The Super League and Big Brain Energy

Now for a completely different topic: European football! Or as it’s known here in the US, soccer.

I have to admit that prior to this year I knew nothing about European football. To be fair, I’m not interested in American football either.

Then I watched the SUNDERLAND TIL I DIE documentary on Netflix, which is about the various misfortunes that have befallen the Sunderland football team. It was fascinating to watch from an outsider perspective. I don’t know whether the documentary was accurate or not, or if how it portrayed the various figures involved in Sunderland was fair (modern documentaries have a bad habit of putting their thumb upon the scale, much like historical dramas), but it was extremely interesting to watch. English sports culture is very different than American sports culture, but because both the US and the UK speak variants of English, it was more comprehensible to me than, say, a documentary about French or Spanish sports culture would have been.

As unexpected side benefit, when Super League controversy became big enough to make the American news, I had enough context to understand what was going on.

From the outsider perspective I mentioned above (I have no emotional investment), I suspect one of the things that gives European football its vitality is the prospect of relegation to a lower-ranking league and the chaotic nature of the season. Like in the documentary, it’s possible for a team to be at the top of its game only to completely fall apart and and get relegated down two levels in two years. There’s a David vs. Goliath element, and while’s not likely that a scrappy David with defeat a well-funded Goliath, it’s still possible and occasionally happens. You just don’t have that in American professional sports.

That’s also why I suspect American sports viewership has been in decline for years – the NFL and NBA are basically ossified cartels, with all the bloated inefficiency and indifference to customer preference that you get in a business that doesn’t have to compete. Many of their problems can be explained by the lack of a competitor eager to eat their lunch. There have been a couple of high-level court cases which ruled that the NFL didn’t meet the legal requirements of a cartel, but in all practical senses, the NFL and NBA are cartels with control of their markets. I think that drains the season of a lot of its vitality – wouldn’t it be great if, say, the LA Lakers or the Tampa Buccaneers could mess up their season and and get relegated to the Tier Two league? At the very least it would make for amazing television ratings.

This isn’t to say that high-level European football isn’t as corrupt as the NFL or the NBA, (to be cheeky, it seems that “bribery” is the basic business model of the NFL, the NBA, and FIFA), but it has pressures that American football does not which forces it to be more competitive.

I read an article that argued the reason the Super League failed was because it was a cynical and greedy attempt to bring American cartel-style professional sports to Europe. But I suspect the chief reason the Super League was such a failure is because of what my youngest brother and I mockingly call “big brain energy.” Like, you get these smart guys who spend all their time doing clever calculations in spreadsheets, and they have amazing spreadsheets. They can prove anything with a spreadsheet. Absolutely anything! So some big brain guys probably put together a spreadsheet demonstrating that the Super League would make a boatload of money, and everyone agreed that it made sense. Except the spreadsheet didn’t include a column for Actual Reality, and the whole thing blew up in their faces. This happens again and again in all human endeavors, where very clever experts get so wrapped up in their theories that they lose touch with Actual Reality. I have no doubt that we can all think of examples from the last twenty years or so.

A theory (or a good spreadsheet) can be like a beautiful stained glass window…but Actual Reality often takes the form of a thrown brick.

I found the Super League controversy interesting to observe from the outside because it was yet another example of this phenomenon.

Also, while it is very unlikely that I will become a billionaire, if I do, I am definitely not buying a sports team. Vizzini in THE PRINCESS BRIDE should have included that on his list of classic blunders!

-JM