soccer – Beesquared

At JFK this week I passed a billboard for a financial firm that depicted a ball shaped like an American football but flatter at each end, like a rugby ball, with the pattern of a soccer ball.

The mythical mass served as metaphor for globalization, which two items in the news this week suggest is accelerating when it comes to sports.

First is a cricket match slated for Saturday at Citi Field in New York, the first of three exhibitions to be played in the U.S. this month by teams of retired all-stars. The other is an announcement by the NFL that it will play at least three games in London in each of the next five seasons after three contests there this year.

The moves mark a quickening of activity by two sports that have yet to arrive in the U.S. and U.K., respectively, on a national level. Of course, cricket has billions of fans around the world. Test matches between England and Pakistan, and between India and South Africa, are among the top events this weekend in all of sport.

World's most valuable bus. #Allstars2015 #AllStars #cricketallstars #cricket pic.twitter.com/N1XMDNk7K3

— Daily Times (@dailytimespak) November 6, 2015

The matches in the states will feature Sachin Tendulkar, who retired from the Indian national team two years ago after scoring 15,921 runs in 200 test matches, or 2,000 more than his closest rival; and Shane Warne, an Australian who retired in 2013 and ranks second of all time in wickets taken (getting a batter out) in test matches.

Tendulkar, 42, who may be the greatest batsman of all time, and Warne, 46, among the best bowlers ever, will helm opposing teams of former greats from Pakistan, India, England, South Africa, the West Indies, and Sri Lanka. “The vision is to globalize cricket,” Tendulkar told the Times. “Somewhere we need to start.”

That could be America, which in 1844 hosted the first international cricket match, between the U.S. and Canada. Today roughly 35,000 Americans play cricket, according to the United States of America Cricket Association.

The grounds at Citi Field will include a pitch that organizers of the matches have trucked from Indiana, where it was grown for the occasion by Mark Perham, the former groundsman at Eden Park, the largest stadium in New Zealand. The pitcher’s mound, which had a workout in the recently concluded World Series, will be lowered so as not to present a hazard for cricketers.

American football comes to rugby grounds

Separately, the NFL announced on Tuesday it has leased Twickenham Stadium, which normally houses rugby and recently hosted the sport’s world cup, for each of the next three seasons.

That brings to three the number of venues the league will use to host games in London between now and 2020. In addition to Twickenham, which holds 82,000 people, the league will play at least two games a year at Wembley Stadium over the coming five years.

The NFL also is slated to play two games a year at a stadium being built for Tottenham Hotspur when it is completed in 2018.

According to the league, the three games it hosted this season at Wembley averaged 83,777 fans apiece, a crowd roughly equivalent to the capacity of MetLife Stadium.

The push by the NFL to expand internationally will extend south as well. The league is expected to play at least one game in Mexico City in 2016 and says it is exploring matchups in Germany and Brazil.

The rules for international soccer fill 140 pages and prescribe, among other things, that the color of artificial playing fields must be green.

If FIFA had brought such specificity to its governing practices the governing body of the world’s most popular sport might have avoided the alleged infractions that have led to corruption probes by prosecutors in the US, the UK, and Switzerland.

The failures of governance at FIFA became clearer this weekend with publication by the Financial Times of an interview with Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, FIFA’s longtime president, whom the organization’s independent ethics committee suspended in October amid allegations that he misappropriated funds.

At some point in their existence, organizations decide on the rules and practices by which they’re directed so as to ensure their long-term success. Or they don’t, in which case they expose themselves to excess financial or business risk.

Such basic practices as term limits for executives, a mandatory retirement age, or transparent processes for setting executive compensation and electing directors all seem to have been missing from FIFA’s boardroom throughout Blatter’s tenure.

Blatter told the FT he remained president of FIFA for so long—he was elected in 1998—because of a push by a majority of the organization’s board to counter a move by UEFA, the governing body for European soccer and the most influential of soccer’s six confederations, to dismantle FIFA.

As for a payment by FIFA in 2011 of roughly $2 million to Michel Platini, the UEFA president, that Blatter has said was owed Platini pursuant to an employment agreement when Platini served as Blatter’s adviser between 1998 and 2002, Blatter reiterated to the FT what he has said previously: that there was no agreement in writing to document the outlay because Swiss law allows for oral agreements.

When Malcolm Moore, the reporter, followed up by noting that’s now how large companies act, Blatter distinguished FIFA as “a club” but refused to address why there’s no record of the payment to Platini.

Blatter’s suspension may relieve pressure on FIFA from its biggest sponsors. About a week before Blatter’s suspension, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, and Visa all called on the embattled executive to step down.