Tag: media

pro soccer

The ESPN+ deal with the UFC and what it means for MLS (and other sports properties)

Posted on by Beau Dure

The literal big deal in sports media yesterday: In January, ESPN will start paying the UFC $150 million a year for a package including:

  1. 15 live events on ESPN+, the new $49.99/year subscription service
  2. Other shows, including Dana White’s Contenders series and some new untitled program, on ESPN+
  3. Weigh-ins, preview shows and press conferences on ESPN+ (yes, MMA fans watch that)
  4. Archives, archives, archives! (Again, yes, MMA fans watch this. Every once in a while, someone thinks, “Hey, I really need to check out the first St. Pierre-Serra fight” and checks out Fight Pass (see below), even though FS1 and FS2 currently show hours and hours of repackaged UFC replays each week.
  5. On ESPN’s cable networks, as opposed to ESPN+, a 30-minute preview show and the aforementioned UFC “library programming” (replays).

IMG-20110603-00019For MMA fans (and former MMA writers like me), this seems too good to be true. The UFC currently offers something called Fight Pass for twice as much ($9.99/month), and it sounds like ESPN+ will have most of that content. But we’re not sure. As Ben Fowlkes points out at MMAJunkie (the blog of USA TODAY Sports, where I was the first MMA beat writer), we don’t yet know what happens to some oddball programming such as the Eddie Bravo Invitational (grappling), overseas MMA promotions and Invicta FC, which is not a soccer organization but actually a compelling all-female MMA promotion. We know Fight Pass and pay-per-view events will be available through ESPN+, but you have to pay a bit more.

So what does this mean for MLS, which has also shut down its in-house subscription service to put games on ESPN+?

https://twitter.com/ErikStoverNYC/status/993852938945785856

(To clarify/expand — as you’ll see above, it’s much more than just those events.)

Consider this: The UFC currently has a deal with Fox networks for $120 million per year, starting in 2012. WME/IMG bought the UFC itself in 2016 for a ludicrous $4 billion, hoping for bigger deals down the road.

And that seemed to be a dumb investment. As industry insider Dave Meltzer points out at MMA Fighting, the UFC is down by so many metrics — pay-per-view buys, TV ratings, box office, etc. My lukewarm take: MMA has peaked. It’s not going away, but neither is it likely to grow. As Deadspin asked in a very-un-Deadspin deep analysis of the UFC’s rights: “Who Cares About The UFC in 2018?”

In fairness to the UFC, the promotion has had some rotten luck recently. Ronda Rousey lost, then lost worse and raced over to pro wrestling. Jon Jones has shown a catastrophic inability to get his life together, and Conor McGregor has outright flipped out. Those are the biggest stars. The people who actually hold UFC belts are sometimes anonymous, thanks to the convoluted manner in which they win the championships. Consider Robert Whittaker, who won the interim middleweight title in July, watched as UFC legend Georges St. Pierre returned to the cage to win the non-interim belt from Michael Bisping, was promoted to full champion when St. Pierre fell ill, and hasn’t fought since. It’s a rare fight card these days in which the top fights proceed as planned, thanks to injuries, illnesses or botched weight cuts.

But this downturn shows the UFC’s base level when it doesn’t have A-list stars like Rousey, McGregor or Chuck Liddell on fight cards. As with golf or tennis, a big crossover star might give it a temporary boost, but it’s unrealistic to think it’s going to be bigger on any long-lasting level.

And yet, the UFC is getting a raise as its Fox deal runs out at the end of the year. The ESPN deal doesn’t cover everything. Someone’s still going to pay good money for the rest of the UFC’s events (excluding pay-per-views) each year.

That bodes well for everything else in sports. Bloomberg’s headline: “UFC-ESPN Deal Suggests Endless Appetite, Money for Sports Rights.”

So if the declining UFC can command a raise, what will happen to the stagnant Major League Soccer when its deals expire?

As you’ll recall from the Riccardo Silva unvitation to buy the rights for $4 billion, MLS renegotiation is a few years off. To be precise: 2022. Combined pay between ESPN, Fox and Univision: $90 million.

(That’s solely in the USA. I haven’t seen the rights fees for Canadian deals with TSN and TVA, which run through 2021. Overseas, as noted in the post on the NASL’s unvitations to MLS, the league seems to have improved its distribution since switching from Silva, who’s mentioned above, to IMG, which is also mentioned above because apparently only three companies control everything in sports.)

Perhaps that’s unfortunate. The current climate — prodded by new ventures from ESPN, YouTubeTV, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. — might not last four years.

But maybe it will. And maybe MLS, no matter what comes of this year’s lawsuits, will emerge with a much better deal than it has now. (And perhaps these shadowy TV execs — not media-bundling companies — who claim they’ll offer eleventy billion dollars for rights fees if MLS goes pro/rel will emerge from the woodwork in 2021.)

0
podcast, us soccer

RSD24: An election-related New Year’s resolution

Posted on by Beau Dure

No interview lined up, so what’s the rant this week?

How the United Soccer Coaches convention in Philadelphia might help us reset the hostility-to-substance ratio in the presidential race.

Who I would NOT endorse for U.S. Soccer president, based on what I know now. (The answer is NOT Eric Wynalda, which I know might blow the minds of some folks on Twitter.)

Why Riccardo Silva’s tweet about promotion and corruption was irresponsible and inaccurate. (He’s welcome to chat with me or simply tweet again to explain, clarify, etc.)

 

A bit of U.S. Soccer voting history.

Some musing on corruption and investigative journalism.

Where were Commisso and Silva in 2002 when MLS was about to fold and could’ve been steered in another direction?

Something that has actually encouraged me about public conversation right now.

My New Year’s resolution that I hope others will share.

0
pro soccer, us soccer

On SUM, Twitter and the media

Posted on by Beau Dure

First off: I’m working on two pieces that raises questions about Soccer United Marketing and the continuing evolution of Major League Soccer. One analytical, one modestly investigative. The latter, basically, is just getting some answers from Kathy Carter about SUM as it currently operates.

SUM is, of course, mentioned in my book Long-Range Goals: The Subtitle I Didn’t Like in the First Place and Dislike Today Because “Success” Can and Should Be Redefined as Time Goes By. It was crucial to MLS’ survival when the whole thing nearly went under in 2002. Don Garber, still relatively new in the job of MLS commissioner, surmised from the history of U.S. pro soccer that it too often competes with itself, and that led to the suggestion to create a marketing company that bundled things together. It worked, and no matter how you slice it, MLS and SUM are valuable properties today that have helped usher in a landscape of pro clubs with academies.

But …

  1. As they say about the stock market, past performance does not guarantee future results.
  2. What was necessary in 2002 could be a hindrance in 2017.

So yes, there are questions to be asked. And if we get through this entire presidential campaign without asking them, we’ve failed.

That said … could people on Twitter be a little more patient, perhaps?

2017 has been a rough year in the media business. More layoffs at ESPN. Fox Sports cast off a great crew of writers so they could “pivot to video,” along with a few other organizations. FourFourTwo laid off most of its U.S. staff. Other organizations have trimmed their freelance budgets, sometimes in addition to layoffs. If you think that’s a function of all of these writers doing something “wrong,” you’re about as ignorant as the people who think newspapers’ print circulation is declining solely because of “liberal bias.” The way in which we get our news has changed and continues to change, and we still haven’t figured out a good way to pay professionals when so many places are cranking out content for free or for pennies.

So when the reporters who still have a travel budget gather for MLS Cup and spend most of the State of the League press conference haranguing Garber about the Columbus-to-Austin shenanigans, is it really necessary to spend the rest of the holiday month yelling at reporters to investigate everything from why Kathy Carter is running for president (a legitimate question that should be asked in more detail in January) to whether MLS strong-armed national team coaches to play more MLS players even though Jozy Altidore, Michael Bradley and Tim Howard have been fixtures on the national team since they were playing in Europe and, if anything, the fact that half the national team is from MLS today is more of a reflection that MLS has convinced these players to come home and how the hell do you expect reporters to get Garber or Sunil Gulati to admit they threatened to kneecap a coach unless they included a player from every MLS franchise and how would that work anyway when MLS has 22 teams and when the hell did Danny Williams become Busquets and Iniesta rolled into one, anyway?

Sorry. Where was I? Right …

I can’t speak for all of the “mainstream media” — especially now that I’ve been informed I’m no longer in it. (Whew! That takes the pressure off.) If you think particular reporters are reticent to challenge MLS and SUM leaders, fine. There are actually some plausible reasons for that — everything from simply getting along on a personal level to being unwilling to upset a source who leaks information. That’s why you should always check out a variety of sources (on anything). And when you notice someone always tends to get certain bits of information “first,” you might ask why that is. (Fortunately, the race to get the latest roster for a meaningless friendly 20 minutes before USSF announces it seems to have dissipated, as we’ve all found better things to do.)

The idea that MLS and SUM are strong-arming journalists, frankly, gets a bit silly. If you think MLS is going to yank credentials away from a Grant Wahl or a Steven Goff (who, incidentally, was way out in front in saying Gulati shouldn’t run for another term), you should really think before you tweet. Even in MMA, where the UFC exerts power on a global scale, Dana White had to backtrack when he kicked out Ariel Helwani. If you run a small blog and no longer have the credentials you once had, maybe someone unjustly kicked you out on a power trip — or, just maybe, you need to take a look at how you were operating.

Yes, a lot of journalists write or have written for MLSSoccer.com. Personally, I wrote a fantasy column for MLSNet back in the early 21st century, then gave it up when I started doing more soccer work as one of my myriad jobs at USA TODAY. You know who else wrote a column for MLSNet back in the day? Eric Wynalda. You think he’s afraid to speak up on MLS and SUM issues?

I mentioned at the outset that I’m working on two things that I hope will shed more light on SUM and MLS. They’re not going to be done before the holidays. That’s life. Some people have one. (Not just me — also the people I would need to interview and the editors who would need to look at and publish my work.)

So keep up the feedback. Let me know some questions you’d like to ask. In some cases, they’re unreasonable and pointless, and don’t be shocked if I let you know. In other cases, they’re interesting things that might not have occurred to me. That’s why I haven’t quit Twitter, and it’s why I block and mute only when people veer into outright harassment.

Have a happy Festivus or whatever you celebrate.

3
cycling

Lance Armstrong and the truth-tellers … well, sort of

Posted on by Beau Dure

The NYT has a curious piece hailing the independent media as the sole source of truth in the years before Lance Armstrong was buried under 1,000 pages of U.S. Anti-Doping Agency evidence.

Nice shoutout to NYVelocity.com, home of the ever-classic Tour day Schmalz, but it’s a little unfair to split the cycling media into “brave, truth-telling, low-profile underdogs” and “those who were unwilling or simply scared to tell the truth.” (Or even worse, “enablers.”)

The issue: For journalists to print doping allegations, they have to have something called “evidence.”

The main reason we wait for evidence: It’s simply ethical to do so. The other reason is one I supposed you could file under “scared,” but legitimately so: Lance Armstrong wasn’t just suing his critics over the years. He was winning.

Satire, such as NYVelocity’s inside joke-heavy “Toto” cartoons, has broader protection. And in a lot of cases, satire is better able to tell the truth than the “media.” Just go back a couple of years to the classic Onion story “Lance Armstrong Wants To Tell Nation Something But Nation Has To Promise Not To Get Mad.”

Sure, a few people pursued the Armstrong case when it wasn’t cool to do so. A lot of people in the cycling community owe Betsy Andreu an apology. But “enablers”? That’s a little harsh. And unfair.

1
olympic sports

Paralympics: How about we treat participants as athletes and show the sports?

Posted on by Beau Dure

You can’t really say the U.S. media had no impact on the Paralympics. Jay-Z is part of the media, and he added a Paralympic/Olympic-specific verse to Coldplay’s Paradise at the Closing Ceremony.

The Closing Ceremony drew a peak audience of 7.7 million, by the way. That’s in Britain, of course — not here in the USA, where we could only watch via streams.

And the lack of Paralympic coverage is something NBC might need to explain when the next Olympic broadcast rights are up for negotiation. (HT: ThinkProgress)

To be fair to NBC, it’s not as if the rest of the U.S. media rushed to fill the void in Paralympics coverage.

Perhaps one reason the Paralympics don’t get much play in the USA is that we forget to think of Paralympians as athletes. A BBC roundup of leading countries, their medals, and their media led to this conclusion:

Most news coverage has focused not on results or the medal chase, but on human interest stories or curiosities, with headlines such as “Shark attack survivor wins bronze.”

Contrast that with another quote in that roundup: Paralympian Josh George via The New York Times:

Even more amazing than the fact that Londoners have opened their arms and hearts to the Paralympics is the fact that they are interested in us for our athletic ability, not the fact that we don’t spend every day in our rooms crying about the fact that we can’t walk, or are missing a limb or two.

South Park has probably said it best on several occasions: People with disabilities often just want to live as everyone else does. And maybe we should focus on wheelchair rugby as a fun sport to watch instead of trumping up the “human interest” angle. We’re all “human.” Paralympians happen to be great athletes as well.

Then again, don’t we often hear the same criticism about NBC’s Olympic coverage?

2
soccer

Hope Solo: Too unique for a double standard

Posted on by Beau Dure

It’s tempting to respond to the cries of a “double standard” against Hope Solo with a segment of “Really!?! with Seth and Amy.”

Really? There’s a double standard against Hope Solo? She said something totally nasty about one of her teammates at the 2007 Women’s World Cup, but people actually like her because of it because it makes her seem like a badass. Really.

Really? A double standard? Landon Donovan quickly moved to apologize for talking in public about David Beckham — saying the same stuff that tons of Galaxy fans were saying as well — but there’s a double standard against Hope Solo? Really? Donovan and Beckham actually sorted it out while Solo still holds a grudge … and wait a minute, that grudge blew open with something she said? Really?

Really? Have any of Hope’s fans ever listened to a sports talk show? If a backup quarterback ever said, “I would have made those passes,” Colin Cowherd wouldn’t even need a microphone to broadcast his show nationwide. He’d just stand up on the roof at ESPN and yell.

Yeah, really! And then Solo does an interview with Jeremy Schaap, and her fans gripe that he asked her about her relationship with the older women’s national team players? After she wrote a book that talked about that relationship?

Really! If Jeremy Schaap interviewed Jose Canseco about his books, do Hope’s fans think he would not ask him about steroids? Really?

And the E:60 video is all Hope’s side! Where’s Cat Whitehill? Where’s Julie Foudy? Where’s Briana Scurry? Really!

Really! And yet Hope has fans on Twitter who say the old guard refuses to “pass the torch.” The Who can keep touring until they don’t have anyone left, but Brandi Chastain’s supposed to disappear at age 40 like some soccer-specific remake of Logan’s Run? Hope’s the one with a memoir out and the excerpts at espnW about her conflicts with the “old guard,” but they’re the ones keeping the past alive?

Really! Really? ….

(This has been “Really?! with Seth and Amy)

So yes, I’m a little skeptical of the “double standard” notion — at least in terms of how Solo and her book have been treated in the media.  The Schaap interview is labeled as “contentious” — which is often Schaap’s style, anyway — and yet Schaap didn’t really challenge anything she said in the book. Schaap didn’t fire back with, “You lost respect for Kristine Lilly? Really?” He asked her to name a name that’s named in the book so they could discuss it.

What I said the last time I wrote on this book two weeks ago is still valid — there are multiple sides to a lot of the issues in Solo’s book, and the other sides aren’t talking. That’s not acquiescence on the part of the “old guard” just because Solo’s book hit the NYT best-sellers list. A lot of NYT best-sellers are political smears, and the politicians in question often don’t respond to them, either. Silence is often a valid PR strategy in such cases.

With so few people speaking up, Solo is really getting a free pass on her unflattering portrayal of players who still have a lot of fans, no matter what Solo’s Twitter echo chamber may say. It’s all her side of the story — which, again, is the point of a memoir. If you lose respect for Lilly, Hamm, Scurry and company because of Solo’s book, that’s really your fault, not Solo’s.

So it’s difficult to make a case for a double standard in terms of the media coverage. What about elsewhere?

And here’s where it gets tricky. Would a men’s team ostracize a player the way the USWNT did to Solo?

I had a long private conversation with another journalist about this yesterday, and we couldn’t think of a case of another athlete being ostracized the way Solo was. But we didn’t know of someone saying the things Solo said in 2007. We also didn’t know of someone being benched the way Solo was — starting goalkeeper until the semifinals, then suddenly yanked from the lineup.

Maybe such a thing has happened to a hockey goaltender or football quarterback somewhere along the way. Men’s teams have their internal disputes as well, often protected by a code of silence and vague words in the media. Perhaps someone at this weekend’s Victory Tour game in Rochester will ask Abby Wambach why, as depicted in Solo’s words, she suddenly thought Briana Scurry was better-suited to the World Cup task than Solo was in 2007. I’d be surprised if the interviewer got a complete answer.

But it’s hard to come up with anything that matches every aspect of Solo’s case — the undisputed starter, with no injuries to consider, suddenly being benched.

Was Solo treated differently within the team because it was a team of women? We really don’t have enough evidence to say. We know men can be called out within the team for their practice habits — ask Allen Iverson. But even if someone were to claim flat-out that Solo was benched for her performance in practice, one of several possibilities floated and never nailed down, could we really compare Iverson’s case with Solo’s?

No. They’re just too different. And not just because they’re men and women.

Solo’s unique. That’s why she’s selling books. And that’s why people are going to discuss and debate what she says. No double standard there.

38
olympic sports, sports culture

When Olympians deserve better from the rest of us

Posted on by Beau Dure

I don’t mean to pick on Mike Wise here, because this isn’t the first column to take a couple of stray mixed-zone comments and berate an Olympic athlete as if she let down her family, country, boyfriend and dog.

He does take it to new heights, though, in this column.

“Pretty much all my mistakes cost me the bout,” Zagunis said, adding that any bout she ever lost had less to do with the skill, smarts and perseverance of her opponents than it was “my lack of concentration.

“Congrats to them for winning, [but] in my opinion, if I was completely 100 percent on mentally, then I would have been able to win again. It’s happened to me before.”

First, I’d like to see the full context here. Second, she’s basically saying she choked. That doesn’t strike me as arrogant or petulant.

Ready for it to get worse?

That is, no one but fencers care about fencing after the Olympics are over. And nothing is as over as when the Olympics are over.

So while they’re going on, niche athletes need to savor the Games and smile more often for those two weeks, give opponents that beat them credit more often — because they really matter to most of us only every four years.

So take THAT, Miss Not As Composed As Journalist Would Like After Shocking Loss On World’s Biggest Stage. You’re utterly useless the rest of the four years between Olympics, when you’re just off getting an education and winning the occasional world championship.

I sometimes wonder why people would want to be Olympic athletes. You devote your adolescent and young adult years to developing a rarified skill, and then if you’re anything less than perfect when the international broadcast feed clicks on, you’re subject to ridicule from an increasingly snarky media feeding off the perpetual snark of Twitter.

NBA and NFL players usually have one more game to play, and their mistakes are quickly forgotten. A media firestorm passes with time, and the player goes back to being an athlete. But if you screw up on or off the field, piste or pommel horse in that one instant America notices you before preparing for a fantasy football draft, and that window is gone.

Fair? Definitely not, even when the journalists are less explicit in their harrumphing than Wise is here.

We won’t change the armchair-Olympian attitude, though in the new media age, people can fight back:

Yes, that’s fellow fencer Tim Morehouse, who has also responded in more detail:

Mr Wise: Maybe she didn’t respond to defeat to your liking, but she didn’t make excuses, throw her equipment, curse anyone out or do anything but respond as best she could to an emotionally challenging situation.     I have seen far worst displays from athletes and this one certainly didn’t warrant the zeal to which you attacked her in your article.

It is legitimate to criticize athletes for their behavior (yes, even fencers), but your article was a personal attack.

And to the “every four years” point, Morehouse says this:

Fencing is a great sport and Mariel Zagunis is a great champion.  Whether people are writing about it or not over the next 3 years, she’ll be working hard to achieve her goals while conducting herself as a role model and contributing to our society.   She pursues excellence not for the Bob Costas sit down or the Wheaties box, but because she is trying to be the best she can be.    And in the end, that IS the Olympic spirit.

PS Don’t mess with the fencing team.   We have swords.(and twitter)

One more point, possibly self-serving: I’ve always tried, at USA TODAY and elsewhere, to get people to care about Olympic sports in non-Olympic years. And these Games have inspired me to redouble my efforts. That’s why this little blog is going to stick with Olympic programming. (And soccer and MMA, don’t worry about that.) When Zagunis wins another world championship, you’ll read about it.

And if we’re looking for Olympic controversies, shouldn’t we be looking at the boxing judges?

UPDATE: Wise has really gotten into it with some people on Twitter, alternating between gracious smoothing-over …

… and upping the ante on the attacks …

Being a Dukie who interviewed this fencing team in Beijing and had a funny conversation with Becca Ward about skipping the closing ceremony in favor of Duke’s freshman orientation (I told her she wasn’t missing much at the latter, but she insisted), I’m moderately curious about this. Ward went on to a fantastic college fencing career at Duke, in any case.

“She and her mother bully people and have a sense of entitlement” is “something positive”?

This is why people hate journalists.

4
general sports, soccer, sports culture

The effect of arguments

Posted on by Beau Dure

A message came in over Twitter from a private feed (I’ll identify him if he likes), asking a good question: “Why on earth do you engage with complete morons?”

This was in response to last night’s Twitter fight, in which I was arguing with two guys with a combined Twitter followership of less than 50 people about the incident at yesterday’s Masters in which Bergen Record columnist Tara Sullivan was denied entry into the locker room.

No one credible is jumping to say Sullivan shouldn’t have been in the locker room. Her male colleagues rallied to share quotes with her. Augusta National very quickly apologized and pinned the blame on a misinformed security guard.

Don’t confuse the Sullivan case with the question of whether the locker room should be open in the first place. That’s a legitimate question, raised recently by Toronto FC’s Aron Winter. The norm in other countries and many smaller-scale U.S. leagues (including Women’s Professional Soccer) is to keep the locker room closed but make athletes available for interviews in a timely fashion. Some sports handle it better than others, of course. But if the powers that be have decided that the most expedient way to handle interviews is to open the locker room, then barring women at the door is an impediment to their jobs.

As my buddy hoover_dam said: “Either you let everyone in or you do a mixed zone where you let nobody in. Get with it, ya jerks.”

Continue reading →

2
olympic sports

Swimming sex abuse scandal breaking

Posted on by Beau Dure

Corporate siblings ESPN and ABC are investigating cases of sexual misconduct among U.S. swimming coaches, with each network releasing some of its work tonight.

The ABC version, at least in the online form, looks a little sensationalized and allows a few unrealistic statements about USA Swimming to go unchecked. Bob Allard, a lawyer for families now suing USA Swimming, calls the organization’s background-check system “willfully incomplete.” That seems harsh given the realities of national sports federations’ budgets.

That said, the report raises a few questions of how some coaches were able to move from place to place just as parents and police were asking questions.

The ESPN piece, which won’t air in full until May 2 on Outside the Lines, seems more promising, delving into the questions of how this could happen without the assumption that it must all be USA Swimming’s fault.

Clearly, the organization isn’t set up to police 12,000 swim coaches. It never could be. But shedding some light on the problem should help to change the culture and make parents and swimmers feel more empowered to report abuses. The news reports will be just the start of that process.

0