Racing around the World

If he is every footballer on planet earth, then I concede my point. Otherwise, he is but one point out of millions in a massive graph. And not relevant to a conversation about trends.

Seeing as though you're making stupid arguments with no clear idea of what you're even saying, I'm tempted to not reply with any more than that, but it's an opportunity to talk about it nonetheless.

You need to know about the origins of professionalism. At a time when most people have an industrial or agricultural job, entertainment (in there same way as science or art) does not have a large talent pool to pick from. They are mostly men of leisure, I.e. wealthy. That's where the people who were the very best at sport at the beginning of the industrial revolution come from -the kind of sport that is popular today.

Note, I'm making the distinction of modern team sport because other early sport was either 'professional' because it was part of your job (archery, shooting) or amateur as folk tradition or just an unpaid spectator event, at your own cost.

Cricket is a middle/upper class sport in England. This is because the game required a relatively expensive amount is equipment, including large amounts of grass unused for agriculture. Same with golf. Same with polo, except that also included horses. The association stuck, and remains today. Who can take off the majority of the working week to watch/compete in a 5-day test? Bob the 80-hour week farmer couldn't, I'll tell you that.

So the working classes needed a game that required very little equipment, no horses, and only used up at most half a day from your working week. Here in the industrial revolution we find football, all the various versions of it.

With better labour laws in England, workers got half a day off on Saturday, and a full day off on Sunday. But Sunday was for church, so 3pm on a Saturday became the traditional football kickoff time, a tradition that in England continues to today.

But that working week schedule is a big problem for teams of working class people who play against the wealthy. Wealthy people have so much more free time to practice, and they aren't knackered from being a factory worker all week.

Here comes the solution: professionalism. If you charge a small amount for spectators to come and see your team, you can pay your players. That means they can spend just as much time practicing as the public schoolboys, and you have a better team. They could now afford to travel to away games more easily. They could support a family.

The wealthy don't like this new system. They're cheating! It's immoral! It's unfair! We're the better team, and they're using underhand tricks to beat us.

This is where Rugby League and Rugby Union split. The North, with its industrial base, growing cities and working class majority, start Rugby League. And Rugby Union remains amateur until the 1990s.

Rugby League changes some of its rules to make it more exciting, closer scores and generally attract more spectators. This is a mature sport, in the same way as we recognise it today.

But as well as allowing your team to improve, you're also providing incentive for better players, from other clubs to come and play with you.

Professionalism makes sport into a labour market. Better team means more spectators and more money. More money and better team means you attract better players and staff. Better players and staff means a better team.

You don't have to be paid 200 grand a week to be a professional sportsperson. You jusy have to be paid, and the amount of people who are paid to entertain by playing sport is way, way more than you imagine.

If you look up things like Zipf's law, you'll learn about this kind of snowballing. But the snowballing doesn't happen evenly, it has a distribution where there are very few extremely successful teams, and very many mediocre teams. This distribution is the same in other markets. Such as, for example, Hollywood.

In Hollywood, there are very few large blockbusters that could attract people from the other side of the planet. There are very many mediocre low-paying student films that can barely put a cast together.

For every Barcelona and Lionel Messi, there are a hundred thousand Tim Stevenses of teams like Leigh Athletic. No-one is moving from Argentina to play for Leigh Athletic

This system of Markets in sport is very fertile. The FA of Germany, a country very familiar with competition, has like 20,000 members, making them the biggest sport governing body in the world. The sport, and its structure, are very successful.

Contrast the NFL in the USA, with its non-competitive closed systems, sharing of revenue and labour, its collective action and strong unions. This is a great system for preventing team failure (as is the market system, because you need opponents to play against, providing incentives to keep opponents financially healthy) and great for these particular 32 NFL teams because there is no way another organisation can compete - you've sealed the system.

NFL teams attract people from far away because there are few options in a closed system.

The vast majority of soccer teams can't attract talent from beyond a local radius because they're subject to market forces and because there's little to attract them.

Rich market clubs and closed systems are a tiny minority of teams on the planet. Just because you can see them, don't assume they're the rule.

/r/polandball Thread Parent Link - i.imgur.com