BEHIND THE PLAY #66

Lots of mainly short, random bits that have been percolating in my head recently.

I watched the first half of the opening game of the Club World Cup (CWC) back in June. It was Bayern’s drubbing of a New Zealand team that plays in front of 500 fans at their home games. From memory the final score was 10-0. I also watched the final between Chelsea and PSG. Nothing in between. Not so much as a protest but just an overall lack of interest in yet another money printer from FIFA that shows a total lack of respect for players’ workloads.

Ticket sales were a calamity. Aside from a handful of high profile games they were almost giving them away, including the opener featuring Messi’s Miami where ‘student’ packages of four tickets for $20 were available in the days before the game so as to fill Hard Rock Cafe Stadium.

The sales promotions desperately leveraged World Cup ticket access with relentless emails offering access to first round and Round of 32 World Cup games if you bought a ridiculous number of CWC tickets. The players hated it, their managers hated it and even the weather at many games showed its disdain. It’s a bad idea that should not be given any further oxygen but of course it will.

Further on FIFA, as now careen towards a 48 team World Cup led by a man clearly who is clearly more interested in becoming a celebrity than in the stewardship of our game at the global level. A man who injects himself, almost comically at times, into every promotional effort involving an actual celebrity. A man who is clearly guided overwhelmingly by the advice of MBA’s rather than the players who are the ones that will bring crowds to the game. There are four “P’s” in marketing. Product, Placement, Price and Promotion. Placement, largely guided and formed by price and promotion is where the MBA’s live. Product is the games, embodied by the players. It’s clear that the product is no longer seen as antecedent to everything else around it. The business end of the game is driving this now and the endless promotions for tickets has become so nauseating that it’s made me go from being an untempered zealot for this World Cup to bordering on disinterest. Everyone reaches a point where the endless marketing of a product, a product you really want, with gimmick-ery, manufactured fear of loss and endless hoops to jump through where you just feel alienated.

A friend of mine and I had an excited plan to try to get a suite at BC Place for a couple of the games being held in Vancouver. We had gone to the 2014 Brazil World Cup and figured that, while expensive, we’d be able to get the 20-30 people to buy into the idea. That’s impossible now. Suites were all bundled into seven figure sponsorship packages for this World Cup. Groups of actual supporters need not apply. OK. Let’s try for Hospitality packages instead. I put my $500 deposit down knowing that you could get a Hospitality level ticket for the Qatar World Cup for less than that. Not this time. To access the ‘bespoke meals featuring local cuisine’ before games in a seat that could be anywhere in the stadium you had to commit to buying this level for every game at BC Place (8 games) at a starting price of $1000. I’m familiar with BC Place food. It’s not awful but it’s not Savio Volpe (where I went for the first time this past weekend and OMG…). So to get a pair of Hospitality tickets you actually had to buy 16. That would clock in at $16,000 minimum. We’re early on the sales curve of course so that will very likely go down but this along with the threat of dynamic pricing for tickets in general is further proof that we no longer have a guardian of the game in FIFA. We have a corporate entity extracting every penny it can from supporters after negotiating contracts with host cities that leave little room for legacy, infrastructure improvements or even goodwill.

I’ll still look to get tickets in the lottery and whatever other means they choose to exchange tickets for money; an auction wouldn’t surprise me. But when you lose me as a zealot, someone who’s been to three previous World Cups, I’d guess you lose thousands more like me who just get fed up being treated like a rube with a Visa card.

It’s hard to know what to make of Rise FC. They did indeed rise to the occasion and, after going winless in the five game prior to the ones noted below in my Bluesky post, go undefeated in the following five. This included two wins against league-leading Toronto as well as smashing Halifax Tides 6-0 along with a 0-0 draw against that same Halifax team and a draw against Ottawa.

By some statistical quirk though they have gone from being tied for first place after 11 games (ie. before these last five games; despite having not won one of their previous five games before that) to fourth place despite being undefeated in those last five games. Perhaps it’s just fair to say there’s excellent parity in the league when you can beat the top team twice but only draw the last place team in the space of a few weeks.

It’s been fascinating seeing the launch of the Northern Super League in general. It’s an incredible achievement to launch a new league in general but to be the first professional women’s league in the country in any sport, with all Canadian franchises is amazing. Quality of play has been everywhere from outstanding to mediocre. I said early in the season that there was a pretty big discrepancy between the top players and the bottom end. I think that’s still true. Attendance figures for games has been pretty much what I expected.

Even if you exclude Rise’s opening game at BC Place with 14,000+ attending their average is 3081, far higher than the CPL’s Vancouver FC. Smartly, they have minimized their home games in July and August when Vancouverites generally get out of town or prefer to do things locally rather than watch them.

Biggest problem facing the league now is how they keep unexpected stars like DB Pridham and Kaylee Hunter in the league next season. They will definitely get NWSL and/or European interest. Same for Latifah Abdu and Esther Okoronkwo.