The goal of any aspirational sports league is no longer to put a superior product on the field and to ensure that its best performers succeed, it’s to either create a Messi or steal him from someone else
When Lionel Messi first arrived in the United States, he didn’t bother to introduce himself. Instead, he just started playing.
“I’m enjoying this new stage of my career,” Messi said. “I’m enjoying the experience of living in this country.” To recap – you hired a guy at massive expense. You renovated the team for him. That team hasn’t won anything that matters. Now you have to remake the team again , but people are still worried that the headliner might jump ship.Except, in this case, it isn’t. Messi has taken the old order of the sports business – win first; headlines after – and inverted it.
The American sports industrial complex got smart and conned colleges into paying their players. Now that they are a de facto minor league, they do the dirty work of letting people know who’s a winner and who isn’t. ‘Winning’ in this case is not a matter of victories versus losses, but monies earned from marketing and image rights. The market now tells us what a champion looks like .
This is the result of so much sports. Too many winners, making it impossible to convince people they should all matter. What people react to now is a hard-to-predict mix of talent, memeability, back story, personality and aesthetics.
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