Author: Aaron Charles Lerner

Time for esports

What a difference a day makes. When the week started, most U.S.-based sports were trying to soldier on in the face of the coronavirus. Now, they’re all closing down. The NBA, NHL, MLB, and MLS have now suspended their seasons indefinitely. The NCAA tournament will be played behind closed doors, and a number of conferences have cancelled their end-of-season tournaments. UEFA, the governing body of European soccer, has called a meeting for March 17th to discuss the status of all on-going competitions, and there are rumors that they will suspended the Champions League and Europa League at that time.

Largely avoiding the widespread cancellations, however, are esports. The pertinent difference between video games and athletics during a pandemic: you don’t need all the participants physically present in the same place to play them. A number of large esports events and tournaments that would have brought people together have been changed to an online-only format. Others, most notably, the upcoming DOTA 2 major in Los Angeles, have been postponed entirely.

Three major esports properties took the online-only route.

1. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive — a first-person, realistic shooter
2. Overwatch League — a first person, futuristic shooter
3. League of Legends — a MOBA and the most popular esport in the world

The order that I’ve put them above mirrors how easy it would be for a newcomer to understand what is going on, with Counter-Strike being the simplest. In CS, your team either kills all the enemy players or achieves an objective (planting bombs at particular sites). Overwatch is more complicated. There are a number of different map types, three different hero types, and 31 playable heroes each with their own abilities. League of Legends is definitely the most complex and will take the longest to understand the nuances. But at the end of the day, it’s a simple core concept — battle the other team and try to take over their base.

All three games are enjoyable to watch and, like sports, can be very exciting. The broadcast production is high quality: the announcers are experienced in their craft, there are creative features between matches, replays, player interviews, and the like — pretty much all the things you see in a sports broadcast.

So if you’re looking for things to watch while sports are on hiatus, check out esports. Who knows, you might enjoy it!

Coronavirus, again

I wrote about coronavirus and how it was and might affect sports around the world last week. Since then, more cases have been confirmed in more places, and games, festivals, and other events have been postponed or cancelled altogether. Italy has basically shut down the entire country and has postponed all Serie A matches until at least April 3rd. The SXSW festival in the United States has been cancelled and Coachella was postponed. All of the major U.S. sports leagues have taken measures to restrict locker room access for reporters in an effort to minimize the possibility of exposure for players.

Arsenal, the Premier League club about which I manage a website, just postponed it’s match against Manchester City scheduled for Wednesday, March 11th on the advice of the British government. Several of Arsenal’s players and staff had come into contact with Olympiacos and Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis 13 days ago. Those who interacted with Marinakis are self-isolating through Thursday evening, when the 14-day period when they can transmit the virus has ended.

We are still just seeing the beginning of COVID-19’s effects on sports. I think more games will be postponed in the coming days out of an abundance of caution, or at least they should be. As I said last time, I’m not a medical professional, so my opinion doesn’t carry all that much weight. But from a commonsense perspective, it seems like an awfully big risk we are taking for sports, something that at its core isn’t that important to society.

In the United States (and to a lesser extent in Europe), we just don’t know how many people have been exposed and what the penetration of the disease actually is. For example, earlier this week, it was confirmed that a priest who had given communion to hundreds of parishioners in Washington, D.C. tested positive for the virus. We don’t know where it is, we don’t really know who has it, and we don’t know how much we are spreading it by continuing to gather large groups of people together.

I simply cannot see how the college basketball conferences and then the NCAA can play tournaments with spectators in attendance over the coming weeks. I think they will do everything they can to avoid cancelling them altogether, but it seems a foregone conclusion that the arenas will be empty. Thank goodness for TV and streaming — they will come in handy as we sit at home trying to minimize our time spent in public, I suppose.

Playing hurt

As sports fans, we love stories about guys playing through injuries. “What a tough guy,” we say, “she gutted it out for the team.” Injured players suiting up for the big game become legends. Michael Jordan’s flu game. Keri Strug’s vault on a badly sprained ankle. Tiger Woods winning the 2008 U.S. Open with a broken leg and torn ACL. Curt Schilling’s bloody sock. Kirk Gibson hobbling around the basepath after a World Series pinch hit walkoff.  And the list goes on. They’ve all etched their names in sports history for fighting through the pain.

But should they have suited up? Should they have been on the field in the first place?

Every case should be evaluated on its own merits, but my general feeling is that no, players shouldn’t play hurt.

For every one of those legendary stories, I’d bet there are three people who battled through as much or more pain that we don’t remember. What did they get out of it? A shot at a big win or a title? Maybe. More pain and problems down the road? Probably.

And when was the last time a team showed the same level of commitment and loyalty to a player as that player showed the team? For a team legend, perhaps (but I’d suggest even those decisions are motivated by things other than any commitment to the player). Teams chew players up, wear out their bodies, and spit them out when they can no longer perform. It’s a cold, harsh reality that fans refuse to acknowledge.

For the majority of athletes, their body is their only valuable asset. They need to protect it and look out for themselves. When they play hurt, they put that asset on the line, and for what? As I said, every case is different, and if it’s just a case of pain tolerance where there isn’t much of a risk of further injury, then I’m somewhat more play with it. But even that has it’s limits — addiction to painkillers is a very real thing that athletes should be concerned about.

As a former athlete, I get it. You want to play. It’s what you do, it’s what you know, it’s who you are. You want to be there for your teammates. I’m fine with adults taking calculated risks if they completely understand their situation, but with all the external pressures athletes face, I wonder if that “informed decision” is even possible.

It’s all a bit cynical from me, I know. But I’m tired of the scales always tipping in favor of the teams. Teams are companies; they are created entities that make money hand over fist. Players are people. They have lives, families, hopes, dreams, pains, and everything else. We have much more in common with them than we do with the teams we support. It’s long past time we realize that and act accordingly.

 

 

The NWSL TV deal is GREAT

The National Women’s Soccer League is preparing to announce a multiyear television broadcast deal with CBS Sports. The deal will see a handful of matches, including the April 18th season opener between the Washington Spirit and the Seattle Reign, on the over the air network, additional matches on CBS’ family of sports properties, and even more through an online streaming platform. The NWSL had previously aired on Fox Sports networks and later on ESPN, but the ESPN deal only came mid-way through last season, after the Women’s World Cup put up strong ratings.

I don’t think I need to tell you, but I will anyways — this is GREAT news. The NWSL features basically the entire U.S. Women’s National Team roster, selection pool, and developmental players. And seeing as the USWNT has the best 23-woman roster in the world (you know, because they won the World Cup) and some think the second 23-woman roster could make a deep World Cup run as well, you get really good soccer.

It’s also incredibly important that we give women’s sports a chance to shine, especially women’s soccer in the U.S. They’ve won 4 of the 8 World Cup’s played, including the last two in a row, yet they’ve consistently been relegated to second-chair behind the men’s side (that hasn’t really won anything and missed the last World Cup) in pretty much every category — funding, coverage, resources, pay, etc. In fact, the women’s team is currently pursuing a $67M gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation for that reason.

There are a number of tired, overused, and under-supported criticisms of women’s sports and why they “won’t work” or “aren’t viable” in the U.S. I want to unpack (and hopefully dismantle) one of them in particular because it goes to this new TV deal. The argument is something like “of course the women’s game shouldn’t be covered and funded like the men’s, it’s not as popular — people don’t watch.”

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and a vicious cycle. How can a sport and a league become more popular if you don’t broadcast it? If you aren’t broadcasting it, it’s difficult to attract fans, advertisers, sponsors, investors — all the things that generate revenue that enable growth and sustain a league. You can create hyper-local followings, but there’s an obvious and artificial ceiling without a way to show the product to anything beyond the people who physically go to games. So of course the league is going to struggle to be viable because it won’t make enough money. And when it doesn’t make enough money, it will fold, and people will say “see, it’s not popular enough to be sustainable.” But the structure, without a broadcasting arrangement, was dead on arrival. You can’t set something up to fail, then say “I told you so” when it does.

And another thing — for years we’ve dumped more resources into the men’s side, at all levels of soccer in this country. Do you think that resource disparity might have something to do with this perceived difference in popularity and viability? I do. We’ll give the XFL a TV contract, sight unseen, to broadcast C-tier football with guys who couldn’t make the NFL playing in mostly empty stadiums, but women’s soccer featuring the best players in the world has to fight tooth and nail to get a few games broadcast? Come on. That’s just sad. And it’s very, very wrong.

We need to work to correct all those years of imbalance before we can even begin to make a useful evaluation of what is and isn’t popular, what is and isn’t viable.

My little blog post is the tip of the iceberg. There are myriad other things we’ve done wrong, ways we’ve failed women’s sports, nuances to the arguments, and probably a bunch of stuff that I don’t know or understand. I am by no means an expert. But I know enough to recognize that we need to do better and that this broadcast deal is a step in the right direction.

The league did their part, they struck a deal to get matches broadcast. Now we’ve got to tune in, to boost the ratings, to talk about the league and create buzz, to show everyone that we want more women’s soccer, and to prove all the naysayers wrong.

 

I think I like Jurgen Klopp now?

For the longest time, I didn’t like Jurgen Klopp. I first became aware of him while he was managing Borussia Dortmund. For me, his trademark gegenpress tactics choked the beauty and creativity out of football and replaced them with running and pressing. To be successful, his teams just needed fitness and a finisher, and they weren’t fun to watch.

Then in October 2015, he went to Liverpool, and because I’m an Arsenal supporter, I was inclined to continue disliking him. His sideline demeanor and antics struck me as manufactured and hyper-exaggerated, which was off-putting. He seemed to be trying too hard at everything.

But he’s grown on me.

It started with Klopp’s letter in response to a 10-year old Manchester United fan who wrote him to ask if Liverpool could lose in the Premier League because he didn’t want them to go undefeated. That he wrote the young boy back is cool, and he passed along a few lessons as well.

The problem is when you are ten years old you think that things will always be as they are now but if there is one thing I can tell you as 52 years old it is that this most definitely isn’t the case.

…although our clubs are great rivals we also share a great respect for one another. This, to me, is what football is all about.

In truth, my liking for Klopp probably should have started sooner. The best window we have into who footballing celebrities really are comes through interviews and press conferences. Klopp grades out well. He’s well-spoken and insightful, and his answers to the media demonstrate a self-awareness that he pairs well with self-effacing humor. He was recently asked a question about coronavirus; his response was perfect.

What I don’t like in life is that a very serious thing, a football manager’s opinion is important. I don’t understand that. I really don’t understand it, if I asked you, you are in exactly the same role as I am. So it’s not important what famous people say. We have to speak about things in the right manner, not people with no knowledge, like me, talking about something. People with knowledge will talk about it and tell people to do this, do that, and everything will be fine, or not. Not football managers, I don’t understand that. Politics, coronavirus, why me? I wear a baseball cap and have a bad shave. I’m concerned like everyone else. I live on this planet and I want it to be safe and healthy, I wish everybody the best, absolutely. But my opinion on coronavirus is not important.

I really like that answer. It’s honest, it’s realistic, it’s smart, and he threw in a dash of humor. He answers most questions like that. His responses seem real, which makes me think his demonstrative passion on the sidelines and after matches is real too. He seems like the Premier League Steve Kerr — a great coach but more importantly, a good guy.

Coincidentally, my initial dislike turned respect and appreciation of Klopp is similar to my feelings on the German national team. I used to really not like them. I thought they played an overly physical, brutal style of unattractive football. Then came Das Reboot, where the DFB completely overhauled their national team program. They started playing efficient, direct football that I enjoyed watching. Perhaps the change in attitude is not a coincidence. Maybe that’s how I am with Germany and football. Then again with the national team, it could also have just been Mesut Özil

I’ll always root against Liverpool because that’s what Arsenal fans do. But I’ve come around on Klopp. I’m fine to see him win the league, especially now that the Invincibles record will stand another season. I may even be happy for him. Now Liverpool supporters, that’s another story. Don’t think I’ll ever come ’round on that lot.

Sports and coronavirus

Coronavirus (that’s the CDC link) is affecting sporting events around the world. Italian sports, like Serie A, are being played to empty stadiums through April 3rd. Several esports events have been cancelled, postponed, or moved entirely online to avoid people physically interacting. The NBA and the NHL aren’t doing anything yet, but they have prepared contingency plans and are encouraging their players to limit contact with fans. The NHL is also concerned about a possible stick shortage because two of the main manufacturers have had factories closed in China.

The FA (England) has dropped pregame handshakes between teams, which seems a bit silly to be honest. Sure, they’re not touching hands to avoid communicating the disease; they’re just playing an entire game where people will be sweaty, bumping into each other, clutching and grabbing each other, sharing water bottles, etc. But good for them for doing something, I guess. Teams have also been advised to start making plans for playing in empty stadiums.

The NCAA Division III men’s basketball tournament just held a game in Baltimore, MD in a fan-less arena. What will the NCAA do for the men’s and women’s Division I tournaments just around the corner? Division I games in Seattle have already been cancelled, and the NCAA has formed a committee to make recommendations.

The International Olympic Committee will have to make a decision on the Summer 2020 games in Japan at some point. All indications from the IOC have been that they want to push forward with the games as scheduled. According to Thomas Bach, the IOC president, the committee will follow the recommendation of the World Health Organization, which he says has not yet mentioned canceling or postponing the Olympics. But the Japanese island of Hokaiddo, where the marathon is scheduled to be held, is currently completely shut down because of the coronavirus. As of March 1st, Japan had the fifth most cases in the world, not including the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which if it were a country, would have more. The games are still four-and-a-half months away, which gives health officials time to get the virus under control, but the clock is ticking.

Not that my completely non-expert, non-medical professional opinion matters, but I think leagues and teams in the U.S. and abroad should be ultra-careful. We have a communal responsibility to protect each other. Even if the virus might not have a high death rate for the main sport-fan demographics, if we continue to spread the virus in the community, we run the risk of transmitting it to the populations for whom it is more problematic. Unfortunately, we have a tendency, especially where sporting events (read: money — from the gate, from T.V., from sponsors) are concerned, to not always get our priorities straight. The primary concern here HAS to be public health.

The chart below comes from a paper from the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America; it shows the Spanish Flu death rates per 100,000 in Philadelphia and St. Louis. During the height of the Spanish Flu, St. Louis cancelled public events, but Philly still held a parade.

Yes, modern medicine is much better than it was in 1918 and the diseases are different, but why risk it? Why gather large groups of people for non-essential events and create environments in which the coronavirus can spread?

Fans needs to be smart as well. If you’re not feeling well, even if there isn’t any particular instruction to stay home because of COVID-19, maybe don’t go to the game. It’s a good rule to live by generally, whether there is a budding global health crisis or not — if you might be sick and can afford to stay home, do it. It’s the considerate thing to do. Your community will thank you.

As we’ve heard time and again, we shouldn’t panic. But we also shouldn’t be silly. Nobody, me especially, wants to see sporting events cancelled. For now, it’s probably better to be safe than sorry.

It’s almost bracket time!

It’s March, y’all! Selection Sunday is a little more than a week away and that means four of the best days on the sports calendar, Rounds of 64 and 32 in the NCAA Tournament, are right around the corner. Men’s college basketball is wide open this season; there aren’t any dominant teams, so the men’s tournament should be particularly wild.

Just remember: brackets are like fantasy football. Nobody really wants to hear about yours. We’ve all had a bracket busted. We’ve all picked the right Cinderella team. For many of us, a bracket filled out by drawing lots will be as or more successful than the ones we fill out based on whatever random reasons happen to be at the front of our minds when the email to submit our entries goes out. Let’s spare each other the bracket talk this year.

Although I filled one out at the 11th hour last year for a casual pool, I haven’t been doing them lately. And you know what, I’ve enjoyed the tournament more when I haven’t been obsessively checking the CBS Sports app to see how I’m stacking up. It’s fun to be able to root for maximum chaos instead of having your entry ruined by UVA being the first #1 seed to lose to a #16.

Plus, you know what I’m more excited for this March? All the [insert whatever topic] brackets that every website on the world wide web is going to bombard me with for the next four weeks. In theory, its Because who doesn’t love a recycled, played-out idea thrown together for cheap clicks.

In this rest of this post, I’ll be giving you a bracket of my ideas to help me select the subject for the random-topic bracket I’m eventually going to…just kidding.

Here’s my idea: we have one more bracket built from all the silly, non-college basketball brackets puts out there for #content and #engagement. And then we declare the idea officially dead and off-limits.

Yes, I’m aware of the irony.

Players can’t go into the stands

What happened after the Tottenham-Norwich FA Cup 5th round match today cannot happen in sports. Eric Dier, a Spurs player, charged into the away stands (Tottenham supporters) to confront a fan/group of fans. Per Spurs manager Jose Mourinho, Dier’s brother was being harassed and/or involved in an altercation with other fans, so he went to his defense.

Mourinho also said that while he understood Dier’s actions and that coming to the defense of a family member was something “that we probably [all] would do” that going into the stands is something “we professionals cannot do.” I cannot believe that I’m writing this, but Jose Mourinho is 100% correct.

Players cannot go into the stands. Full stop.

Fortunately, it appears that cooler heads prevailed and the stewards were able to get between everybody so that nothing really ugly happened. But the potential was there. Without security intervening, I bet punches would have been thrown. Somebody could have gotten seriously injured, either from a fight or from being trampled in a panic.

Anytime there is a player-fan incident, you think of the Malice at the Palace, where then Indiana Pacers player Ron Artest, now known as Metta World Peace, ignited a brawl by entering the stands to confront a fan who had thrown a drink at him. In soccer, you think of Eric Cantona karate-kicking a fan in the chest at Selhurst Park.

What’s wild is that in both cases the incidents made the players beloved with their home fans. That same thing seems to be happening today with Dier; Tottenham fans appear to be rallying around him. Tribalism is a heck of a drug. Personally, I’d prefer it if players from my team didn’t jump barriers to go be violent to fans, but that might just be me.

I’ve got questions about how things went down at Carrow Road. Was Dier close enough to the dispute his brother was having to hear what was being said? Why wasn’t the fracas broken up by stadium personnel before it escalated? Why wasn’t Dier stopped from going into the stands? Where were the rest of the Tottenham players while this was happening? It’s not uncommon for away teams to go applaud and thank the traveling fans after a match, win or lose. But usually, the entire team goes over there. Where was everybody else? Did nobody else notice what was happening?

All that aside, I’ve got a good bit of sympathy for Dier. Fans can lose themselves in the  emotions of the game and do things they wouldn’t normally do. Also, a not insignificant number of sports fans just suck. You don’t need to look very hard to find examples of both types. I know I would find it hard to handle all the crap that fans incessantly throw at me in the stadium, in public, and on social media. I’m sure it takes its toll.

More importantly, if I saw a family member in a confrontation with somebody, you bet I’d be there in a heartbeat. It’s a natural reaction for most of us. But most of us aren’t professional athletes and don’t have the added responsibilities that come along with that.

So really, Dier was put into an impossible situation — he “had” to come to the defense of family, and to do that, he had to do something he “can’t” do. I doubt that calculus consciously occurred to him in the moment. He probably acted on instinct.

And while all of that informs his conduct and helps us understand his actions, it doesn’t excuse them. As Mourinho said, you can’t do what he did. Even though we can understand why he did it and might do the same, Dier has to face the consequences. The FA has to suspend him for a significant amount of time. My guess, without heavily researching the precedent, is that the ban will be at least a month, possibly for the remainder of the season. And since he went into the Tottenham fan section to confront a Spurs fan, there might be discipline from the club too, although that may end up just being a hefty fine.

Because family was involved today, I can’t help but to think of the incident with Granit Xhaka and Arsenal fans earlier this season. Xhaka was slow coming off the pitch in a match the Gunners were losing and got into with the supporters who were harassing him as he left the pitch. He didn’t go into the seats, but it was clear that he told at least one fan, maybe more, to f&%* off. Turns out, Xhaka had been the target of some particularly nasty abuse on social media from fans, including messages wishing death on his wife and newborn child. It pushed him to his limit and the abuse as he left the pitch that day made him snap. We place expectations on players, but at some point, we’ve got to place them on fans too, right? After all, professional athletes are human beings and deserve to be treated with decency and respect. And while we don’t know what was going on between Dier’s brother and other fans, the messages Xhaka received were way beyond the pale.

Not to sound too naive, but I hope everybody learns from this. I hope Dier grows and matures from it. I hope fans in general and the fans involved today in particular become less jerk-ish (although I’m not holding my breath on that one). I hope the FA finds a way to minimize the chances of something like this happening again and figures out a way to insulate and protect players from the nastier elements of fan behavior.

P.S. I’m going to get to non-soccer stuff at some point, I swear!

The Champions League is bad

Maybe not for the reason you’d think.

I’ll admit upfront — I’m an Arsenal writer and fan and that is undoubtedly coloring this opinion, but I’d bet there are fans of other similarly situated clubs across Europe that would agree. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching the best football in the world. It’s higher quality play than the World Cup, but that’s a hot take for another day.

The Champions League is an insular, exclusive slush fund that is designed to keep the rich clubs rich and maintain the status quo in European football. It’s the same teams every season, and the same top clubs are the favorites every year. There might be some changes on the fringes, especially with the Premier League participants where there are more good enough teams than spots to go around, but if you look at the winners, it’s the same bunch. In the last 20 years, one, maybe two winners were “surprises” — Chelsea in 2011-12 and Porto in 2003-04.

The Champions League winner this season could make more than €80M. Simply reaching the group stages netted clubs €15M. Winning a group stage match was worth almost €3M; drawing one, nearly €1M. For comparison, the Europa League winners (the secondary continental league), will make about €40M. Reaching the group stage is worth less than €3M, with a match win earning €570K and a draw €190K. And if you’re not in either of those competitions, you get a big, fat nothing.

But it gets better (well, worse). Last season, UEFA introduced “coefficient ranking and shares” for both the Champions and Europa League to funnel more money to the big clubs. For each competition, every group-stage club is assigned a rank based on 10-year performance in continental competitions. UEFA then takes a chunk of the prize money and splits it into shares. The highest ranked club gets 32 “shares” and the lowest ranked club gets 1 “share” of that amount.

In the Champions League, the money carved out for share distribution is the same amount as the total prize pool to be distributed for advancing in the competition! It’s €585M! In the Europa League, it’s half the prize pool for advancing, €84M. On the one hand, it seems fine to be rewarding consistent performance, but when you’ve got a system designed to maintain the status quo, it ends up handing more money to the same big clubs and further insulating them.

Recently, both Arsenal and Leicester City, good teams with probably good enough players that have been relatively successful for the past five years, released financial reports that showed they were both losing money. For Arsenal, it was the first time the club had lost money in nearly 20 years. The thing both clubs have in common: they’re not in the Champions League. The top brass at both clubs said as much; they said their club needs the money from the CL to be successful both on the pitch and on the balance books.

Heck, until this year when they dropped to 11th, Arsenal were perennially in the Forbes Money List Top 10 for football clubs. Said club chairman Sir Chips Keswick, “another season outside the Champions League will continue to apply pressure to our financial results.” That just shows you the near-necessity of qualifying. If you don’t make the Champions League, even as a financial powerhouse club, you’re going to struggle. If that’s the effect it has on a club with a global brand, imagine what it’s like for financially lesser teams with significantly smaller footprints. That doesn’t seem right to me.

The stagnation in the Champions League where the rich stay rich is part of the reason why runs like the one put together last season by Ajax are so special. I’d love to see an Ajax-like run every year in the CL but that just doesn’t happen. Now Ajax have an illustrious history of their own as a club, but they’ve long since fallen out of the “kings of Europe” conversation. Last season, they were a team full of young talent that was fun to watch. They almost made the final, missing out on away goals because of a miraculous comeback from Tottenham. Then the summer rolled around, and the big clubs, loaded up with their own Champions League money, came calling. Ajax sold their two best players Frenkie De Jong and Matthijs de Ligt to Barcelona and Juventus respectively. This season, they crashed out of the Champions League in the group stage and will probably do the same next year after they lose more key players to big clubs.

Yes, selling to those bigger clubs is part of Ajax’s business model, but it would be nice if the structure in place gave us at least a couple years of young upstart teams before the roster pillaging. Clubs should be able to protect their talent and build a core, not be forced into selling out of (at least in part) financial necessity. It would have been really fun to see what that bunch of guys could have grown into together.

To be fair to the Champions League, it is not the sole reason for the problems of wealth distribution and spending capacity in football. But it definitely plays a large part in maintaining and reinforcing the divide between the haves and the have-nots. And now the powers that be in European football want to create the Super League, which would further entrench the stratification in the club system. I don’t know what the answer is or what continental football should look like (although I think I just came up with a concept for a new post), but I do know that we should be looking for ways to broaden the pyramid not narrow it. I’m tired of seeing the same names at the top.

To the Bundesliga: Do Better

The final 13 minutes of the Hoffenheim-Bayern Munich match this past weekend were strange. During the game, a group of Bayern Munich ultras had displayed banners deemed abusive to Hoffenheim owner Dietmar Hopp, including one that roughly translates to calling him a “son of a bitch/whore.”

The referee took the first two steps of the UEFA three step process put in place to combat disruptive fan behavior, although the process was mostly designed to combat racism, homophobia, and other abuses of that nature. A warning had been read out over the stadium public address, and the two teams had been taken off the pitch for fifteen minutes.

When the two teams came back out, they essentially finished the match with a protest of their own. They stood around the middle of the pitch and listlessly kicked the ball back and forth. I question what the players would have done had the match not been a 6-0 blowout — I suspect they would have played out a one-goal match — but that’s neither here nor there.

The Bayern Munich fan group released a statement (broken down here) explaining their reasoning. TL;DR — they were protesting a decision by the German Football Association (DFB) to ban Borussia Dortmund supports from attending Hoffenheim matches for two years, which they view as DFB breaking a promise (that was never made an official policy, mind you) not to collectively punish fanbases. They also were endeavoring to point out the absurdity and hypocrisy of equating the treatment of Hopp with fans racially abusing player and taking issue with what they see as a Draconian response to “mere insults” when compared to accusations and incidents of racism that have gone unpunished.

A little background on Dietmar Hopp and why he has become such a disliked and divisive figure. Hopp is one of the founders of SAP software company, the third largest IT group in the world. He’s a multi-billionaire and used some of his fortune to buy his boyhood club, TSG 1899 Hoffenheim. Under his ownership, the club went from the eighth tier of German football all the way to the Bundesliga in 2008. During the climb, he received an exception to the “50+1 rule” designed to prevent a single investor from holding a majority share in any club from the German Football Association (DFB). With the exception in hand, he has poured money into the club, leading critics to accuse him of buying a spot in the Bundesliga and becoming a poster-boy for “the commercialization of football.”

Borussia Dortmund supporters have been particularly outspoken about his ownership tactics and have displayed banners, including some with his likeness in the crosshairs of a rifle, since 2008. The conflict escalated in 2011 when Hoffenheim were found to be piping in artificial background noise in an attempt to drown out critical chants from Dortmund supporters. While Hopp was never officially linked to the artificial noise, naturally, Dortmund fans and Hopp’s other detractors think he was behind it.

Nobody, not the fans, not the players, nor the DFB come out of this mess looking great. Fans should try to stay away from personal attacks on anybody, especially insults not tied to the person’s professional activities, and putting someone’s face in the center of a crosshair is never okay. I recognize that the Bayern supporters made a deliberate choice and that’s their prerogative as protestors, but football fans have come up with some very creative chants over the years — perhaps they can again.

Similarly, the players were well within their right to counter-protest by knocking the ball about for the final 13 minutes of the match. You’d just like to see the same level of statement and commitment from players in the face of abuse, racial or otherwise, of their teammates. For the most part across Europe, we haven’t seen that. What we have seen is players trying to physically restrain their racially abused teammates to keep them on the pitch instead of walking off the field arm-in-arm with them.

The same criticism can be leveled at the DFB. Why have they chosen to draw the hard line at ownership being targeted? It’s a double-standard, and for now, they’re on the wrong side. If they come down hard on the next incidence of racism in German football, I’ll reevaluate. But I’d remind you that when Mesut Özil retired from the German National Team citing racism experienced at the hands of his fellow Germans as one the reasons for his decisions, he was basically called ungrateful, accused of making it up, and told to shut up and go away by the German footballing establishment.

It’s all an unfortunate commentary on who matters. Accusations of racism have been met with dithering and excuses, but the book gets thrown if you come at a billionaire owner? That’s not a good look. Do better, everyone.