Ordering the Acronyms: Are FIBA and FIFA Useful Analogues?
What hath Barca to do with basketball? Based on our recent posts, much, and in every way. On Monday I took a stab at the vexed question of whether NBA owners should restrict their players from international competition. My post was inspired by Kevin Arnovitz and it, in turn, inspired a number of insightful comments from our readers. The sort of comments that made me brag to the neighbors-“our readers are smarter than yours, neh, neh, neh, neh.” No shame.
Those comments pushed me to think harder about the issue. A behind the scenes exchange of emails ensued, largely centering around Mark Cuban’s claim that no other commercial industry would simply loan out its best employees for someone else’s slave labor. Our international readers took umbrage and issued a polite “ahem”. What about FIFA and local clubs? The Euroleague and FIBA? “Reasonable questions,” I thought. “Better flash a bat signal high above Gotham.”
Enter Brian Phillips, atop his Underwood and properly attired, as you might expect, in a handsome cape, armored abs and a steely cup of zinc-iron alloy . Brian is, simply put, a masterful sportswriter. He helms The Run of Play, the flagship blog for all things soccer. Brian kindly contributed the following post in an attempt to distinguish between the NBA’s relationship with FIBA and [insert local club] with FIFA.
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A Troublesome Comparison
The trouble with comparing international basketball to international soccer is that international basketball is a quaint sideline, an activity designed for small gyms and pale Lithuanians, and international soccer is a gigantic, dripping sea-god of money. In basketball, the NBA runs the world, because the NBA makes a billion dollars a year in TV money and nothing at FIBA can stand up to that. In soccer, things are more complex, because while the domestic leagues are rich, FIFA is rich, too—it’s expected to clear around $2.5 billion in TV rights for the next World Cup alone, a tournament that lasts one month—and has the power to keep the clubs in line.
On top of that, the satellite economy around international soccer crushes—just absolutely dwarfs—anything to do with international basketball. Dirk Nowitzki might suffer some marginal loss, in German shoe profits or something, if the Mavs don’t allow him to suit up for Germany, but it’s still a better investment for him to stay on Mark Cuban’s good side and work toward his next contract. That’s not the case in soccer, where huge swathes of the sport-celebrity industry—measured in media exposure, kit sales, shoe sales, book sales, endorsement deals, posters, sticker books, celebrity girlfriends, replica doggie sweaters—revolve around the international game. David Beckham would have been a star had he only played for Manchester United, but he became a galaxy-swallowing ur-phenomenon when he “completed the transformation from villain to hero” (thanks, Wikipedia) with the English national team.
The National Team is an Economic Force
So if a soccer club chafes at having to send a multimillion-dollar superstar to have his ankles hacked at Ginobili-style in a midseason international game against Kyrgyzstan—and the teams chafe all the time; club managers hate the international game, and fanatic club supporters sometimes do too—the soccer club can’t just pull a Cuban sulk and expect Ronaldinho to fall in line. There’s a gray area to this, and it often happens that a famous player who’s been called up to their national team for an insignificant friendly will coincidentally come down with a minor groin strain and have to pull out of the squad at the last moment. (Friendly wave to Steven Gerrard.)Â But for the most part, in most countries, the national soccer team is a force to be reckoned with, rather than, say, a venue for the display of Mike Krzyzewski in shorts.
So that’s the crass material explanation for why NBA owners might have a stronger hand in discouraging their players from competing in international tournaments than soccer owners do. FIFA can afford to pay clubs some compensation for players who feature in major tournaments (around $110 million for the next World Cup, in what is essentially a take-this-and-shut-up kickback), has more and broader regulatory power than FIBA (FIFA sanctions the individual domestic leagues, while the NBA plays by no one’s rules but its own and possibly Leon Rose’s), and has the self-interest of the top players on its side.
Clubs Deeply Rooted in Community
But there’s more to it than that. As Tim’s Monday piece showed, we’re very comfortable in America thinking of teams as businesses and of players as “assets” and “employees.” Our leagues are made up of a small number of extremely valuable franchises competing in closed competitions in perpetuity, and—probably because of the geographic distance separating many fans from their teams—we’ve basically accepted that everything revolves around the displaced reality of TV. It’s not that we have less of a personal stake in our teams, and we definitely don’t love it when crass Oklahoma billionaires swoop in, move them halfway across the country, and rename them after abstract weather phenomena. But we’ve seen it happen before, and we’re able to pick ourselves up from it.
That’s not the case with soccer, especially in Europe. Teams are clubs, not franchises: they’re, at least in theory, institutions with ancient local roots whose role in the community is more important than their ability to buy diamond-studded horn-rims for the local equivalent of Al Davis. Every tiny town has its own club, and they’re all linked together in multi-tiered league systems that mean (again, in theory) that Scunthorpe United could one day supplant Manchester United at the top of the major leagues. It may be unrealistic, given that the top teams all act like American sports franchises anyway, but fans expect owners to act as responsible stewards for clubs that fundamentally belong to the community. There’s a deep-rooted sense that soccer isn’t supposed to be all about the money, which can be jarring for American fans who’ve known what the mid-level exception was since Keith Jackson explained it in doodle-bug terms when they were on their mother’s knee. Again, it’s unrealistic, since soccer is often transparently all about the money, but in practice, an owner who huffed about risking his “assets” in international play would likely wake up to an exploding Porsche. At least rhetorically, owners have to play a different game. More idealism, more hypocrisy.
A Passionate Public, Globalization and the Future
And that’s the thing about international soccer compared to international basketball: the situation holds because everybody really freaking cares. The paradox of the situation I’ve described here (more materialism supported by more idealism) is possible because billions of people love international soccer. The World Cup, the European Championship, the Copa América, and so on just matter in a way that even Olympic basketball, even outside the United States, doesn’t, except possibly within the heated inner sanctum of Jerry Colangelo’s imagination. The fans’ passions set the limits of the organizations’ powers, and determine where and how the players are going to get paid.
At the moment, the NBA doesn’t have to contend with anything like this parallel reality of loyalty and competition, and that may be a good thing (because it means we’re the center of the universe of basketball, and because our teams’ top players may be less likely to get injured in spasms of charitable patriotism) or a bad thing (because international soccer is an absolute blast, and how cool would it be if there were other great teams around the world for us to compete with?), but it’s the way things are at the moment. What’s intriguing is the thought that if all the hoops-globalization/Stern-in-China memes we’ve had to swallow over the last few years turn out to be right, that could eventually change.
If basketball does start to approach the worldwide popularity of soccer, one question will be whether the more open mercantilism of the NBA, combined with its independence from FIBA, will keep the international game in second place, or whether a surge of fan interest could make country vs. country matter. David Stern would trade Tony Parker’s ankle for another billion fans in a heartbeat, but it’s not clear whether his NBA-centric vision of the game’s growth would ultimately kill international basketball or give it new life.
To read more of Phillips-and why wouldn’t you?-visit The Run of Play.
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