Nomadism at keekerdc

Nomadism

January 5th, 2013

The only sports team to live a completely nomadic life, and make it sustainable, has been the Harlem Globetrotters. At least as far as I can think of.

But we can do it, right? Travel to every event, with a ten percent chance of making that back through prizes, if we’re being generous. No worries, the sponsors will pay for it.

Maybe we can Darwin our way through, chalking up team flameouts to weakness of resolve and aptitude. On the surface, it may seem the promotion-relegation systems of football in Europe are doing much the same thing; rarely a month goes by without hearing a team of some stature reporting face-melting losses or money problems brewing.

Difference is, they typically don’t fold quite as quickly, because their benefactors are loooooaded. But let’s not delude ourselves, people don’t own sports teams as a convenient way to quickly dispose of burdensome cash. It’s not just a status symbol, like a yacht.

An esports team blows through a couple few hundred thousand dollars and can’t bring back even a tenth of it? Even half of it? Damn right they’re folding, and they’re not the exception.

Yea, there will be some winners, because someone has to win. It doesn’t excuse the rest of the goings-on. Really, we can’t expect much better when everyone fighting the battle for fiscal survival, is doing so without a fortress. Esports is a turf war of global scale, where everyone calls the internet home.

You can’t all be the home team.

Less hype, less expense, more frequent, more local. Give a town many evenings of lightweight entertainment, rather than blowing in for one ridiculous weekend every few years, doing so really just to produce a video feed, making the locale practically irrelevant. Become part of a community, many times over in many different places.

I’ll keep saying it ’till we get it, because it’s really the only way to generate stories like this. Even the most prolific of global sports properties, which are anomalies themselves if we’re being honest, all started from humble non-global beginnings, working regional rivalries towards a solvent business; and they still have their home today (which they obviously still pack to the gills on match day).

It’s all been done before, but we’d rather not. Why? I really don’t know. A desire to be absolutely separate from the world of traditional sports in every way?

This debate in two tweets:

@sirscoots @keekerdc @prophet4profit match day income is not realistic at all. Don’t build any plans around that. esports is same as tennis

— Michal Blicharz (@mbCARMAC) December 28, 2012

@keekerdc @sirscoots @mbcarmacin soccer its roughly quater each: tickets & hospitality , sponsorship , tv , merchandising & licensing

— Ralf Reichert (@RalfReichert) December 28, 2012

Written by keekerdc

January 5th, 2013 at 12:00 pm

Posted in glhf

http://www.facebook.com/Zechleton Michael Radford

vhttp://90minutesup.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/football-economics-comparing-revenue.html actually, most top tier footy teams rely a lot more on broadcasting according to this. The trouble is, that isn’t really a viable option for esports right now because nobody wants to pay billions of pounds for the rights to something so comparably tiny. Of course, a casual glance around the lower leagues shows you that even then, the money doesn’t spread around all that well.

Most competitive sports started out making their money through ticket sales and I don’t really see how esports can find another angle. I’ve never pretended to be a financial expert, but selling tickets does seem like a difficult proposition if you’re not a league/broadcaster of a sport that is played entirely on the internet.
keekerdc

Since it got a bit garbled by Disqus; the link from above: http://90minutesup.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/football-economics-comparing-revenue.html
http://twitter.com/Bijan_Mousavi Bijan Mousavi

I love getting these in my email. It always feels like Chris is a friend who I rarely hear from, but who, every once in a while, wires me a fully organized and formulated essay on how the toll booths should operate differently.

As to the topic of “nomadism”, I completely agree. Esports needs to foster more of a physical presence in communities. We can’t expect everyone to tune in to the global forums and watching other people play a video game on a computer in your office is a much harder point of entry for many newcomers.

It would be far easier to convince an uninitiated friend to to drop twenty bucks to see a live match at the local esports club/studio then to plan 3 months in advance to have 3-5 days free, call out of work, book a flight and hotel, and haul your tired ass out to an event that will probably endure for around 40 hours in total.
http://twitter.com/lafleuralan Alan LaFleur

Should be noted that most sports franchise owners in the United States, use the franchise as a tax deduction and are not looking to turn massive amounts of profits. Which is good because MOST sports teams do not turn a profit.

I agree with everything you say here. Well done.
keekerdc

Interested in hearing more about this point. Can you describe the basic mechanism that an owner would use a team as a tax discount, if it’s more complex than just an owner writing down losses?
http://www.facebook.com/cmoncivalles Chris Moncivalles

Disagreed completely. If you have the money to be able to purchase a franchise, I guarantee you you’re looking to make money. Look at the LA Dodgers. You don’t spend $2b to buy a franchise as a deduction. Since then, they’ve announced a $6b TV deal. Look at the NFL and you’ll realize that any teams that have been sold have been purchased with either an eye on moving to a larger market where they can cultivate their LOCAL following (LA) or they’re looking to improve their local stadiums to make them more revenue friendly.