Nature on Binary Sex

The science journal Nature has a nice piece on the science of sex. Claire Ainsworth writes that science does not support a strict nbinary view of sex. One scientist that she quotes says:

“I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.

The scientific abiguity can be problematic because many parts of society have been designed on a binary model of sex (for isntance, at ESPN Kate Fagan discusses the issue of "sex testing" as related to FIFA and the Women's World Cup):

These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person's legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.

“The main problem with a strong dichotomy is that there are intermediate cases that push the limits and ask us to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between males and females,” says Arthur Arnold at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies biological sex differences. “And that's often a very difficult problem, because sex can be defined a number of ways.”

The article uses the term "disorders of sexual development" - DSDs - to refer to the condition of people who don't fall neatly into one or other of the male/female dchotomy. I am not a fan of this terminology as it suggests that people who fall outside of the binary have a "disorder" and thus are somehow abnormal. In contrast, what the science suggests is that what are called DSDs are in fact normal, but not typical.

Whatever terminology is used, the practical issues remain:

[I]f biologists continue to show that sex is a spectrum, then society and state will have to grapple with the consequences, and work out where and how to draw the line. Many transgender and intersex activists dream of a world where a person's sex or gender is irrelevant. Although some governments are moving in this direction, Greenberg is pessimistic about the prospects of realizing this dream — in the United States, at least. “I think to get rid of gender markers altogether or to allow a third, indeterminate marker, is going to be difficult.”

So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.

My draft paper - soon to be submitted - on "sex testing" proposes a policy solution to this issue based on scientific evidence that in some cases there is no clear binary of male and female. I'm still taking comments, please email me if you'd like to see the draft.

Blatter vs. Scala

So Sepp Blatter has apparently decided that he may try to hold on to the FIFA presidency, according to a report in the Swiss press.  That Blatter may be trying to hold on to power probably isn't a surprise to many FIFA watchers, and is consistent with a theory I aired here a few weeks ago.

In response to the report, Dominico Scala, the chair of FIFA's Audit and Compliance Committee issued a statement:

"For me, the reforms are the central topic," Scala said in a statement. "That is why I think it is clearly indispensable to follow through with the initiated process of leadership change as it has been announced."

It seems safe to conclude that Scala is not a supporter of the idea that Blatter might stand again in the "snap election." When asked to clarify Blatter's intentions, FIFA said in a statement:

"We refer you to the remarks from FIFA President Blatter from 2 June. FIFA has no further comment."

This sets up the spectacle of FIFA's President being in open conflict with the organization's Audit and Compliance chairman. As both men are elected in their positions, they can only be removed by a vote of the FIFA Congress (and thanks to @michellechai12 for pointing this out). So if things do get all the way to the extraordinary Congress, one possibility are referendum's on both men being put before the FIFA Congress.

It also seems clear that any meaningful FIFA reforms will not happen in the next months with Blatter in charge. That agenda will have to await leadership change.

The conflict between Blatter and Scala sets up an extended period of considerable public awkwardness for FIFA. If Blatter wants to run again and Scala does not want him to, then things could get ugly. Scala does not appear to have any formal standing to weigh in on whether Blatter runs or not. Blatter has shown in the past that he is willing to use some dirty tricks to remove an internal opponent from the scene (e.g., case of Mohammed bin Hammam). And there is continuing uncertainty about what the US federal investigators may have on Blatter. Of course, Scala may also chose to resign in protest (though he finds himself is a uniquely powerful position in the mess that is FIFA). Who knows?

There is lots to play out and lots of uncertainty. What does seem certain is that there is more FIFA drama ahead.

FIFA Presidents and Platforms: The Smorgasbord Option

At the BBC Richard Conway reports that FIFA is looking to schedule its "Extraordinary Congress" to elect the successor to Sepp Blatter later this year, on December 16 in Zurich. Conway reports:

A final decision on the date for a presidential election is not expected to be made until July, but it is believed holding an emergency congress in mid-December is Blatter's preferred option.

That would give him just six months to devise and implement the reforms he has promised before leaving the organisation he has been a part of for more than 40 years.

The FIFA plan seems procedurally problematic. Any agenda of reform will (it seems) have to be voted on by the FIFA Congress. But this is the same Congress who will be voting on a new president who may or may not share the same reform agenda. Unless Sepp Blatter intends to put himself forward as a candidate (don't laugh) it makes no sense for there to be a "Blatter Reform Agenda."

Will the FIFA Congress first vote on Blatter's reforms and then after that vote for the next FIFA president to implement them? Or vice versa? Neither makes much sense.

Here is a better idea.

Over the next months, FIFA might put together a smorgasbord of possible reform proposals. This won't be difficult as there are lots of experts and groups willing to help, like Transparency International, and the reforms FIFA needs are not exactly rocket science. With a finite list of clear options for reforming the organization, perhaps in place within 3 months, the candidates to succeed Blatter would then be in a position to announce which of the reform options are part of their platform to serve as the next FIFA president, and which reform proposals that they reject.

Then, when the election occurs the FIFA Congress and others will be able to clearly associate each candidate with a specific reform agenda. With candidates working from a centralized set of proposals there will be much less opportunity for gaming the reform agenda. Candidates could of course ignore such a smorgasbord of options for reform, but that would certainly call into question their commitment to reforming the organization.

Putting forward a "Blatter Agenda" seems unwise and a recipe for further problems. At the same time, if Blatter is actually sincere about reforming the organization, he could easily and visibly lay out a set of options for reform as building blocks that would allow his potential successors to clearly articulate their platform for leading FIFA into the future.

Jack Warner on President Obama's "Bribe"

Jack Warner has compared his visit to the White House with the various other perks (called "bribes" as part of a RICO by the US Government) he received as a top FIFA official.

AFP reports:

Warner called the United States two-faced, since he and Blatter had once been welcomed to the White House by President Barack Obama.

"Was the president of the United States seeking a strong lobby from a FIFA vice president or was he 'bribing' a FIFA official with a visit and a meal to the White House? I think not," Warner said.

"In each case, the answer is no, but it just goes to show how selective this 'bribe' issue can be," he added.

There is a different in law between legitimate and illegal efforts to win influence. That this escapes Warner speaks to how ingrained favors-for-influence are as part of the FIFA culture.

At the same time, Warner does have a point, which is awkward for the White House and for US Soccer.

Who has the Backstory to this Photo?

The photo above above, from July 27, 2009, shows President Obama with now-disgraced FIFA president Sepp Blatter along with FIFA" Jack Warner, who the US is trying to extradite from Trinidad & Tobago in order to prosecute for a variety of organized criminal activities.

According to FIFA, "In particular, he was very interested in the development plans and using football for development, especially in the areas of education and health." Awkward. Also at the meeting were FIFA's Jermone Valcke (implicated as a conduit in a $10 million bribe to Warner) and US Soccer's Sunil Gulati.

Gulati has been incredibly quiet since the FIFA scandal broke. perhaps because he is very close to many of the key figures, such as above. More generally, how does it happen that key members of what the US government now calls a RICO -  a Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization - get into the White House, share a seat on the president's couch and hear him praise (in ignorance) their corrupt activities.

Maybe someone has already written the back story to this White House visit. If not, someone should!

BBC Panorama: Catch Me if You Can

Sepp Blatter's Snap Election

So let me air this theory. Sepp Blatter has no intention of stepping down As a masterful politician, he has called a snap election. Politicians do not call snap elections in order to retire. What is a "snap election"? Here is Wikipedia:

Generally it refers to an election in a parliamentary system called when not required (either by law or convention), usually to capitalize on a unique electoral opportunity or to decide a pressing issue. It differs from a recall election in that it is initiated by politicians (usually the head of government or ruling party) rather than voters, and from a special election in that the winners will serve an entire term as opposed to the remainder of an already established term.

Blatter says he want to serve until the election and during that time implement a broad reform agenda. What better opportunity to show that he, and he alone, is the man to take FIFA forward in the 2016 FIFA presidential election? After all, all this attention on FIFA can't sustain, and a veneer of reforms might just reduce the heat.

Sepp Blatter isn't gone, far from it. He has said he will not run, but, hey, he has said that before. No, yesterday he has just bought some time to figure out how to improve upon the 133 votes he got last week.

A crazy theory? Maybe. But then again, it's FIFA.

Sepp Blatter to Resign, Reforming FIFA Begins

At a remarkable FIFA press conference just concluded Sepp Blatter announced that he will resign from FIFA, which will take effect upon the election of his successor, most likely to occur sometime January-March, 2016.

There will be much needed discussion of reforms. Here in PDF is a chapter that I wrote earlier this year summarizing some of the most prominent reform proposals put forward by Transparency International, governance expert Mark Pieth and FIFA's own internal reform committee. See the appendix for the full list.

Blatter is on his way out, that marks an ending. The task of reforming FIFA however has only just begun.

Is This the $10 Million Bribe to Jack Warner?

UPDATE June 2: The answer to the question posed in the title of this post appears to be ... No. See Martyn Ziegler here.

One of the schemes alleged by the US DOJ  (#7 - the 2010 FIFA World Cup Vote Scheme) claims (and now apparently confirmed from South Africa) that in 2008 FIFA sent $10 million of South Africa's FIFA funds to host the 2010 World Cup to Jack Warner, as a follow up payment in exchange for his 2004 vote for South Africa to host the event.

I was curious about whether that money could be identified on the CONCACAF end. With a hat tip to @mjstainbank here is a candidate for those funds on the CONCACAF end:

CONCACAF President Jack Warner was ecstatic after FIFA, the governing body of world football, issued a US$10m grant to CONCACAF, the group of football-playing countries of which Warner is president.

When contacted in Zurich yesterday, an elated Warner said: "This is a dream come true for 11 of our member countries. It will surely help to lift the bar of football in these countries. My sincere hope is that the governments and business organisations join with us in this FIFA initiative that will take the sport to even greater heights".

The FIFA funds will go into the "WIN in CONCACAF with CONCACAF" programme which was devised by FIFA in conjunction with CONCACAF and was agreed yesterday. The new development programme will see US$10 million invested in North and Central American and Caribbean football programmes over the next two years. The funding has been tailored to meet the specific needs of individual member countries, and will help develop the infrastructure in the first division leagues of Barbados, Belize, El Salvador, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. 

The news article is June 2009, so one year after the transfers were made from the South Africa FA via FIFA. No mention is made of any South Africa connection, nor the the CFU mentioned, which was also identified as a recipient of the FIFA transfer by the DOJ.

The $10 million grant also shows up in a 2013 FIFA press release (in bold below):

Between 1999 – the year in which the FAP and the Goal programme started – and 2012, FIFA has invested USD $260,099,659 in football development in the CONCACAF region. While USD $186,750,000 corresponded to FAP funds, and USD $39,100,000 were invested in Goal projects, additional resources were transferred through adidas Goal balls in CONCACAF (USD $1,667,255), courses (USD $15,900,000), Win in CONCACAF with CONCACAF (USD $10,000,000), humanitarian support funds (USD $5,041,732), and PERFORMANCE (USD $1,640,672).

With more than $260M being transferred from FIFA to CONCACAF, there is plenty of space to hide $10 million.

But the question is ... is this the same $10 million?

Does the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Apply to FIFA?

Over the past decade the US government has increasing used a 1977 law to go after corrupt international business practices that touch on US shores in some way. The provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) are far-reaching and consequential.

But does the act apply to FIFA? Here a few expert perspectives:

First, on the "no" side:

[T]he FIFA-related action is NOT an FCPA enforcement action.  Rather the individuals were charged with racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and certain defendants were also charged with tax evasion and obstruction of justice.

Nevertheless, the conduct alleged could potentially result in FCPA scrutiny for certain companies.

As the FCPA Guidance rightly notes: “the FCPA does not cover every type of bribe paid around the world for every purpose …”.

Indeed, the FCPA’s anti-bribery provisions only apply to bribe payors and not bribe recipients and the various FIFA officials are generally alleged to be bribe recipients.  Further, for there to be a violation of the FCPA’s anti-bribery provisions a “foreign official” must be an actual or intended recipient of a payment scheme.

This legal note (in PDF) agrees that FIFA itself in unlikely to fall under the FCPA, but argues that national FAs certainly might:

A more significant question, however, is whether the national athletic associations which comprise FIFA or the IOC would constitute “instrumentalities” of their respective governments for FCPA purposes. For example, soccer in Brazil is organized under FIFA member organization the Confederação Brasileira de Futebol. Qatar participates in FIFA through the Qatar Football Association, and the Olympiyskiy Komitet Rossii represents Russia in the IOC. These entities and national organizations like them often play a large role in organizing, hosting, and controlling international sporting events that can attract millions, if not billions, of dollars. If national athletic associations are determined to be instrumentalities of the government, any bribes to officials of such associations may violate the FCPA. Companies dealing with foreign sports organizations should take measures to ensure compliance with US anti-corruption law.

As always in such matters, its complicated. Here is what Reuters reported on the possible application of the FCPA in relation to Nike's alleged role in the scandal:

The description of the $160 million, 10-year deal signed by "Sportswear Company A" matched exactly the details of Nike's agreement to become the footwear and apparel supplier and sponsor of the world's most successful national soccer team.

Still, the U.S. Justice Department is likely to take a tougher stance against those who solicited bribes than those who paid them, especially if a company did not have a long history of paying bribes, said former U.S. federal prosecutor Michael Volkov.

"Where the case is going, it's not focusing as much on the people who were shaken down as it is on the people doing the shaking," Volkov said.

While the 14 defendants in the indictment are being charged with crimes such as money laundering and wire fraud, the United States has normally prosecuted U.S. businesses for foreign bribery under the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

That law's anti-bribery provisions apply to dealings with governments and government officials and may not be of much use in the soccer world because soccer associations are typically not government agencies. The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF), which signed the 1996 deal with Nike, is a private organization.

"The FCPA does not prohibit private bribery," said Homer Moyer, who specializes in FCPA cases at the law firm Miller & Chevalier in Washington.

If Nike is thought to have paid bribes by transferring funds from a U.S.-based account, the Justice Department might consider charging the company with "international promotional money laundering," said a former official with the Justice Department's money laundering section.

While seldom used in the past, prosecutors have made increased used of this charge in recent years, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to his private sector work.

Prosecutors could employ a provision of the FCPA that requires companies to keep accurate accounting records. If the sportswear company in the Brazil deal disguised or hid wrongdoing in its books, it may have violated the law, lawyers said.

For the US to go further than it did last week in its pursuit of FIFA would seem to require breaking some new jurisprudential ground. Stay tuned. 

DOJ Scheme 7 has No Counts - What's the Significance?

Indicted FIFA officials and co-conspirators engaged in 12 "schemes" as alleged by the US Department of Justice (here in PDF). The 14 indicted individuals together face 47 criminal counts against them.

I have gone through the 47 counts to the relevant 12 schemes. It seems interesting (to me at least) that there are four schemes which have no associate criminal counts. I am not an expert in criminal law, so I can't judge the significance of schemes without counts.

It is interesting because one of the schemes (#7 - the 2010 FIFA World Cup Vote Scheme) is the one that alleges (and now apparently confirmed from South Africa) that in 2008 FIFA sent $10 million of South Africa's FIFA funds to host the 2010 World Cup to Jack Warner, as a follow up payment in exchange for his 2004 vote for South Africa to host the event.

Is there no count associated with this scheme because:

a. No US laws were violated?
b. Laws were violated and charges are pending?
c. Laws were violated and this will be the subject of future arrests?
d. This is under Swiss jurisdiction?
e. It is simply context?
f. Something else?

Any thoughts?

Where to Start on Sports Governance?

I was at a neighborhood picnic last night and everyone wanted to talk to me about FIFA. It is great to see such interest in the topic. There were lots of questions, like: What is FIFA anyway? Why is it so hard for anyone to influence them? Aren't they a part of the United Nations? And so on. These are the same sorts of questions that I've been asked by media on 5 continents since the DOJ indictments last week.

It turns out that there are lots of questions like these and not many places to go for ready answers. The media coverage of FIFA has been excellent and offers some great resources for people to learn more about sports governance.

In this post I am going to do the professorial thing, being a professor, and offer some readings. I'll be happy to add to the limited number of pointers presented below and take recommendations. There is a substantial, and sprawling, literature on aspects of sports governance. Much of it is technical and wonky, and it often is narrowly focused on topics like the case of Lance Armstrong, concussions in the NFL or the history of the Olympics.

So consider this post a pointer to some scene setting perspectives. It is impossible to do justice to the field in a single post. In spring of 2016, I'll again be teaching Introduction to Sports Governance here at the University of Colorado-Boulder and I will again share my syllabus (with recommendations welcomed!).

I'll start with two pieces of mine, which were written specifically to address some fundamental questions of the sort that my friends were asking me last evening. Both are peer reviewed papers, but hopefully (if I did my job) they are broadly accessible and readable.

The first paper is titled "Obstacles to accountability in international sports governance" (here in PDF) and was written earlier this year by invitation of Transparency International as part of their "Corruption in Sport Initiative." TI will ultimately have 50+ articles on various dimensions of this topic, which may serve as a definitive resource on the topic. My paper looks at issues broader than just FIFA, which are characteristics of institutions of international sport governance more generally.

Here is how my article begins:

To understand why international sport organisations are so often the subject of allegations and findings of corruption it is necessary to understand the unique standing of these bodies in their broader national and international settings. Through the contingencies of history and a desire by sports leaders to govern themselves autonomously, international sports organisations have developed in such a way that they have less well developed mechanisms of governance than many governments, businesses and civil society organisations. The rapidly increasing financial interests in sport and associated with sport create a fertile setting for corrupt practices to take hold. When they do, the often insular bodies have shown little ability to adopt or enforce the standards of good governance that are increasingly expected around the world.

This short article describes why improved governance is needed and why it is so hard to achieve. First, it recounts a number of recent and ongoing scandals among sports governance bodies. Second, it discusses the growing economic stakes associated with international sport. Third, it provides an overview of the unique history and status of international sports organisations, which helps to explain the challenge of securing accountability to norms common in other settings.

A second article of mine focuses on FIFA. I started it in 2010 after the various World Cup site selections scandals started being reported in the media. The paper was the result of my own effort to answer the question that is the paper's title: "How can FIFA be Held Accountable?" and is here in PDF.

Here is the abstract:

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA, is a non-governmental organization located in Switzerland that is responsible for overseeing the quadrennial World Cup football (soccer) competition in addition to its jurisdiction over other various international competitions and aspects of international football. The organization, long accused of corruption, has in recent years been increasingly criticized by observers and stakeholders for its lack of transparency and accountability. In 2011 FIFA initiated a governance reform process which will come to a close in May 2013. This paper draws on literature in the field of international relations to ask and answer the question: how can FIFA be held accountable? The paper’s review finds that the answer to this question is "not easily." The experience in reforming the International Olympic Committee (IOC) more than a decade ago provides one model for how reform might occur in FIFA. However, any effective reform will require the successful and simultaneous application of multiple mechanisms of accountability. The FIFA case study has broader implications for understanding mechanisms of accountability more generally, especially as related to international non-governmental organizations.

For those wanting to dig deeper, these papers cite excellent work by several scholars, among them Jean-Loup Chappelet, who has written extensively on the Olympic movement and international sports governance. There are also excellent books about FIFA, most recently "The Ugly Game" by Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert.

Perhaps the best one-stop shop for learning more about various dimensions of sports governance is the website of Play the Game, a Danish group focused on governance. The next stop probably should be the resources made available by Transparency International. One can dig much deeper by browsing the journals listed here on "sports management" broadly conceived.

Sports governance is a sprawling area of practice and inquiry. There is some excellent media reporting these days on the subject, which ideally will make more sense if placed into the context of a broader understanding of the issues and history.

Comments, pointers, suggestions encouraged!

The FA Cup Hurricane Prediction Model

As readers here will know, I have a long-time interest in predictions - how they are made, how they are used and how good they are. Evidence indicates that though we try hard, we are just not very good at making good predictions.

Luckily, in research I did a few years back I appear to stumbled on to an exception. In a paper on mine on our ability to anticipate US hurricane damages 1-5 years in advance (here in PDF), the time scale of predictions offered by the so-called "catastrophe modelling" companies, I discovered a unique relationship between the final score of the FA Cup and the total hurricane damage in the US later that same year.

I explain:

Indeed, my own research shows a correlation of 0.33 between the total score in the UK Football Association’s (FA’s) annual Cup Championship game and the subsequent hurricane season’s damage, without even controlling for SSTs, ENSO or the Premier League tables. Years in which the FA Cup championship game has a total of three or more goals have an average of 1.8 landfalling hurricanes and USD11.7 billion in damage, whereas championships with a total of one or two goals have had an average of only 1.3 storms and USD6.7 billion in damage.

Of course, anyone with some data and a spreadsheet can mine for relationships. The true test of a prediction is how it does in real-time prediction. Starting 2006, the companies which provide forecasts (or "medium-term outlooks") of US hurricane damage for 5 years into the future consistently predicted that annual hurricane damage would be above average. These predictions are important because they influence everything from global reinsurance to homeowners insurance.

So how have these sophisticated (and costly) predictions done compared to the FA Cup Prediction model from 2008-2014? The table below shows the results.

You can see that the FA Cup model has been twice as accurate as the catastrophe modeling companies in anticipating US hurricane damage.

OK, this is all fun and games, but there is a serious point here to make as well, and it goes far beyond hurricanes to how we produce and think about scientific research that produces predictions about the future.

From my 2009 paper:

The "Guaranteed Winner Scam" Meets the "Hot Hand Fallacy"

I am sure that no one would believe that there is a causal relationship between FA Cup championship game scores and US hurricane landfalls, yet the existence of a spurious relationship should provide a reason for caution when interpreting far more plausible relationships. Two simple dynamics associated with interpreting predictions help to explain why fundamental uncertainties in hurricane landfalls will inevitably persist.

The first of these dynamics is what might be called the ‘guaranteed winner scam’. It works like this: select 65,536 people and tell them that you have developed a methodology that allows for 100 per cent accurate prediction of the winner of next weekend’s big football game. You split the group of 65,536 into equal halves and send one half a guaranteed prediction of victory for one team, and the other half a guaranteed win on the other team. You have ensured that your prediction will be viewed as correct by 32,768 people. Each week you can proceed in this fashion. By the time eight weeks have gone by there will be 256 people anxiously waiting for your next week’s selection because you have demonstrated remarkable predictive capabilities, having provided them with eight perfect picks. Presumably they will now be ready to pay a handsome price for the predictions you offer in week nine.

Now instead of predictions of football match winners, think of real-time predictions of hurricane landfall and activity. The diversity of available predictions exceeds the range of observed landfall behaviour. Consider, for example Jewson et al. (2009) which presents a suite of 20 different models that lead to predictions of 2007–2012 landfall activity to be from more than 8 per cent below the 1900–2006 mean to 43 per cent above that mean, with 18 values falling in between. Over the next five years it is virtually certain that one or more of these models will have provided a prediction that will be more accurate than the long-term historical baseline (i.e. will be skilful). A broader review of the literature beyond this one paper would show an even wider range of predictions. The user of these predictions has no way of knowing whether the skill was the result of true predictive skill or just chance, given a very wide range of available predictions. And because the scientific community is constantly introducing new methods of prediction the ‘guaranteed winner scam’ can go on forever with little hope for certainty.

Complicating the issue is the ‘hot hand fallacy’ which was coined to describe how people misinterpret random sequences, based on how they view the tendency of basketball players to be ‘streak shooters’ or have the ‘hot hand’ (Gilovich et al., 1985). The ‘hot hand fallacy’ holds that the probability in a random process of a ‘hit’ (i.e. a made basket or a successful hurricane landfall forecast) is higher after a ‘hit’ than the baseline probability.9 In other words, people often see patterns in random signals that they then use, incorrectly, to ascribe information about the future. The ‘hot hand fallacy’ can manifest itself in several ways with respect to hurricane landfall forecasts. First, the wide range of available predictions essentially spanning the range of possibilities means that some predictions for the next years will be shown to have been skillful. Even if the skill is the result of the comprehensive randomness of the ‘guaranteed winner scam’ there will be a tendency for people to gravitate to that particular predictive methodology for future forecasts.

Enjoy today's game. Let's hope for less than 3 goals, and of course, an Arsenal win!

Productive Debate on FIFA's Future

Now that Sepp Blatter has won a fifth term and the US and Swiss prosecutors are hard at work with who-knows-what-might-happen-next, it might be a good time to debate what kind of FIFA we'd collectively lie to see in the future. Having this debate may prove a challenge.

Consider this very recent tiff.

Over at FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver proposed one model for a new, breakaway soccer association:

But what if you used the 34 OECD members as the foundation of a new football federation? The OECD doesn’t include Russia but does have most of the large European economies, including Germany, the U.K., France, Italy and Spain. It also has the United States and a foothold in the Asia-Pacific region (Japan, South Korea, Australia) and Latin America (Mexico, Chile). These OECD members account for more than 60 percent of the GDP-weighted World Cup audience and about 80 percent of the club-team representation in the 2014 World Cup.

Convince Brazil and Argentina to join the breakaway foundation, and you’re doing even better. You’d be up to almost 70 percent of the GDP-weighted World Cup audience, and you’d have 11 of the 16 countries that advanced to the knockout stage of last year’s World Cup.

Silver's proposal drew the ire of Branko Milanovic, CUNY professor and former World Bank economist:

The piece illustrates that a combination of good statistics with lack of knowledge of history, produces useless results. It is as if one were to study today’s racial wage gap in the US without knowing that there ever was slavery.

But let us consider the key part of Nate’s idea. He thinks that a new FIFA should be formed of the countries that bring most money to the current FIFA and the rest should be left out in the cold. Let the poor countries with awful soccer turfs, with these miserable human creatures that cannot pay $100 per game, stay out on their own, and keep on playing their game on dirt fields, not seen on TV screens or by anyone else except their neighbors. In the  meantime, we the new rich and shiny FIFA will come to the game in our Audis and Mercedeses, and play on the impeccable fields full of fun commercials, and shall flood every TV screen of every nation in the world.

The  importance  of countries reflects, Nate says, how much money they bring to FIFA. If a country is rich, populous and lots of people watch the World Cup, and thus add to FIFA’s revenues, then that country should matter more. OECD is big and rich enough to go it alone. 

Do go read both pieces in full. Both make some interesting points, but neither really helps to clarify options, much less expand them into new possibilities. A debate over FIFA's future, of course, is one worth having -- and judging by Milanovic and Silver's Twitter exchanges, probably not on Twitter.

The essential issue here was well characterized by Stefan Szymanski in an earlier post at Reuters:

Perhaps most worryingly for FIFA and the future of the World Cup, it’s not even clear that people around the world agree on the meaning of corruption. This is a culturally sensitive issue. Kickbacks and bribery are a normal part of doing business in many countries, as documented by watchdog Transparency International. But even within the United States, in many cases it is the norm to pay individuals a gratuity for making things happen. When you tip a waiter or doorman you don’t expect the sum to be public or the transaction to be considered a bribe, even if you follow your tip with “Now please find me the best table.”

In northwest Europe and the United States, we have now drawn a sharp distinction between this legal activity and the illegal activity of giving gratuities to public officials or individuals involved in arms-length transactions. Not everyone in the world thinks like this. No doubt there are executives inside FIFA who, until now, have thought of themselves as “clean,” but must be wondering if any of their actions might be actually be legal. After all, the Justice Department says, “this indictment is not the final chapter in our investigation.”

Building a coalition on a global scale — and that’s what the World Cup and FIFA really is — requires immense compromises, and often a willingness not to look too deeply into what is going on. Most people might applaud the Justice Department’s assault on the worst excesses of FIFA. But if this investigation goes much deeper, resistance from the members of the FIFA congress might stiffen. The warring parties might break up into regional blocs, and the World Cup itself might be the victim. If that is the price of justice, some might say, then it is a price worth paying.

Options for FIFA's future are not at all comparable, as Silver analogizes, to spinning off the Premier League from lower divisions in English soccer in the early 1990s. Nor is it comparable, as Milanovic has it, to deciding on the proper form of global governance. Such perspectives do more to muddle than clarify.

FIFA is a sports association, with a long history and complex politics. That people around the world care so deeply about soccer is wonderful. However, considerations of options for improving FIFA won't benefit from oversimplifying the politics and culture, nor from overstating the significance of FIFA's governance structure. And our discussion of options won't benefit from snark on Twitter. Any discussion of FIFA's options going forward must be well attuned to politics, history, culture, data, and realize that people will fundamentally disagree about many of these things.

In fact, achieving disagreement would be a sign of process. At the moment, before (the) other investigative shoe(s) drop(s), we have an opportunity to engage in a thoughtful debate about options for FIFA's future. Clarity on options may prove useful at some point in the future. Big wigs like Silver and Milanovic can help that debate to happen, or not.

Just Read This: The NYT on FIFA in June, 2011

Circular and Irrelevant Scientific Reasoning in "Sex Testing" Debates

In the current issue of Science Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young have a Policy Forum on the measurement of testosterone in male and female athletes. The article makes one excellent point but it also confuses issues of sex and gender in the arena of "sex testing" for determining qualification to participate in elite sports as male or female.

First the excellent point.

Karkazis and Jordan-Young observe the fundamental circularity involved in quantifying testosterone levels in male and female athletes. A necessary methodological step is to identify who is male and who is female before doing the comparison. But if testosterone is used as a distinguishing characteristic, then any "scientific" test will simply serve as a mirror to the classification scheme, hence the circularity.

No scientific test can tell us who is male and who is female. Thus, it is confusing for Karkazis and Jordan-Young to engage in a debate over the science of testosterone levels as a marker of sexual categorization. They seem to first accept testosterone as a marker of sexual categorization by challenging the science of testosterone.

I think it is far better to simply point out that the science, while interesting, is just irrelevant. Here is what I write about that in my paper on "sex testing";

While there is an ongoing debate over the effects of testosterone on athletic performance, here I depart from some of the critics of the IAAF policy. I argue that testosterone simply does not matter -- not scientifically -- but practically. Let us suppose for the sake of argument that some women have testosterone levels which fall into a range that is far more populated by men. Let us further suppose that this amount of testosterone can be associated with some greater athletic achievement, say speed or strength. The appropriate response is “so what?”

Imagine the previous paragraph rewritten with “height” substituted for “testosterone.” There are notable examples of female athletes with exceptional height, generally attained only by men, who achieved notable sporting successes. Further, challenging the exact role of testosterone in athletic performance gives standing to the IAAF/IOC policies that they do not deserve. The role of naturally occurring testosterone in a woman is no more significant than hereditary polycythemia. The role of naturally-occurring testosterone in athletic performance is scientifically interesting, but it is inherently no more relevant to athletics policy than any other naturally occurring characteristic of the human athlete, man or woman.

Now the confusing part. Karkazis and Jordan-Young write:

... it is widely recognized in medicine, law, and the social sciences that when people are born with mixed markers of sex (e.g., chromosomes, genitals, gonads), the medical standard is that gender identity is the definitive marker of sex—there is no better criterion.

I know (from experience) that the writing of a Policy Forum for Science requires brevity in words and nuance can be lost. But in this case I think that Karkazis and Jordan-Young have sacrificed accuracy for brevity.

Sex and gender are indeed different concepts, and they are not interchangeable. They probably mean to say that "gender identity is the best tool available for distinguishing elite athletes into categories for purposes of competition." But they didn't and this may be confusing to readers not immersed in this issue.

Karkazis and Jordan-Young hint at this more accurate framing in their conclusion when they suggest, quite correctly, that gender is a social construction and so too are the categories that we separate men and women into for purposes of competition. However, once you accept that fact -- and social construction is a fact (for all you post-modernists;-) -- then all of the debate over the science of testosterone as a marker of male-ness and female-ness become pretty much irrelevant.

However, the urge to debate policies through science is a strong one.

Evaluation of Skill in 2014/2015 EPL Predictions

Over at Sporting Intelligence my latest column is up. In it I review the skill of 60 predictions of the 2014/2015 EPL season.

Head on over there to read it, and feel free to return here if you have any questions on comments.

Bottom line? Skillful prediction is really, really difficult,

A Problem with 538's NBA ELO Time Series

UPDATE 22 May: FiveThirtyEight doubles down on this flawed methodology with a follow-up post that makes the erroneous thinking inescapable. Not good.

The ESPN website FiveThirtyEight (disclosure: I wrote a handful of pieces for them in 2014) has just put up a time series of ELO rankings for NBA (and also now defunct) basketball teams. The effort is notable but deeply problematic. Consider that the ELO rankings produce the following:

1949 Chicago Stags: 1577 (pictured above)
2015 New York Knicks: 1256

Raise your hand if you think that the 1949 Stags (a fine team no doubt) would be favored to beat the 2015 New York Knicks!

The problem is that ELO is constrained to an average value of 1500 over time, thus removing the signal of any trends, variability or non-stationarity in the league performance.

ELO is a tool for contemporary comparison, and is not well suited for presentation as a time series because the baseline changes over time. I'd guess over the long term it has changed so that teams get better, on average, as compared with those of the  past. But certainly there is variation in the overall competitive level of the league, which ELO does not capture.

So when 538 says that the 1996 Chicago Bulls were "the best ever there ever was," what this really means is that they were relatively the best team ever, in comparison to the competition that they faced in 1996. That is a bit different than saying they are "the best that ever was." Producing a time series of ELO is thus fundamentally flawed.

In other words, an average ELO team in 2015 at 1500 is not at all comparable to an average ELO team at 1500 in 1949. The 2015 New York Knicks, as awful as there were in 2015, would probably beat the 1949 Chicago Stags by about 100 points.

Thus, rather than reporting absolute ELO scores 538 might have reported anomalies from the long-term average, to present a team's relative ranking, thus removing the need for consideration of any trend. Not as cool as a long-term ranking, but more accurate.

It is a good first effort, but needs some work!

Gatlin's Geriatric Sprinting Exceptionalism

The graph above shows sprint times for 100m for 10 top sprinters, by age. The data comes from the IAAF (which hosts a fantastic array of easily accessed data). The sprinters include those with the 9 fastest times ever recorded (< 9.84 seconds) plus Carl Lewis. More sprinters could be easily added.

I was motivated to compile the data by this post today by Ross Tucker at his excellent Science of Sport blog. Tucker discusses the interesting case of Justin Gatlin the US sprinter who at age 33 is running faster than he ever did when younger. Gatlin's circumstances are interesting (right euphemism?) because he served a 4-year ban for doping from 2006 to 2010 for steroids. He is of course not the only athlete on this graph who has been punished for doping.

Tucker explains why Gatlin's circumstances provoke interest:

Since his return in 2010, he has run faster every single year, and claimed six of the seven fastest times in 2014.  He also had the two fastest 200m of the year, including a double at the Brussels Diamond league event where he ran 9.77s and 19.71s on the same evening.

Impressive stuff, and just what the sport needs – a challenger to Usain Bolt (and the other Jamaicans) as we build towards the Rio 2016 Olympics, and Bolt’s quest to claim a third sprint double.

Except, there’s that nagging, not insignificant doping problem around that challenger. Gatlin is the problem that will not go away. . . .  he is a former doper, dominating a historically doped event, while running faster than his previously doped self.

Motivated by Tucker's post I thought I'd look at some data.

The graph shows that these top sprinters pretty uniformly improved their sprint times until ages 25-27.  The average age for career-best time is just over 26 and the average age for 2nd career best time is just under 26. Gatlin's career best (so far) came last week at age 33 and 2nd career best at age 32. At the same meet in Doha that Gatlin won, 39-year old Kim Collins came in 4th at 10.03.

In fact, none of these athletes ran a faster 100m after age 27 than they did at 27 or before (except Richard Thompson who ran faster at 29). Tucker points to a few athletes who had career bests in their 30s. Gatlin, of course, wasn't running (for time) at age 27 since he was serving a doping suspension. We can imagine all sorts of ways to connect the dots between the two red curves in the graph, consistent with a range of possible story lines. Here are a few:

• He might just be the greatest sprinter in history, in terms of longevity and sustained performance (just look at Usain Bolt's curve), who ran into some really bad luck.
• He might be, as Tucker and others mention as possible, still benefiting from past doping, suggesting that short-term bans aren't really up to the task.
• He might be doping today, and has figured out how to evade the testers. 

We will be hearing more about Gatlin and doping to be sure.

A Model for Sharing Licensing Value with College Athletes

On Twitter, Steve Berkowitz (of USA Today @byberkowitz) shared the image above from a presentation given by Doug Allen to the Knight Commission on College Athletics.

The slide shows a proposal for group licensing of players' name and image right. The proposal has a lot in common with an idea that I have aired to model college athlete compensation for their "intellectual property" in much the same way that universities manage IP for professors and other researchers. Allen's proposal suggests that others are also thinking about creative ways to align incentives in a positive way.

Here is my proposal in more detail:

What the NCAA can learn from Bayh-Dole

College sports are facing a crisis. A group of about two dozen current and former college athletes, led by former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon have sued the National Collegiate Athletics Administration. The athletes argue that licensing revenues generated by the NCAA using the images and likenesses of specific players should be shared with those players. In the coming weeks a federal judge will decide whether to certify the case as a class action, which would then bring into the case many thousands of former and current college athletes.

If that were to occur, then the NCAA and universities could be responsible for paying billions of dollars to college athletes. In 2012, the top 5 college athletic conferences collectively received over $1 billion in television revenue for football and the March Madness spring post-season basketball tournament operates under a 14-year, $10.8 billion television agreement. March Madness alone generated more than a billion dollars in TV ad revenue, exceeding that of the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball. Johnny Manziel, the Texas A&M quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy last year, generated an estimated $37 million in publicity for his university last year.

With the magnitude of the financial stakes, it is only a matter of time before the dam breaks and the notion of the “scholar-athlete” who plays only for school pride and a scholarship becomes a thing of the past. Rather than wait for a court decision, a labor action by high profile athletes or other possible revolutionary changes, the NCAA and universities can get ahead of this issue by paying attention to the lessons of history very close to home.

In 1980 the US Congress passed what the Economist called in 2002 “possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century.” The Bayh-Dole Act changed property rights with respect to the discoveries made in universities as a result of federally funded research. Prior to 1980 the US government retained ownership of the intellectual property associated with discoveries which resulted from federal research and development. Very few of the patents owned by the federal government were being been commercialized, and policy makers sought a way to better capitalize on the billions of dollars in federal R&D taking place at universities.

Under the law, professors and other university researchers who create intellectual property gain a share in its rewards, thereby creating strong incentives both to discover and to commercialize. In the two decades following the passage of Bayh-Dole US universities increased their patents by 1,000% and added an estimated $40 billion annually to the economy. At the same time, the law ensured that technology transfer activities on campus would be closely monitored to ensure that the mission of universities was not compromised.

So what does Bayh-Dole tell us about college athletics? Several years ago, former Senator Birch Bayh explained why the Bayh-Dole Act works: “it aligns the interests of the taxpaying public, the federal government, research universities, their departments, inventors, and private sector developers transforming government supported research into useable products.”

The NCAA and universities should explore aligning the interests of scholarship athletes, university campuses, the NCAA and the sports public with the incredible revenue potential of college sports. Assigning to universities the intellectual property rights of athletes which play under their names while creating a revenue-sharing model with those athletes would meet this need. Just as occuered with respect to the faculty, such an approach would encourage the further generation of revenue from sports, creating a windfall for many college athletic programs, some of which are strapped for cash, and deliver deserved rewards to the scholarship athletes who play the games.

A revenue-sharing model has served college faculty who conduct research and their home universities very well over more than three-decades. Universities should get to work on adopting a similar model for its athletes, before change is forced upon them, perhaps abruptly.

ESPN on Sepp Blatter on May 12

German TV Crew Investigating FIFA Arrested and Detained in Qatar

So this is interesting:

A television crew was arrested, interrogated and had its equipment deleted and destroyed by Qatari authorities while filming a documentary about the 2022 World Cup.

A reporter, cameraman, camera assistant and driver were denied permission to leave the Gulf state for five days after capturing footage of labour camps there for a programme called The Selling of Football: Sepp Blatter and the Power of Fifa.

The reporters were released and their equipment destroyed:

[Florian] Bauer and his team were arrested on March 27, a day after arriving in Qatar, and were held for 14 hours before being released at 4am the following morning.

Admitting he was “scared”, Bauer said: “There were interrogations by people from the intelligence service who said if I didn’t co-operate with them, it would work badly for me.”

The crew was physically unharmed, which could not be said for its equipment.

Bauer added: “Everything was deleted: phone, hard drives. A laptop got destroyed, got opened by I don’t know who.”

The press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranks Qatar 155th out of 180 countries in terms of press freedom.  Reporters Without Borders argues that with hosting the World Cup comes certain responsibilities:

"Any country with major sporting events such as Qatar seeks the international stage, it is also important that global public be allowed to ask questions." (translated)

For its part, the Qatari government explained that the arrests had nothing to do with FIFA or the World Cup, but occurred to the fact that filming was taking place without required permits. This seems rather circular as the reporters requested permits to film and were ignored. So they proceeded anyway.

Continuing revelations about the Qatar bid to host the World Cup and working conditions within Qatar continue to hound FIFA and the Qatari government. The latest episode adds to the list. The German documentary is set to air next week. FIFA and Qatar can be sure that it will get many more viewers thanks to the arrested journalists. FIFA has apparently not commented.

A Content Analysis of ESPN's Draft Coverage - Evidence of Racial Bias?

At Vice Sports @A_W_Gordon has a fascinating post on the language used to described football players during 15 hours of ESPN's coverage of the 2015 NFL draft.  Content analyses is a powerful tool to reveal focus of attention as well as the key terms used in communication.

Here is a word cloud of terms used by the ESPN hosts only to describe black football players (with the size of the word proportional to its frequency):

And here is a word cloud for those terms used exclusively to describe white players:

Gordon writes:

. . . feel free to stare at this for as long as you want, but let's do a quick breakdown. Only black players were described as: gifted, aggressive, explosive, raw, and freak. Only white players were described as: intelligent, cerebral, fundamentally, overachiever, technician, workmanlike, desire, and brilliant.

In 2014, Deadspin (Gordon and colleagues) did a similar analysis with similar results.

There is also a substantial academic literature on this subject. For instance:

• Rainville, R. E., & McCormick, E. (1977). Extent of covert racial prejudice in pro football announcers' speech. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 54(1), 20-26.
• Tyler Eastman, Andrew C. Billings, S. (2001). Biased voices of sports: Racial and gender stereotyping in college basketball announcing. Howard Journal of Communication, 12(4), 183-201.
• Billings, A. C. (2004). Depicting the quarterback in black and white: A content analysis of college and professional football broadcast commentary. Howard Journal of Communications, 15(4), 201-210.

And more recently:

• Angelini, J. R., Billings, A. C., MacArthur, P. J., Bissell, K., & Smith, L. R. (2014). Competing Separately, Medaling Equally: Racial Depictions of Athletes in NBC's Primetime Broadcast of the 2012 London Olympic Games. Howard Journal of Communications, 25(2), 115-133.
• Schmidt, Anthony, and Kevin Coe. "Old and New Forms of Racial Bias in Mediated Sports Commentary: The Case of the National Football League Draft." Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 58.4 (2014): 655-670.

How we talk about sport tells us something about society beyond sport, and the resulting image is not always so pretty.

Kentucky Derby Times and Performance Limits

The graph above comes from a column I had at FiveThirtyEight one year ago. In it I looked at the data on winning times in the Kentucky Derby. Here is the interesting fact which prompted the column:

Since 1949, the time it takes thoroughbreds to run around the 1.25-mile track has averaged 2:02.25, and no winning race time has deviated by more than 3 seconds

Interestingly, horse speeds have plateaued but human speeds have not. Doping? Genetics? Sport science?

The 2014 race, run a few days after my column, played out true to form with California Chrome's winning with a time of 2:03.66.

Have a look at my column for a discussion.

Is the MLS Sustainable?

Stefan Szymanski, professor at the University of Michigan and author of the forthcoming book Money & Soccer, has written a post questioning the sustainability of the business model of Major League Soccer, The post has attracted considerable discussion and debate, as it cuts right to the issue of the long-term prospects for professional soccer in the United States.

Let's cut to Szymanski's bottom line -- after reviewing data and estimates for MLS revenues and expenditures he concludes for 2014:

Overall we arrive at an annual loss of $139 million, or just over $7 million per franchise in 2014. No doubt there are various tax write-offs to soften the blow, especially if losses can be written off against profits in other businesses. But I doubt that would make this a profitable venture overall.

He then surmises that this loss-making situation does not appear likely to change anytime soon, with its impacts softened only by the entrance fees paid to the league for new teams. The bottom line?

You can fund a loss-making enterprise from the entrance fees of new buyers for a while, but without making money, the only reason for doing this would be glory, not profits. Americans constantly tell me that owners of sport franchises in the US will insist on making money. If that really is the case, then I predict that MLS will collapse, and probably sooner rather than later.

His last statement is a conditional, predicated on the desire for owners to make profits. If owners don't care about profits, then of course, Szymanksi is not predicting collapse.

There have been two types of critiques of Szymanski's argument. One is that his numbers are wrong, and MLS is not in fact a "loss-making enterprise." For instance, @kevinmacauley writes at SBNation:

The basic argument of "Giant costs - smaller revenues = big loss, therefore collapse is imminent" only makes sense when you've actually accounted for all revenues. Szymanski hardly got started on that. When someone makes this argument while actually accounting for all revenues, maybe their argument and prediction will be taken seriously.

On his blog Szymanski responded to a similar criticism:

Well, until MLS decides to reveal the books to us we are both speculating. 

A second type of critique focuses on the longer-term prospects of the MLS. Here is an example:

This was always going to be a long term effort with return on investment delayed much longer than your typical stock market play. From an individual team standpoint, losing $5 million dollars per year, 1/20 of that $100 million, the loss is not all that significant when you factor in what these teams, or the league, could be worth 10 years down the road. A $5 million dollar loss per year is peanuts to some of the richest men in sports. Also, TV revenue tripling in 10 years isn’t a bullish thought. The numbers are so low now that it wouldn’t take much to accomplish that. This would more than cover the current losses and that’s before we factor in advertising, sponsorship and other sources of revenue that would naturally increase as well.

If MLS has done anything well, its certainly been the strictness of their cost control. A slow and steady approach has led to an extremely successful league at the ticket window. Once that transfers to television, the sky is the limit.

Arguments about future revenue growth reflect hopes and dreams as much as dollars and cents. The sky may indeed be the limit, and if a profit is to be made then Szymanski's conditional is off in any case. Those critiquing his argument in this manner can just ignore it, and watch the revenues grow year by year.

Here I'll offer a third perspective. Whether MLS is sustainable or not is probably the wrong question. If it is not sustainable, it will collapse -- that is a truism. But if it is sustainable, any realistic assessment of its future would be hard pressed to conclude that it is as "minor league soccer" or, as Simon Kuper recently quipped, as an "elephant's graveyard."

It is just hard to overcome the financial mathematics. Last fall at Sporting Intelligence, I wrote about the staggering wage bill gap between the MLS and the EPL:

On the 2014 [MLS] salary list are 572 players earning total wages of just over $129.5 million. This sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But in comparison to the Premier League, for example, it is small potatoes. The MLS total includes 21 clubs (for 2014 it includes Chivas USA, since folded, and partial squads for NY City FC and Orlando City FC, both being formed). Yet their total wage bills combined equals about the same as the wage bill for Queens Park Rangers ($126 million) in 2012-13, the most recent year’s data available.

In 2012-13, six Premier League clubs each had wages bills well in excess of the entire MLS, with Manchester City topping the list at $376 million (for all club staff). The wage bills for the top 20 clubs in England were almost $2.9 billion combined. For the bottom 20 payers across the Premier League and the Championship it was about $750 million.

The total payroll of the MLS is about 1/15 that of the NHL (data from my new book). Right now the MLS is to global soccer what the Russian professional hockey league is to the NHL -- interesting domestically, but not a threat to the world's top league in any way.

Perhaps there is a way to make MLS more major. Along these lines, Szymanski has previously made an interesting suggestion:

I think the only way around this conundrum is for MLS to become a minor league for Europe and for European teams to buy up MLS franchises. European teams already employ the talent that would make MLS attractive and the big clubs have more talent than they put on the field. Manchester City’s acquisition of the new New York City FC franchise is surely a logical step. Of course, European teams could just loan players to MLS in the same way that they do in Europe, but then there’s the worry that the borrower will not take good care of the asset.

This might be branded as a 2nd-tier Champion's League of sorts, as the clubs with the assets to invest in a minor league farm team would likely overlap significantly with regular Champion's League squads. Such a strategy would also have the advantage of not denying the MLS status as a minor league, but instead, exploiting that fact as a feature.

All this aside, it is great to see Americans debating the MLS, its status and its future. However, in terms of development of soccer talent in the US, I think there are larger issues elsewhere -- like the NCAA, but that will have to await a future post.

English Political Constituencies by Football League

Via Philip Cowley, Professor of Parliamentary Government, Nottingham University.

FYI: Red =  Labor, Blue = Conservative, Yellow = Lib Dem

Poisoned Spikes

Above is the full documentary shown on Kenyan TV channel Citizen Television which claims systemic doping in Kenyan athletics.

WADA has issued a statement here.

Transparency International on Sport Corruption

Transparency International, a global anti-corruption NGO, today has launched a "Corruption in Sport Initiative." They explain what they are up to:

Sport is a multi-billion dollar business engaging billions of people. It is also a global symbol of fair play and a source of great joy for many people on this planet, whether participating, attending or watching events.

With so much public involvement, political influence and money at stake, corruption remains a constant and real risk. Mounting scandals around match-fixing, major events and elections, and systemic deficiencies in sports governance are now so undermining public trust that it is reaching a tipping point.

Keeping sports clean is therefore a global imperative. Our goal is to ensure that sport can continue to “create a way of life based on (…) the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles” (Olympic Charter).

At the core of the initiative is a major report on sport, which will eventually be comprised of more than 50 (!) chapters on various aspects of corruption and sport. (I am an author of one of these chapters.) Of note is that TI is including the NCAA as a focus in its report.

Five of these chapters have been put online today (available here), including one by Jean-Loup Chappelet, a Swiss academic and dean of scholars on the Olympic movement.  The TI initiative is using a Twitter hashtag #sportintegrity and has a companion set of pieces on the TI blog. You can also find there an interview with Jens Sejer Andersen, international director of Play the Game.

As a participant in the TI effort, I have been extremely impressed with their commitment to accuracy and quality in the preparation of the chapter which I contributed - better than most any academic journal, for sure. The initiative is a significant contribution to the growing interest in sports governance around the world.

Have a look, and participate in the discussion!

What's Going on with FIFA and its Watches?

Trying to figure out why FIFA does what FIFA does is often a challenge. Take the ongoing saga of the Brazilian gift watches (background here and here).  In theory, this situation should provide a great opportunity for FIFA to demonstrate publicly and unequivocally its commitment to its new ethics rules. Instead, it is an issue clouded by mystery.

In the matrix above, for my own benefit, I have tried to sort through the combinations of possibilities related to whether or not FIFA has all 65 gift watches in its possession, and whether or not FIFA would claim that publicly.

As a matter of logic and common sense, it would seem that FIFA does not have all 65 watches. I cannot imagine a scenario in which FIFA has all the watches and would not admit as much (of course that might just reflect the limits of my imagination!) If this is so, it would imply either (a) that its very public ethics case against Greg Dyke was selective, (b) or that other cases remain open. If the latter, then as a matter of consistency we should expect ongoing press releases about returned watches and ethics case, as we saw yesterday with respect to Dyke. If (a) then that would really refelct poorly on FIFA - using ethics rules selectively to punish or shame.

Whatever is going on at FIFA, this episode reveals a continuing lack of transparency and a basic failure to understand the meaning of ethics guidelines and their application. As I have previously written, FIFA could make a powerful public statement by holding a press conference with the 65 gift watches arrayed on a table, and then could announce the donation of $1.3 million (their collective value) to some noble cause.

For FIFA watchers, this episode is but one of many that raises an eyebrow, but it also suggests that despite claims to the contrary, little has actually changed.

An Update on FIFA's Swanky Watches

Last year FIFA officials were given some swanky £16,000 watches by the Brazilian Football Association. This was a kind gesture, of course, but according to FIFA, against it's ethics rules. So FIFA asked for its watches back.

Today FIFA announced that Greg Dyke, chairman of the English Football Association, has returned his gift watch and FIFA has thus dropped ethics charges against him.

Richard Conway of the BBC asked FIFA about the status of the other 64 watches, and reports back FIFA's reply above, via Twitter and reproduced here. FIFA is apparently "unable" to account for the other 64 watches. The statement comes from Cornel Borbely, FIFA's recently installed chief investigator, who replaced Michael Garcia who resigned in protest.

This would mean that FIFA is not in fact accounting for its request that the watches be returned and appears to have been pursuing an selective investigation of Dyke. FIFA could show that it takes such ethics violations seriously by simply accounting for the improper gifts, say by laying out the 65 watches on a table at a press conference.

Also, if Sepp Blatter has not returned his watch, under FIFA's rules, he would be ineligible to participate in the upcoming FIFA election.

SNL Mocks the NCAA

In traditional SNL fashion, it's not terribly funny, but the fact that the hypocrisy of the NCAA is being mocked is noteworthy.

US Senators Call for Russia to be Stripped of 2018 World Cup

On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of 18 US Senators sent a letter to  Sepp Blatter at FIFA (here in PDF) calling for it to strip Russia of the 2018 World Cup. Here is the full text of the letter:

Given Russia’s ongoing violations of the territorial integrity of Ukraine, we respectfully request that you convene an Extraordinary Congress of FIFA to consider stripping Russia of the privilege of hosting the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Allowing Russia to host the FIFA World Cup inappropriately bolsters the prestige of the Putin regime at a time when it should be condemned and provides economic relief at a time when much of the international community is imposing economic sanctions.

As you know, nearly a full year has passed since unmarked Russian troops and Russian-backed separatists began their dismemberment of Ukraine. Since then, more than 40 countries, all FIFA members, have implemented sanctions on Russia in an effort to end the conflict. It is unacceptable that while nearly half of the 2014 World Cup participants have joined the international sanctions regime to counter Russian aggression, FIFA would not even consider allowing its members to vote on moving the 2018 competition to a country that respects the shared principles of FIFA and international law.

With the goal of ending the crisis in Ukraine and ensuring a successful 2018 World Cup, we strongly encourage FIFA to deny the Putin regime the privilege of hosting the 2018 World Cup and make preparations for an alternate host country.

With the 2016 US elections now in view, it would be timely for the US Senate to hold a hearing or two on FIFA and the 2018 World Cup.  Can you imagine a panel of witnesses including Sunil Gulati, the head of US Soccer and also a member of FIFA's Executive Committee, Sepp Blatter, and Jeffrey Webb, the head of CONCACAF? We the Senate to invite these men and be turned down, it could cause some problems for US and international soccer. It would be a delicate situation for certain.

It is not clear, of course, whether the 18 US Senators are engaged in a one-off stunt with the letter, or if there is a broader interest in pursuing this issue. If the latter, then FIFA might be facing a bit of opposition with more teeth than usual. Stay tuned.