and steals his 24th base of the year.
What is not unusual is the Mets’ cosmopolitan make-up: six of the nine starters were born outside the United States. The Mets are a prime example of the globalisation that has swept through sport’s labour markets in recent years. Now many sports are trying to pull off a more difficult trick: globalising their product markets too.
Start, though, with labour—and with baseball. In recent seasons, the proportion of players in the major leagues who were born outside America has been nearly 30%, up from 20% ten years ago. Dominicans are the biggest group, followed by Venezuelans. There are several Japanese players, and New York’s other team, the Yankees, has a star Taiwanese pitcher.
In the minor leagues the proportion is even higher: close to half. Among the legionnaires is Loek van Mil, a Dutch pitcher who stands 2.16 metres (7’1”) tall. If he fails on the mound, he might want to join Mr Yao playing basketball: in recent years foreigners have accounted for around 80 of the 430-odd players on the NBA’s rosters. In ice hockey, North Americans no longer think Europeans too weak, with sticks or fists, for the NHL. Over 30% of NHL players come from outside America and Canada. This year’s Stanley Cup winners, the Detroit Red Wings, were captained by Nicklas Lidstrom, a Swede and one of 13 Europeans in a 28-man roster.
In other sports a global labour market may seem less of a novelty. English cricket has long relied on the old empire. In football, the Italian and Spanish leagues were graced by several fine foreign players in the 1950s and early 1960s. Both countries then banned foreigners in the hope of helping their national teams. Spain’s ban was lifted in 1974 and Italy’s in 1980.
Thirty years ago, when Tottenham Hotspur, a London football club, signed two members of Argentina’s World-Cup-winning squad, English fans marvelled at such boldness. Now imports are so common that FIFA and UEFA, the governing body in Europe, would like to cap them, but under European Union labour law players must be able to move freely between member states. The transformation in England, with the richest television contracts in the sport, has been remarkable. More than half the players in the Premier League are from outside Britain, up from one-quarter ten years ago. English clubs employed almost one-eighth of the players in the Euro 2008 tournament this June, even though the national team failed to qualify. Only German clubs were better represented.
The supply side of football’s labour market has shifted too. Brazil has long been a big exporter. Most of the clubs in this year’s Asian Champions League, for instance, have at least one Brazilian. Over the past decade or so there has been a scramble for Africans. French and Belgian clubs had been using Africa as a cheap source of talent for years, but lately the English have been keen buyers, often via Belgium or France, of such talents as Ghana’s Michael Essien and Togo’s Emmanuel Adebayor.
Ten years ago just under half the players at the African national championships played in their own leagues and two-fifths were with clubs in Europe. Of the 146 men involved, 41 worked in France and only three in England. At this January’s tournament, less than one-third were with domestic teams, mainly in north Africa. Well over half were working in Europe: 202 in all, 57 of them in France and 41 in England (see chart 6).
Virtuous circle
It is not surprising that sport’s labour markets are globalising. The most talented people are gravitating towards the richest employers, whose ability to pay has been enhanced further by juicy television contracts. In turn, the best players make the sport more enjoyable to watch, bringing in more fans and more revenue.
The television money and fan base attract capital too. The globalisation of sport’s capital markets may not have gone as far as that of its labour markets, but it is under way. Several English football clubs are owned by foreigners, among them owners of American baseball and football franchises. In cricket, one franchise in the Indian Premier League has owners based in Australia and Britain.
Now several sports—and sports leagues in particular—are trying to expand their product markets beyond their borders as well, by staging games abroad. This is easier said than done. Sport, says Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College in Massachusetts, is different from other industries: “You can’t produce your product in one country and sell it in another. You can do it with laptop computers, but you can’t do it with a game.”
It is possible to export sport indirectly, by selling media rights. Most globalising leagues hope to make their money from fans in front of television sets rather than inside stadiums, and games abroad are one way of building a brand. But it may not work, because local loyalties matter. “It’s hard to get people interested in a baseball team on the other side of the world,” Mr Zimbalist says. “It’s an emotional thing.”
There are other potential obstacles. American football, for example, is not played much outside America and requires a lot of explaining. Soccer needs no introduction, but any league wanting to expand abroad faces another problem. Under FIFA rules it needs the permission of the national association of its host country. That association may well want to protect its own league from imports.
None of this is putting off prospective exporters. “US sports are rushing to get first into globalisation,” says David Stern, commissioner of the NBA. All of them, he explains, try to make money in roughly the same ways: by staging events, including games; by building television audiences; through digital media; through marketing partnerships; and by selling merchandise. European football and its top clubs are doing much the same thing, with the English to the fore.
Would-be globalisers have a success story to ponder: F1 motor racing, which has been stretching from its old haunts in western Europe, the Americas and Japan towards the fast-growing economies of the Middle East and Asia. This year the United States Grand Prix (GP) was dropped from the calendar. One race is scarcely enough to compete with NASCAR, and other countries have been eager to get their own GPs.
A Malaysian GP was added in 1999; races have been held in Bahrain and China since 2004 and in Turkey since 2005. In September the first Singapore GP—and the first F1 race at night—is due to take place. India, which already has an F1 team, is due to stage its first GP in 2010. According to Bernie Ecclestone, F1’s boss, races in Russia and South Korea may follow.
“We go where the markets for the manufacturers are,” Mr Ecclestone noted last year, “where they are going to sell their cars in the future.” The sponsors whose logos festoon the cars and drivers’ firesuits are doubtless pleased to see the sport spreading around the world. And there are no protective local federations to worry about. On the contrary, more countries seem to want the glamour of their own GPs than can be fitted into the calendar.
On the face of it, American football has much in common with F1. It already has dedicated fans in its main target market (Europe, and chiefly Britain). It is seen as an upmarket sport. The NFL faces no protected competitors abroad, and its product is scarce. The NFL’s 32 teams play only 16 regular-season games each; those that reach the Super Bowl play a further three or four. Almost all games sell out. Ten teams have a 25-year waiting list for season tickets.
How to go global
One big difference, though, is that F1 is already a global sport, whereas American football is not, and past efforts at exporting it have stuttered. Lots of exhibition matches have been played. In the 1990s the NFL set up a European league, which is now defunct. It has decided that there is no point in offering second-rate fare. “It’s got to be the NFL,” says Mark Waller, the Briton who oversees the NFL’s international operations. “It can’t be the European league.”
So last October the NFL went to Wembley Stadium in London, where the New York Giants (eventual winners of the Super Bowl) beat the Miami Dolphins 13-10. This year it will bring the New Orleans Saints and the San Diego Chargers to Wembley. Last year’s game was a sell-out. When tickets went on sale this May, 40,000 were snapped up within 90 minutes.
AFP
From Accra to London via LyonThough a great treat for Londoners, the NFL’s jaunts abroad are less fun for fans of the “home” team (the Dolphins last year, the Saints this time). Unless they can afford a foreign trip, they must forgo one of only eight regular-season home games. Mr Waller admits this is a problem. “We’ve got to find a way to get more games,” he says. His preference would be to add an extra game for everyone, to be played on neutral ground. That would be fair on all the teams, and there would be 16 games to be spread around: perhaps in Toronto (where the Buffalo Bills are already due to play once a season), Mexico City (where a game was staged in 2005) or American cities without an NFL team, as well as London. New venues might see four games a year.
Meeting pent-up demand in America may prove easier than generating new interest abroad. Still, the test for the NFL is whether live games bring in more British enthusiasts who will stay with the sport. To fans, the game’s technicalities are part of the attraction. The problem is to get newcomers hooked. The NFL has always used television inventively, and Mr Waller thinks that high-definition television, in combination with its website, can help to explain the game to newcomers by getting them close to the stratagems and the sweat. “The only way you could do that before was to get on a field. You can do that all digitally,” he says.
MLB and the NHL may be luckier, in that they have more games to spare and are preaching to the converted. The NHL plans four regular-season games in Prague and Stockholm at the start of next season. MLB first went abroad in 1999, to Mexico. This season began with a series between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics in Tokyo. Next year will see the second World Baseball Classic, a sort of baseball world cup, in which many MLB players take part.
Mr Stern’s NBA played regular-season games in Japan 18 years ago. Now, all its foreign games are friendlies. Yet it may be best placed of all the ball-playing organisations to build a business abroad—notably in China. Basketball is already popular, roughly on a par with football, according to CSM Media Research in Beijing. It is also simple to play, and the Chinese government has a five-year plan to put a basketball court (and a table-tennis set) in every village. The Olympic baseball stadiums in Beijing are only temporary structures. The nearby basketball arena is anything but.
Home-grown attractions
Better still, in Mr Yao the NBA has a local hero who draws in viewers by the million. It also has another Chinese star in Yi Jianlian, now of the New Jersey Nets. Its games are shown on CCTV’s main free sports channel and it has another 50 television deals in the country. Not everything is predictable: during the three-day mourning period for the Sichuan earthquake, CCTV took the NBA playoffs, along with other forms of entertainment, off the air and resumed coverage only slowly afterwards—albeit in time for the finals. Earlier this year the NBA sold 11% of its Chinese subsidiary to a group of five investors, including ESPN, for $253m. Eventually, thinks Mr Stern, there may be potential for the NBA to form a partnership with a Chinese enterprise to launch an NBA-affiliated league. Expansion to Europe is also on the horizon.
Getty Images
A starring role for YaoOf all the leagues with grand globalisation plans, the Premier League has probably caused the most fuss. Its Asia Trophy has been staged every other year since 2003. Now it is wondering how to expand its activities abroad. Earlier this year Richard Scudamore, the league’s chief executive, floated the idea of an “international round”, to be played in the middle of the season, in which all 20 teams would play an extra league match abroad with points at stake. This caused uproar.
One reason was that English fans cherish the symmetry of their football leagues: every team plays every other one twice, once at home and once away. The international round would upset that symmetry. (American sports leagues, by contrast, typically have unbalanced schedules.) Secondly, the Premier League has to deal with foreign football associations. Perhaps taking umbrage at the lack of warning, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC)—a potential host—said it did not like the idea of the English inviting themselves over. However, it has since softened its tone, saying that the Premier League would be welcome after all.
Mr Scudamore explains that things are still up in the air. “All the clubs agreed to take a look at this over a long period,” he says. “The clubs are still keen to see us developing some kind of international strategic play. I sit here not knowing in what variant it will come back, but it will come back.” One selling point for some of them may be that foreign games will help financially to even up a lopsided league in which the top four are entrenched. Unlike domestic television revenues, foreign fees are shared evenly among the clubs.
In China, potentially the biggest market, the Premier League lacks the draw of a local star. Zheng Zhi, captain of the Chinese national team, does play in England—but his club, Charlton Athletic, was relegated from the league in 2007. The only Chinese player in the Premier League last season, Sun Jihai of Manchester City, started a mere seven games. He has just moved to Sheffield United, one level below.
Some have also questioned the wisdom of selling television rights for the three seasons to 2009-10 to WinTV, a pay-television company. Mr Scudamore says that WinTV won a tender fair and square, and that it is “doing well from a low base”. WinTV says that since it started to show English football its subscriber base has increased “significantly”, to nearly 2.5m (some buying its channels singly, others as part of a package). It expects the number to double in 2008-09. People also mocked the sale of domestic rights to BSkyB when the league started, Mr Scudamore says—and look how that turned out.
“If they are going to be interested in sport,” Mr Scudamore says of potential fans in emerging economies, “we hope they’ll be interested in our sport. If they’re going to be interested in our sport, we hope they’ll be interested in us.” Most would-be exporters of sporting spectacles would no doubt say the same. They offer sport of the highest quality, whereas the standard of play in local leagues is often pretty ropy. But quite possibly, those fans, just like those in America and Europe, will eventually prefer to see their own local teams—the more so as standards improve.
Already, notes Seamus O’Brien, chief executive of World Sport Group, a sports-marketing firm based in Singapore, games involving national football teams draw far bigger audiences in Asia than do matches beamed from Europe “in the middle of the night”. Mr O’Brien, who counts the AFC among his clients, thinks Asian football associations should treat the game at club level as an infant industry. They should shell out cash on bringing in foreign players—as Western sports have been doing for years, and as Major League Soccer did to bring Mr Beckham to America. He proposes that South-East Asian countries pool resources to form their own regional super-league, which would be stronger than national competitions. There is money to pay for this: the second-placed bids for Premier League football rights in Asia, he says, amounted to $600m.
Eventually, believes Mr O’Brien, “Chinese football will be bigger in England than English football is in China,” because the number of Chinese expatriates wanting to watch games from back home will outnumber their English counterparts. That may be some time off. But in the sports business developed countries no longer call all the shots. The strongest evidence for that co[attach]37501[/attach]mes not from baseball, basketball or football, but from another of the world’s great games: cricket.