Stuff Your Superleague.

[Hot Pepsi]

That's a good explanation.

"A great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

College sports in the US is in the same situation. Nobody is entirely - or, in some cases, at all - happy with the current set-up*, but changing it would require taking away money or power or opportunities from people who currently have it, and nobody is willing to give up what they have for the chance of something better especially if it's mostly somebody else that will benefit.


*Except, perhaps, the bookies.

[diggedy derek]

Fair play to Arsenal – the fans have done exactly the right thing and turned up in loud, angry mass outside the Emirates.

[ursus arctos]

The Players League is a fascinating subject and a lot of good work in primary sources is still being done, but it is not frivolous to believe that it would have succeeded had it not been the victim of bare knuckled opposition by the established owners, the people who controlled baseball stadia (often those same owners), and the courts.

Absent global and family issues, I would be in Cooperstown today hanging out with the very people who are working on it.

Ward has my vote as the Most Interesting Man in 19th C Baseball, to the extent that I once considered writing a serious biography of him, only to pre-empted. He also is not without some responsibility for the league's failure (though he would say he acted pragmatically, and there is significant support for that conclusion). Had Marvin Miller somehow been able to transmit his skills and principles to Ward across time and space, history may have been much different.

The most famous image of Ward in his pomp

[ursus arctos]

A good portion of the more cerebral and outward-looking faction of the college football commentariat have spent the last several days discussing the idea of a College Football SuperLeague independent of the NCAA.

Serious people have estimated that the television rights alone for such a league would be worth between USD 1.5 billion and 2 billion a year.

It will never happen, but is a fun diversion.

[Hot Pepsi]

The Players League is a fascinating subject and a lot of good work in primary sources is still being done, but it is not frivolous to believe that it would have succeeded had it not been the victim of bare knuckled opposition by the established owners, the people who controlled baseball stadia (often those same owners), and the courts.

Absent global and family issues, I would be in Cooperstown today hanging out with the very people who are working on it.

Ward has my vote as the Most Interesting Man in 19th C Baseball, to the extent that I once considered writing a serious biography of him, only to pre-empted. He also is not without some responsibility for the league's failure (though he would say he acted pragmatically, and there is significant support for that conclusion). Had Marvin Miller somehow been able to transmit his skills and principles to Ward across time and space, history may have been much different.

The most famous image of Ward in his pomp

Since the book has been written, perhaps you could produce a film or write a novel about him. You're welcome to stay here while doing primary research on his roots.

At Penn State, there are conflicting legends about why he was kicked out. One says it was for "stealing chickens" which, I suspect, was a common offense in those days. The chicken coops were in the middle of campus until the 1980s. But a more reliable story seems to be that he was the victim of fraternity hazing and fought back.

it is not frivolous to believe that it would have succeeded had it not been the victim of bare knuckled opposition by the established owners, the people who controlled baseball stadia (often those same owners), and the courts.

I agree it was a fundamentally sound idea. But that's why the capitalists wouldn't allow it to happen. In those days, they didn't even have to pretend they were doing it to "Protect The Game" or whatever Rob Manfred would say now.



A few quotes from AG Spalding that seem prescient.

"Professional baseball is on the wane. Salaries must come down or the interest of the public must be increased in some way."

"Two hours is about as long as any American can wait for the close of a baseball game, or anything else for that matter."

But he also said:

"Neither our wives, our sisters, our daughters, our sweethearts, may play Base Ball on the field... they may play Basket Ball, and achieve laurels; they may play Golf, and receive trophies, but Base Ball is too strenuous for womankind, except as she may take part in grandstands, with applause for the brilliant play, with waiving kerchief to the hero of the three-bagger."

Women's Basket Ball must have been unbelievably dull back then if he thought it was less strenuous than Base Ball.

[Hot Pepsi]

A good portion of the more cerebral and outward-looking faction of the college football commentariat have spent the last several days discussing the idea of a College Football SuperLeague independent of the NCAA.

Serious people have estimated that the television rights alone for such a league would be worth between USD 1.5 billion and 2 billion a year.

It will never happen, but is a fun diversion.

Indeed, a lot of people in the 80s and 90s assumed it was going to happen soon. It actually would have made more sense back then when even the teams with the biggest fanbases were only on national TV a few times a year.

The TV money for a super league would be a lot, but the big schools are making a lot of easy money from their current conference TV deals and are generally happy with that arrangement. The SEC might be willing to sacrifice every other sport and every pretense of academic rigour to squeeze a bit more out of football, but the schools in the Big Ten won't. Neither will the Pac 12, I don't think.

There was some thought that the economic crisis wrought by COVID-19 could cause a change. But the schools that are most desperate for cash right now are not the ones in a position to form a super league to try to get a quick payday.

Players forming a union and/or otherwise winning a better deal could change that. Because then it really wouldn't be legally tenable at all to pretend that D1 football and basketball players are no different from D3 golfers. But we'll just have to see how that plays out.

Likewise, these lucrative conference cable channels etc may not make any sense in the future if cable TV as we know it ceases to exist.

[DPDPDPDP]

Fair play to Arsenal – the fans have done exactly the right thing and turned up in loud, angry mass outside the Emirates.

It’s just a pity that their players didn’t turn up tonight. Leno - oh dear, oh dear. Arsenal definitely sold the wrong keeper. Very poor game. That’s 90 minutes of my life that I won’t get back.

[diggedy derek]

If they keep up performances like that, though, they might get what they really want this season.

[Satchmo Distel]

Arsenal have been as poor as that for most of the season but the owner's contempt for the fans now being open knowledge means the lid is off and I'm not sure he will want to stick around if there are protests every week, as seems likely. That being said, they are still in the fucking Europa, annoyingly, so their season is not an outright failure yet.

[ursus arctos]

He's never there and won't be overly bothered. Having the entire city of St Louis baying for his blood didn't trouble him. His kid can run the lacrosse team or the e-sports franchise.

He may sell more quickly than he would have, but that's because his return on investment models now have a big hole in them where the SuperLeague money was.

[Patrick Thistle]

I see.

I guess what wasn't "pragmatic" about how the SPL et al. came to be was that nobody - at least nobody with power to do anything about it - looked at the league as a whole and said "We should just have one big club in each 'market.*'" But even before TV, or even radio, created regional fanbases, the owners thought in terms of carving up territory and taking new territory rather than just trying to make sure their own club had enough competitive fixtures.

The Montreal Canadiens of old didn't need to travel to New York and Chicago to "get a competitive game." Quite the opposite. Players from Montreal and the rest of Canada moved to those cities to get a paycheck.

They were colluding as a league and thinking about the success of the league and their sport overall, not least of all because other leagues could form and chisel their territory. There was no national body or transnational body that could organize the whole thing.
.

You seem to not know that The Football League might have been the first league in the world but it wasn't on its own for long. There was the Southern League, the Isthmian League and the Northern League very quickly after the original league was set up. These have all been subordinated into the pyramid now but in the early days they were viable alternatives for big clubs. So having a Scottish league was perfectly natural as regional leagues were the norm. The Football League didn't extend any further south than Birmingham.

You're probably right that nobody had a big picture for how the sport was going because it grew organically out of various institutions - unions and factories and school alumni and ex-servicemen and churches and cricket clubs wanting to do something in the winter. Various Football Associations existed of varying size and importance and they all had their own cups for teams to compete for. In 1888 leagues were a newfangled idea compared to the established competitions. The football league was not set up by the Football Association (which is why it attracted clubs from Wales who belonged to a different football association) and the FA didn't operate a league until 1992 when they helped engineer the breakaway Premier League.

So unlike North American sports where teams were often ruthlessly promoted by individual owners who saw them as a business in a way similar to carnivals and circuses, football grew in Britain in a different way.

[jwdd27]

Of course the early leagues would have been regionalised for sound logistical reasons, before motorised transport one presumes the train was the only option for an away trip, with further geographical expansion of the football league occurring once the transport options increased.

[ursus arctos]

An interesting aspect of the US experience is that early baseball clubs were not unlike early football clubs in being outgrowths off those types of associations. The circus model developed with professionalism, but was not always present nor was it inevitable.

[Hot Pepsi]

You seem to not know that The Football League might have been the first league in the world but it wasn't on its own for long. There was the Southern League, the Isthmian League and the Northern League very quickly after the original league was set up. These have all been subordinated into the pyramid now but in the early days they were viable alternatives for big clubs. So having a Scottish league was perfectly natural as regional leagues were the norm. The Football League didn't extend any further south than Birmingham.

You're probably right that nobody had a big picture for how the sport was going because it grew organically out of various institutions - unions and factories and school alumni and ex-servicemen and churches and cricket clubs wanting to do something in the winter. Various Football Associations existed of varying size and importance and they all had their own cups for teams to compete for. In 1888 leagues were a newfangled idea compared to the established competitions. The football league was not set up by the Football Association (which is why it attracted clubs from Wales who belonged to a different football association) and the FA didn't operate a league until 1992 when they helped engineer the breakaway Premier League.

So unlike North American sports where teams were often ruthlessly promoted by individual owners who saw them as a business in a way similar to carnivals and circuses, football grew in Britain in a different way.

I knew that all of those leagues started as small regional circuits. But they eventually found a way to coexist rather than battle to the death.

I’m not sure how they managed to prevent capitalists from owning their sport - or the other popular UK sports - for as long as they did.



I get that the FA and FL are separate, but the FAs and FIFW can still wield power and decide which competitions are sanctioned and which are “rogue” and all that. The USSF does that too and had a say in which leagues could count as the official second division and all that.

There’s nothing like that in the other big sports, for better or worse.

Nobody “sanctioned’ the USFL or any of those leagues. They just started playing.

Rob Manfred and the MLB owners just ruined much of minor league baseball by fiat and there’s nothing anyone else could do about it.

[ursus arctos]

It is an interesting question, and I think the differing mentalities in the US and UK were important to the outcome

The winners of the industrial revolution in the UK aspired to upper class status and took their cues from the traditions of the landed gentry. So buying a massive country house and bankrolling the local football club as a vaguely charitable enterprise were very much in keeping with that ethos. Play your cards right and you might get a seat in Parliament or even a peerage.

Whereas US capitalists of the era were invested in Social Darwinism and monopoly/cartel capitalism. That led to them looking to "monetise their investment" and create a closed shop in a way that wouldn't become popular in the UK for another century or so.

[Etienne]

There was also a very strong feeling that the workers should be encouraged to play and watch sport to keep them away from drinking and Bolshevism.

[Amor de Cosmos]

The winners of the industrial revolution in the UK aspired to upper class status and took their cues from the traditions of the landed gentry. So buying a massive country house and bankrolling the local football club as a vaguely charitable enterprise were very much in keeping with that ethos.

It was bit more pragmatic than that. Professional soccer in England (and probably Scotland) was a by-product of the introduction of the Saturday half-day-holiday. Factory and mill owners saw organised professional football as a way of keeping workers out of the pub on Saturday afternoons. Drinking was endemic, consequently Sundays were for going to church and sobering up — not necessarily in that order. More time off work on Saturday, meant more time in the boozer, and more accidents and absenteeism on Monday. That, and the social cachet of bankrolling the local team, were the twin motivators.

[ursus arctos]

Whereas a number of early US baseball tycoons owned breweries.

The National League's first serious rival, the American Association, grounded its appeal to working class fans by playing on Sunday, charging only 25 cents for tickets, and allowing beer to be sold in the stands.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Whereas The Lord's Day Observance Act prevented "entertainments" on Sundays in Britain.

The other big thing that boosted football's appeal was the rapid growth of public transport in the mid-to-late 19th Century. Trams gave spectators from a wide urban area easy access to the home ground, and 'Football Specials,' at very generous rates, took them to away games.

[ursus arctos]

Sabbath observance laws in the US were (and are) local.

Organised sporting events on Sundays were barred in Pennsylvania until 1931, with the lobbying of Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics being a key factor in their repeal. Other clubs sometimes resorted to "alternate sites" outside of their restrictive home jurisdiction for Sunday games.

[My Name Is Ian]

I knew that all of those leagues started as small regional circuits.

Not quite. It's important to bear in mind that the big schism early on in football was between professionals and amateurs, and as late as the early 1890s it was somewhat up in the air where all that might end up. The Football League had early opposition, both professional and amateur. The Combination was founded in 1889 as a professional league, but was screwed within two years by a lack of central administration. Its successor, the Football Alliance, was sufficiently successful to merge with the Football League in 1892 as its Second Division.

The Southern League followed in 1894 as a professional league for the south because the Football League was seen as being for the Midlands & North. Arsenal (Woolwich Arsenal at the time) joined the Football League in 1893, but they were the only one of 31 members from south of Birmingham. The Southern League's original catchment area was as big as the north's, it's just that the southern professional clubs weren't as well developed. Its launch was also delayed by a year or two by the London Football Association.

The split between rugby union (amateur) and rugby league (professional), which occurred in 1895, was probably where a lot of people thought football would end up heading at the time. This didn't quite happen, but it almost did. The Isthmian League was founded in 1905 because there were still no amateur leagues in the south. The Northern League started as a mixed professional and amateur league in the north-east in 1889, but once it switched to amateur only it stuck so rigidly to that amateurism (more latterly, it was travel expenses, which to me is more justifiable) that it repeatedly turned down invitations to join the pyramid until the end of the 1980s, by which time several of its biggest clubs had got fed up with it all and joined 'pyramid' leagues instead. The north-west amateur leagues were a mess of county leagues. The Northern Premier League, the professional equivalent to the Southern League, formed in 1968.

It gives an indication of the mood of the time that, when the Amateur Football Alliance (which continues to this day as the home of some of the first FA Cup winners, alongside other public school old boys and armed services teams) was formed in 1907, it was called the Amateur Football Defence Council. The attempts to revive amateur football are a fun read for historians, though. The most famous of them were The Argonauts, an all amateur club who applied to join the Football League twice in the late 1920s and only fell a few votes short the first time around, despite never having kicked a ball, and Pegasus, a joint team from Oxford and Cambridge universities team who played in the FA Amateur Cup in the early 1950s and won it twice before disbanding. They were forever trying to "bring back" amateur football. Shamateurism - under the counter payments to 'amateur' players. The news story that blew the doors off it started at Hitchin, I think. Once it was in the open, the FA started to worry that the taxman might come after clubs or, worse, them. They ended their distinction between amateurs and professionals in 1974. It was on the clubs to report their tax correctly, now. No more hiding behind, "oh, we don't pay anyone."

I've found it interesting that people have been talking about "The Pyramid" as though it is some sort of monolith that has always been there, and that there seems to be this idea that a club could rise from the very bottom to the very top in some ancient English football rite when this simply hasn't always been the case. There was no 'pyramid' in non-league football until the formation of the Alliance Premier League (now the National League) in 1979 while, without automatic promotion and relegation between the Fourth Division and the APL (which was finally introduced at the end of the 1986/87 season, at which point the APL rebranded itself as the Football Conference - it had sponsors throughout this period, but 1987 was when the "Conference" name took hold) the Football League was a closed shop which invited (and very frequently rejected) applications at its AGM every June.

The decisions they made were partially meritocratic, and not always without controversy. There was no ground grading as we know it now, so they inspected the facilities of any applicants. To my eyes, you certainly can't date "The Pyramid" back to earlier than 1979, and it could be argued that, even then, it didn't really form into the pyramid that we know now until the 2004 non-league reorganisation. AFC Wimbledon almost certainly wouldn't have been able to do what they did in, say, the 1950s. At least, I doubt it. The original Wimbledon FC were a long-standing amateur club who switched to the professional game in 1964, and switched from the Isthmian to Southern Leagues, but starting from the very bottom to get to either of those would have been a slog years ago. There was just a morass of barely connected regional and county leagues.

You could argue that the formation of all these leagues were similar to the Super League, in their way. Clubs broke away and formed new leagues. That's certainly how the Northern Premier League and the Alliance Premier League were formed, not to mention the Premier League. But in the case of the first two, the long-term goal was always automatic promotion and relegation to the Football League. The FA abolished amateurism in 1974, but for a good 15 years it had been becoming increasingly competitive. It was being done for sporting reasons, and to improve the game. And it has, I think. Yeah, the heightened ambition has been bad. Really bad for a lot of clubs.

But crowds are up - the average was almost 2,200 in the National League last season, the first season in 1979 I'd be surprised if it was any higher than 1,000, and possibly quite a bit lower. I remember that when Enfield won it in 1983, their average crowd was about 820, or something. And non-league football is freaking massive now, too. There are just so many more divisions than there used to be. When I was watching Isthmian Premier matches in the late 1980s, crowds of under 200 were commonplace. Last full season, only four clubs averaged below 200, and it's a level lower now, because of the National League South. It certainly feels like there are far more people watching non-league football than there used to be, so I consider that an improvement. And it's hardly as though they haven't always been going bust.

The Premier League, though, was different, as was the Super League.

[jason voorhees]

Women's Basket Ball must have been unbelievably dull back then if he thought it was less strenuous than Base Ball.

Up until the late 70s in high school the offense and defense wasn't allowed to cross half-court. So it was 3v2 on both ends, as women would pass out from exhaustion and wither away and die if they had to run like Sheryl Swoopes or Rebecca Lobo or Candace Parker or Chamique Holdsclaw or Lauren Jackson or Sue Bird or....

[ursus arctos]

Girls in Iowa played six on six, with three restricted to each half of the court into the early 90s

The state tournament was to Iowa what the boys' tournament was to Indiana, allowing Iowa to provide one out of every five pre-Title IX female athletes in the US

https://www.neh.gov/article/when-iow...l-ruled-courts

[Amor de Cosmos]

The news story that blew the doors off it started at Hitchin, I think. Once it was in the open, the FA started to worry that the taxman might come after clubs or, worse, them. They ended their distinction between amateurs and professionals in 1974. It was on the clubs to report their tax correctly, now. No more hiding behind, "oh, we don't pay anyone."

I remember it very well, it was the only time 'My Team' ever made the back page of the Nationals. The secretary of the club was in the clubhouse after a match being plied drinks by someone who turned out to be a stringer from Fleet Street. Interestingly nothing happened to the club, but four of our players lost their 'amateur status.' Which was a pretty big deal at the time.

[Gangster Octopus]

Excellent post My Name Is Ian. I'm convinced that if Wealdstone had been able to have a crowd this season, the average would've been higher than their average back in 1984-5 when they did the non-league double..