While I agree with your view on hydration breaks, I have to disagree that 48 teams was a bad thing. It led to wonderful stories like Cape Verde (and their goalie) who were competitive against Argentina. They wouldn’t even have qualified under the old system. We saw Congo almost beat England (again, a non-qualifier in the old days). Conversely, scoring goals is exciting and Germany’s 7-1 over Curaçao let us see some amazing goals.
More teams means more underdogs, more chances for greatness and more high points. I know it was purely for money, but I think the move to 48 teams really worked.
Cape Verde would have qualified for the World Cup even if there were 32 teams. Cape Verde topped its group, beating usual world cup teams like Cameroon.
The narrative that Cape Verde is a beneficiary of the 48-team setup is completely and utterly false.
The Super League was a wonderful idea! Imagine watching the best teams in Europe playing each other multiple nights a week for months on end! Instead you’d rather watch 1 or 2 teams spend 10x more than anyone else and dominate the league every season. How is that fun or exciting? Would you rather watch a Bayern v Bremen match or a Bayern v Chelsea match? Or PSG, is it fun watching them not even bother playing their best guys in games against Lyon?
It makes no sense to me that people favored the (much) worse product because “tradition”.
Easy: it was going to be a (mostly) closed competition.
Competition gets boring real fast when it is always the same handful of teams. When there are no real consequences to losing, winning becomes meaningless.
Bayern v Chelsea matches stop being as interesting when every game is a Bayern v Chelsea match and most of them have no real impact either way. On the other hand, football becomes most interesting when it's a Bayern v Bremen and Bremen wins. People love an underdog after all, and nothing is more exciting than seeing an elite team take the game for granted and being punished for it.
The Super League is only a more interesting product from the "big name play ball" perspective. It is great when you want to make a fortune in tv rights and licensing, but it sucks for everyone who cares about football as a sport.
That’s the same justification my German friend made. I guess it’s American viewpoint vs European. The Super League would have been like the NFL in the US, where every team can beat any other any given night. That’s much more appealing to me, but to each their own.
The NFL is so balanced not because it’s a “super” league but because every team has the same salary cap. The best team and the worst team all have to spend essentially the exact same amount of money on their players, ensuring that no team can buy their way to the top.
Even there it’s still not really true that the best team can lose to the worst team in any given night. The best team is generally favored a lot and justifiably so. In soccer teams can also be quite mismatched and a lucky goal by the worse team can be the only score and win the match.
As a lapsed NY Jets fan, I disagree -- competent ownership and management is required more than good draft picks. To wit: Tom Brady was drafted at 199 overall, but the Jets' last two QB picks (Zach Williams and Sam Darnold) are both journeyman-level players.
I'm more of a hockey guy, which has a much stricter salary cap than the NFL, and the Edmonton Oilers are instructive here: they had a bunch of first overall picks 10 years ago (including multiple franchise players), but the team itself wasn't competitive until management changed and could build a cohesive team.
Bad management will certainly tank a team, but he’s right. The draft structure also helps to even out the teams.
In the NFL, winning is more about quality management and coaching (and some luck) than anything else. Which is a good thing. Leagues where winners are decided mostly on who is able to spend the most on players are lopsided and kind of lame.
The NFL is an association of billionaires that captured a sport and created rules to keep scarcity going and not let either of them ruin it for the others. In football we already have oil magnates buying individual clubs here and there, but at least they are very diluted among the real clubs.
I agree with you, but I think it’s worth pointing out that the NFL is balanced because they tried to make it balanced - the salary cap, draft, revenue sharing, etc. are all outcomes of that plan, not the prime motivators themselves.
In the Champions League the top, let’s say, 16 teams can all beat each other, so that part of the NFL experience is still there. The thing is that these top 16 teams change every year and there is no clear definition which clubs are top teams at the moment. But that’s the charm of it.
Football is very tribal. People want to dream that their local club have a shot to participate and maybe win the Champions league. Think of Leicester and Girona. In the Netherlands there is now a club called NEC and they have a shot to qualify for it, and that by itself is a historic moment for the club.
Exactly. Look at Bodø/Glimt from northern Norway. In 2017 they played in Norwegian 2. division and in 2020 they played AC Milan in the Europa League and won the top division in Norway and it's only been better since. BUT, this too will end at some point and another team will take their spot at the top. Maybe my team that has been struggling for decades will get their shit together and start winning something? That is much more exciting than seeing the same 10-20 money doped teams play matches all over the world to generate even more money.
Imagine never having any relegation risk for being crap.
Without divisions and removal of risk, what's the point?
Without the chance to work at a lower level and through simply being good, getting a team promoted how are you supposed to inspire? NFL, is both the least and the most American sport there is.
PSG has won 8 of the last 10 Ligue 1. Bayern 9 of the last 10 Bubdesliga. Barcelona/Real Madrid 9 of the last 10 La Liga.
That’s exciting? There’s 50+ teams in those leagues that stand NO shot of ever winning a championship, ever. The argument I’ve seen in this thread is either 1) it’s thrilling when my favorite average team upsets the backups of one of the powerhouses and 2) it’s exciting to get relegated and then come back.
You know what’s even more exciting…winning a championship. And every August every NFL fan starts with the hope and belief that this is their year. NFL has Leicester-lite situations every few years. Patriots were worst 2 years ago, lose in the championship the next year.
I will give credit to the Premier League - they’re doing it right. As mentioned, too 15-20 teams are competitive and could win a title in a given year. You know why it’s the best league - they set up a revenue sharing model similar to US leagues. Equal chance of winning = most excitement for fans of the entire league.
You can fuck right off trying to create a closed league where only a "chosen" few clubs take part.
It might just be an entertainment spectacle to you but for others it's very tied into local identity.
The idea that outside money men should be allowed to come in and destroy open competition is highly offensive to me.
The best years in football are when a smaller club gets a run of luck and beats the big boys. Or when one of the super clubs gets relegated and their fans have experience a season or two in the lower leagues.
You're not taking that away from us without a fight!
States have the ability to sue to block mergers as well as the federal government. See the recent 11 state lawsuit seeking to block the WarnerMount merger.
Just a couple of months ago, someone was still suing[1] to block Alaska Air/Hawaiian. This is a merger that already entirely went through. I would predict equal likelihood of some state lawsuit derailing a merger like this.
Nevertheless, I have very little faith in states somehow blocking big mergers. Can you cite an example where this has happened? We've had basically every airline, several supermarket chains, and every major media company go through 1-2 rounds of megamergers. Which, specifically, have been successfully blocked by states?
In 2017, Valero tried to acquire some energy infrastructure owned by Plains All American. The FTC cleared it but California's AG filed to block the deal, which was ultimately abandoned before the trial could begin.
Considering that California is one of the states and it’s Warner Brothers and Paramount, both entertainment companies based in California, the bark has a lot of bite.
Which is funny because regardless of whether or not those states succeed in blocking the merger, those legacy video entertainment businesses will become irrelevant whether they are one business or two, due to the fierce competition from TikTok/Instagram/Reddit/Youtube/Whatsapp/computers/anything on the internet in general.
It's probably the most inconsequential merger, from a consumer standpoint.
But not anything is worth litigating. The kids with a lemonade stand on the corner in my neighborhood have a monopoly on that corner.
Video media sellers are dime a dozen these days, and the barrier to entry for selling video media is basically none. Warner brothers and paramount are nowhere near the only business to buy and watch media, and it affects almost no buyers negatively if they merge.
If it isn’t red states the current admin won’t care at all. If it’s mostly or entirely blue states, they’ll just default to siding with the merger out of spite.
> my kids are all fully vaccinated on a spaced-out schedule and not taking more than one shot in at least 2 months
Why? At what point did you say “I know a better vaccine schedule than highly trained specialist doctors who have done decades of research on hundreds of thousand of children”? You don’t find this incredibly naive to think you know better than them?
I have seen a "highly trained specialist" declare that a baby can easily accommodate thousands of vaccines a day (advocating for the then existing vaccine schedule), because the immune system encounter that many pathogens per day!
I hope I don't have to explain the fallacy in that to the crowd here.
> Maybe he's raising his daughter in a culture that doesn't celebrate hedonism and massive numbers of casual sexual partners, effectively reducing the risk of HPV-induced cervical cancer to near-zero, no magic potion needed.
This is like saying "We don't need fire alarms (and all the risks involved with installing them) because we're responsible people, not reckless morons who go playing with matches in their home."
There are, on the low end, thousands of people who've died of cervical cancer they caught from HPV given to them by their one and only partner.
You might want to let Europe know about your fire alarm analogy because the whole of Eastern and Southern Europe including Spain and Italy as well as Iceland have no requirement for smoke detectors in residences.
The justification is their superior brick and plaster construction makes them unnecessary compared to American and Australian matchstick and drywall construction.
It's relevant in the same sense that they feel the risk is sufficiently low for their particular circumstances that the threat to their well being is not enough to mandate it.
Some places, like Denmark, have Cadillac-grade health care systems and are able to manage infectious disease on a national level like a Formula 1 team. They are able to be less stringent because it's far easier to get a handle on disease outbreaks.
Other places, like the US, are running 1992 Chevrolet Cavalier-grade health care system and are able to manage infectious disease on a national level like a group of drunk fraternity members. There's little choice but to use every blanket policy available to try to keep disease in check.
It's not clear my analogy is more broken than yours, which is taken to task elsewhere in this thread. You can't get an STD because your neighbor has unsafe sex; your house can burn down because your neighbor smokes in bed.
The Jaguar redesign / rebrand has been a complete and utter disaster! A 97% drop in European sales. That’s not a misprint - 97%!!
No one would call the cybertruck a success either.
This design is a massive mistake for Ferrari. Looks at Porsche’s first electric, the Taycan. I can tell it’s a Porsche as soon as I see it. Look at Lamborghini- looks like a Lambo. Look at this car - looks like a Volkswagen. This is going to be a bomb.
More teams means more underdogs, more chances for greatness and more high points. I know it was purely for money, but I think the move to 48 teams really worked.