They should get 100%...

…the Western Sydney Wanderers, that is. The players have been embroiled in a pay dispute with the club, which has offered them only ten percent of the revenues from participation in FIFA’s pointless annual parade of continental champions’ league winners, the Club World Cup. The players have been asking for fifty percent – the same ratio that Adelaide United got when they partook of the same event in 2008.

There are a few examples of professional sporting teams being run along the lines of workers’ co-operatives. In 1890, baseball players disenchanted by team owners’ use of the reserve clause to hold down their earnings formed the Players’ League, once of three major leagues in operation that season, with franchises in Boston, New York, (the then-still independent city of) Brooklyn, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago. Players took the profits for themselves, and clubs didn’t collude to reduce players’ bargaining power.

Prior to 1905, Australian cricket tours to Britain were run by the players themselves for their own financial benefit, with the Melbourne Cricket Club getting a slice of the profits in exchange for lending its support and branding (pre-Federation Australian tourists wore the blue, red, and white of the club rather than the green and gold introduced by the Board of Control). The formation of the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket (now Cricket Australia) ensured that the profits from outbound Ashes tours would be siphoned away from the players and towards the administrators. The final blow to player sovereignty was inflicted in 1912, when six of the country’s top cricketers were left out of a touring squad bound for Britain when they demanded the right to choose their own manager for the tour.

1890 and 1905 were victories for capitalist owners and administrators over the players – the sporting equivalents of the Freikorps’ shooting of Rosa Luxemburg and Franco’s coup against the Spanish Second Republic. They helped to ensure that professional sportspeople would spend the rest of the century battling the reserve clause, the maximum wage, and other restraints on their bargaining power.

What is needed is for professional leagues to be run on the lines of the Players’ League, with players owning and managing their own franchises, and controlling one hundred percent of the profits generated by their labours.

Alternatively, players’ bargaining power can be increased by upping the number of owner-controlled franchises bidding for their services. American baseball players benefited from the existence of ‘third’ major leagues in the 1910s (the Federal League) and the 1940s (the Mexican League), in both cases either jumping ship to the new league or using its existence to get a better deal from the established leagues. A rebel league is a difficult proposition in soccer, with FIFA’s totalising control over the sport, but the original North American Soccer League showed that it can be done.

The players, not only of the Wanderers but of all the other professional sports franchises across the nation, would do well to study the examples of the Players’ League and the pre-1905 Ashes tours. They shouldn’t settle for ten percent, or even fifty percent.

Film review: Semi-Pro

Since the formation of the NBA in 1946, some decidedly medium-sized cities have been home to big-time professional basketball teams: among them Fort Wayne, Indiana; Moline, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and Waterloo, Iowa. Flint, Michigan was not one of them, but that didn’t stop the 2008 Will Ferrell film Semi-Pro from focusing on a fictional team from the hometown of Michael Moore.

The American Basketball Association, or ABA, was a competitor to the NBA which lasted from 1967 to 1976, and which featured three-point shots (later adopted by the NBA) and a red, white, and blue ball. When it merged with the senior circuit in 1976, four of its franchises were accepted into the NBA: the Denver Nuggets, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs, and the New York-cum-New Jersey-cum-Brooklyn Nets. Semi-Pro presents a counter-factual history in which those four places were determined by the teams’ results in the league’s final season.

The opening scenes show Ferrell as Jackie Moon, a platinum-selling disco singer who has purchased, and is the captain-coach of, the Flint Tropics, a perennially bad ABA team who play in front of more cheerleaders than paying spectators. Over drinks at the fashionably multi-racial Kremlin nightclub, he learns of the ABA-NBA merger, and at a meeting of team owners he further learns that only four franchises will be accepted into the NBA for the 1976-77 season. The remainder will be dissolved; Moon asks “is that even a word?”

The protagonist convinces the other owners (the names of real-life ABA teams are displayed around the table in front of each Old Rich White Guy) to change the terms of the merger agreement to allow on-court results in the 1975-76 season to determine which four teams will make the jump. (If this had been done in real life, the Kentucky Colonels would have joined the NBA in 1976 instead of the Pacers.)

Former Boston Celtics player Ed Monix (Woody Harrelson) is recruited from the Colonels, traded, unbelievably, for a washing machine. Despite his own personal issues, he takes over as coach from Moon in a Western Bulldogs-style player revolt (Moon, however, retains the style of coach while Monix takes on the Orwellian title of ‘offensive and defensive co-ordinator’). Under Monix’s leadership, the Tropics learn some new tactics and begin to climb off the bottom of the standings.

Meanwhile, in a satire of the increasingly show-biz nature of pro sports, Moon and his team-mates get involved in a series of barmy-as-a-pot-of-whitewash matchday stunts, culminating in him ‘fighting’ a live lion. (In a case of life imitating art, the Brisbane Lions have announced plans to have a live lion on the field of play next season.) All this is rather a distraction from the plot; it is unclear whether its purpose is to critique the commercialisation of the modern NBA, or to pine for the comparatively innocent stadium atmosphere of the seventies.

The final game of the season sees the Tropics at home to the most successful of the post-ABA franchises, the Spurs; in true Hollywood fashion, the Michiganders need a win to qualify. This is where the film gets ridiculous: a Tropics player traded to the Spurs switches sides mid-match, and a concussed Moon has a conversation with his dead mother, who, mind-bogglingly, is African-American. One can probably guess the ending: the Tropics win by one point with an after-the-buzzer shot, and Moon gets a job with the NBA even if his team doesn’t.

There are many ways to interpret Semi-Pro. One possibility is that the film represents a longing for the small-city teams which once populated America’s pro sports leagues, and of which only the Green Bay Packers remain. The film, however, doesn’t focus much on Flint itself (perhaps due to it not being directed by Michael Moore), and the possibility of the Tropics being admitted into the NBA remains live until near the end. A more realistic idea is that it is a paean to simpler times, before the world of sport was taken over by commercialism and when players simply went out and played, not worrying much about tactics or fitness.

Like most imagined pasts, this supposed golden age was not what it seemed. All sports are better to watch now that their players are full-time professionals, and all are better for the tactical revolutions engendered by men like Lobanovskiy, Barassi, Gibson, and Lombardi. On the other hand, television coverage has had a negative impact on most sports, as the type of gameplay and presentation favoured by casual fans in their living rooms often differs from that appreciated by the rusted-on fan in the stands. Basketball presents good examples of this: just look at the NBA’s codes regarding players’ off-court dress and behaviour, which are designed to make the league’s predominantly African-American players more acceptable to white, middle-class America.

Semi-Pro doesn’t deviate from the usual script of Hollywood’s treatment of sports. It sheds little light on the real history of the ABA, and it valorises amateurism and tactical innocence while failing to identify What Went Wrong for professional sport in the last few decades of the twentieth century.

What would make a better sporting film? One that highlights the key problems of sport in the neoliberal age: the greater dependence on television revenue than on gate revenue, the de-proletarianisation of crowds, the trend towards taxpayer-funded all-seater stadia, the increasing tendency of the managerial state to intervene in the affairs of once-autonomous sporting organisations, and the exploitation (in the Marxist sense) of players by clubs and leagues. Semi-Pro has very little to say on the social and political aspects of professional sport.

The Australian National Football League: a counter-factual history

(This is the first in a series of [approximately] five alternate history scenarios, intended to show how various sporting leagues could have evolved differently.)

Following the success of the 1933 interstate carnival held in Sydney, the national code continued to grow in New South Wales. By the 1960s, most Sydney first grade clubs had licensed clubs and used the poker machine revenue to lure star players from the southern states, and the increasing revenue allowed the NSWANFL to build its own equivalent of Waverley Park at Homebush Bay, which it named Pemulwuy Stadium. When the idea of a national competition was first discussed, the NSWANFL was of at least an equivalent standard to the SANFL and WANFL. In the mid-1970s, top clubs from the VFL and NSWANFL hammered out plans for a national league, which began play in 1977.

The league was named the Australian National Football League; at the time, all state leagues except Victoria had the word ‘national’ in their names. The VFL’s traditional ‘big five’ (Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Geelong, and Richmond) and post-war powerhouse Hawthorn were joined by the NSWANFL’s four power clubs (East Sydney, Newtown, North Shore, and Wests) as well as up-and-coming suburban side Campbelltown. They invited Port Adelaide and Norwood from the SANFL, Mayne and Sandgate from the QANFL, and a composite Canberra side, to be known as the Rams. To better market themselves to a national audience, Newtown and Wests rebranded themselves as the Sydney Bloods and Sydney Magpies respectively.

The sixteen teams played a twenty-two round season, with two televised matches each week at Waverley Park and Pemulwuy Stadium, followed by a final four. Minor premiers East Sydney held off Port Adelaide, Geelong, and Campbelltown in a tense finals series. Soon after the Bulldogs’ grand final triumph in front of a near-capacity Pemulwuy Stadium, the ANFL announced its seventeenth team, the Newcastle Dockers, would enter the following season.

The 1980s saw the league expand further, with the Wollongong Hoppers and Tasmania Devils joining, before the increasing ease of trans-continental air travel made it possible to recruit Perth-based teams for the 1987 season. Like Adelaide and Brisbane, Perth was allotted two spots, which went to East Perth and a combined Fremantle team, known as the Sharks. To even out the competition, a Cairns-based team, the Crocodiles, was added in 1995.

Nowadays, the ANFL’s twenty-two teams play an uneven twenty-two-round fixture which allows for blockbusters and derbies such as the Port Adelaide-Norwood ‘Showdown’ and the East Perth-Fremantle ‘Derby’. The top eight teams qualify for the finals series, which is a knockout, but the minor premier retains the right of challenge (i.e. if knocked out, it plays the winner of the final in a ‘grand final’). Matches are played over twenty-five-minute quarters with two interchange and two substitutes per team, and an ‘offside’ rule introduced to stop flooding mandates that each team have two players in each fifty-metre arc and four in each half of the field at all times, leaving ten who can follow the ball around the field.

The introduction of a national league made the old interstate matches obsolete, and though a ‘state of origin’ concept was mooted early on, the abolition of the states and the rise of Australian nationalism made such an idea seem pointless. The increase in the number of foreign players, however, has led to an ‘international’ match being played every year between the all-Australian team and ‘the Rest’.

The teams are listed with their nicknames and home grounds in parentheses, and any other relevant information in brackets.

1. Carlton (the Blues; Princes Park)

2. Collingwood (the Magpies; Victoria Park)

3. Essendon (the Bombers; Melbourne Cricket Ground)

4. Geelong (the Cats; Kardinia Park)

5. Hawthorn (the Hawks; Waverley Park)

6. Richmond (the Tigers; Waverley Park)

7. Adelaide Redlegs (Norwood Oval) [formerly Norwood]

8. Port Adelaide (the Magpies; Football Park)

9. East Perth (the Royals; Subiaco Oval)

10. Fremantle (the Sharks; Fremantle Oval) [merger of East Fremantle and South Fremantle]

11. Tasmania (the Devils; North Hobart Oval and York Park, Launceston) [composite team; nickname taken from the early 2000s Tasmanian VFL team]

12. Campbelltown (the Swans; Monarch Oval, Campbelltown)

13. East Sydney (the Bulldogs; Sydney Cricket Ground)

14. North Shore (the Bombers; Gore Hill Oval, Chatswood)

15. Sydney Bloods (Pemulwuy Stadium) [formerly Newtown]

16. Sydney Magpies (Pemulwuy Stadium) [formerly Western Suburbs]

17. Newcastle (the Dockers; Newcastle No. 1 Sports Ground) [composite team; nickname inspired by the real-life Fremantle franchise]

18. Wollongong (the Hoppers; Wollongong Showground) [composite team; nickname inspired by North Albury FC]

19. Canberra (the Rams; Manuka Oval) [composite team; nickname taken from the NSW-ACT TAC Cup team]

20. Brisbane Seahawks (Brisbane Exhibition Ground) [formerly Sandgate]

21. Brisbane Tigers (Brisbane Exhibition Ground) [formerly Mayne]

22. Cairns (the Crocodiles; Cazaly’s Stadium) [composite team]