In the end, the Rangers end up paying a total of $111 million for the player, and $51.7 of it goes to Darvish’s club in this case.  Some question whether someone is worth this much money and risk, but it is important to note that bidding high and winning means that no rival team has a chance at getting him under contract for at least another year.

As for the Japanese clubs, the money that the Seibu Lions brought in from Daisuke Matsuzaka was quite helpful in stadium renovations that they wanted to make.  In essence the posting system transformed the stadium into the house that Daisuke built.  The question is, what will the Nippon Fighting Ham do with the $51.7 million?

I’m sure that Malcolm Glaser wouldn’t mind a bunch of homeless guys camping out in his owners suite in Raymond James Stadium while he’s off tending to Man United.  After all, he’s gotten $30 million from the state of Florida since 1997 for this kind of “economic development.”  That should pay for the carpet to be steam cleaned when they vacate the premises on game day.

Maybe it’s because FIFA really likes people to just have a good time that they want fans to be able to have beer at all the venues? After all, FIFA has a really good record at being decent, honest and transparent, as epitomised by its president, Sepp Blatter. People often use FIFA as a synonym for integrity.

Of course I’m being somewhat sarcastic here. FIFA is in a tissy because Budweiser is one of its biggest sponsors, and hence if beer can’t be sold at the venues, then who knows what Bud might do with its money?

It highlights one of the I guess lesser realised aspects of hosting the World Cup – notably that FIFA tells governments what it needs to pass as legislation before the tournament begins. It rides roughshod over whatever reasons there might have been for beer being banned at football stadia in Brazil – those kinds of things are immaterial in the face of the mighty sponsorship deals FIFA has with various large organisations. It might have been nice if supporters travelling all that way to Brazil for the tournament might have been able to sample the local delights of Brazilian beers in the venues, but nope, they must put up with the same Budweiser they could have got in a bar back home.

Others have looked into whether supporters have a role influencing referees to add more minutes of injury time at the end of matches, and whether they influence referee decisions moreover. The literature is rich, it’s fair to say and I won’t do justice to it in this post.

I’m reminded of this by recent events at Premiership team Blackburn Rovers. Blackburn have had heady days in recent decades: They are, aside from the usual suspects (Man Utd, Arsenal and Chelsea), the only other team to have actually won the Premiership, hard to believe as that may be. In recent days, they were yet another top English team taken over by foreign owners as the closet xenophobic British press (and bloggers) have had some fun pointing out in recent years: They were taken over in 2010 by the Venky’s of India, to great fanfare.

However, all has not gone swimmingly for English football’s first Indian owners. They sacked exceedingly competent manager Sam Allardyce in December 2010 for no obvious reason, and replaced him with an complete unknown, Steve Kean.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fans weren’t overly excited by that appointment, and things have not gone particularly well since, and as of Tuesday this week, they sit at the bottom of the Premiership with just two wins all season. Tuesday however was notable in that it marked the latest high (or low) point of the campaign of Blackburn fans to have Kean sacked and replaced. As far back as their first win of the season (against Arsenal), Blackburn fans were stages regular protests against the manager.

On Tuesday, against Bolton, local rivals, farcical defending put Blackburn 2-0 down early in the game and it’s said the atmosphere in the stadium was “poisonous” – the Twittersphere was rife with Tweets from folk who left at half time in protest – including notably the Everton coach David Moyes. Blackburn put in a vastly improved second half performance but fell to a 2-1 defeat to sink to bottom (Bolton had previously been bottom of the table).

What this whole sorry episode suggests perhaps more than anything is the role fans play. Of course, we don’t know how Blackburn might have performed on Tuesday had supporters instead turned up to support their team instead of to protest against the coach (and also the owners now – typing Venkys and Blackburn into Google reveals a lot of vile against the Indian owners). Anecdotal evidence is pretty conclusive though; when a set of supporters decides against a coach, even if the owners try to persist with the coach, supports usually get their way. Abusive chants, poisonous atmosphere at games, abuse in the streets, abuse of friends, relatives, etc., all take their toll usually. It seems hard to believe that Kean can take much more of what he’s currently enduring in deepest, darkest Lancashire (it’s hard also to believe that Northern folk are generally perceived to be more friendly!).

Personally I can only think of one example where supporters have been proved wrong, and that was when Martin O’Neill took over at Leicester many years ago. After a few initial defeats supporters were protesting. A few years later and a few League Cups and European nights, I think they forgave him for those early defeats.

Fans would appear to be pretty powerful stakeholders in the model of the football club, casting their judgement on a particular manager or player, and usually getting their way even if those with the actual power (chairmen, managers, players) don’t agree.

In other news, Sevilla (of Spain’s La Liga) President Jose Maria del Nido has received a seven and a half year prison sentence for his role in embezzling money from the Spanish town of Marbella.  In a curious set of circumstances, the club’s vice president has said that the sentence is unfair, and that del Nido should be allowed to continue as President of the club.  I wonder if anyone has ever run a football club from prison.

I see it more of being Rottenberg’s Invariance Principle (which I have discussed on this blog before), which notes that players tend go to the team that values them the most, as long as there are not certain constraints.  In this case, the NBA stands out as a constraint that is preventing Chris Paul from going to a team that seems to value him more at the moment.  Of course, the fingers are all pointing at NBA commissioner David Stern, who has been a bit of a bad guy with the whole deal about the lockout, and now this.

Pundits, the media, fans, and even owners often talk about the big market teams raiding small market teams for players, but some would say that this is just the Invariance Principle in effect.

Perhaps more intriguingly, however, is the possibility of match fixing in the rermarkable game between Lyon and Dynamo Zagreb. Lyon entered the game needing a win and to turn around a goal difference NINE goals against them in order to qualify ahead of Ajax.

Ajax lost 3-0 to Real Madrid, leaving Lyon needing a six goal winning margin in Zagreb, which they duly managed, with six second half goals, to win 7-1. Of course, that could just be chalked down to a truly remarkable second half performance, but people are smelling rats.

And, it would seem, not without justification. Zagreb had a man send off in the first half, and after the fifth Lyon goal went in, footage clearly shows the Zagreb keeper winking and giving a thumbs up to a defender on his team.

It doesn’t look good, and apparently it is being investigated, thankfully. The question for me though is, if you are going to fix a match, surely you make a little bit more effort to hide it? Losing 7-1 at home is notable, losing by just enough for a team to overturn a NINE goal deficit, doing it all in the second half, on the last night of the group stages, just makes no sense. You want to hide what you did so you can get away with it. That or you’re just plain stupid?!

The exact financial implication is unclear at this time.  However, one can speculate that overall travel costs for the regular season will be lower for the entire league with a more balanced schedule.  Second, having the first two rounds of playoffs with close geographic competitors not only reduces travel cost for participating clubs, but also should increase the competition between the teams.  Overall, realignment looks like a positive step for the NHL and its clubs.  Hopefully, they do not take a page out of the Big Ten Conference “playbook” in terms of naming the conferences.

Last week, a story by Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)  issued subpoenas to the Marlins organization to understand the agreement reached by the city and the team on a new stadium. Among items that the SEC wanted to see was the Marlins financial records, communications with the MLB commissioner, other meeting minutes, and campaign contribution.

Passan outlines the Marlins story up to the SEC subpoenas. The Marlins wanted a new stadium because they were supposedly losing money. The Marlins threatened to relocate the franchise if the city did not provide the team with a new, baseball only, stadium. The local government requested financial records from the Marlins but were denied. However, the government still voted to build the new stadium which also gives the Marlins all stadium related revenue.  The stadium is expected to cost the city 2.4 billion dollars. When Deadspin posted team financial statements last year, the financial statement of the Marlins showed that the Marlins made tens of million of dollars. Now the SEC has stepped in to investigate. As Passan writes:

While the subpoenas issued by the SEC do not explicitly detail the purpose of the investigation, the feds’ motives are evident: They want to understand how, exactly, a group of county commissioners agreed to fund 80 percent of the Marlins new stadium, which cost more than $600 million, without ever seeing the team’s financial records – and whether bribes had anything to do with it.

It remains to be seen what the SEC investigation will conclude.  This situation has the potential to be very ugly for the Marlins, the city, and Major League Baseball.

School	Total revenue				Profit
Oregon	$122,394,483				$41,853,109*
Alabama	$130,542,153				$26,600,939
Penn State	$106,614,724				$18,572,803
Michigan	$106,874,031				$17,507,011
Oklahoma State	$106,362,128				$16,960,715
Iowa	$88,735,093				$13,771,190
Texas	$143,555,354				$13,118,820
Oklahoma	$98,512,287				$10,834,088
Georgia	$89,735,934				$9,282,558
LSU	$111,030,795				$8,704,026
Kansas State	$53,436,790				$7,864,000
Florida	$117,104,407				$6,869,130
Texas A&M	$82,774,133				$6,832,207
Arkansas	$78,072,620				$4,575,742
Purdue	$61,653,561				$3,288,418
Michigan State	$83,545,892				$2,034,660
Nebraska	$73,483,733				$1,745,665
West Virginia	$62,030,104				$1,166,950
Indiana	$69,287,811				$1,108,881
Virginia Tech	$63,613,464				$968,280
Ohio State	$123,174, 176				$434,422
Washington	$64,034,410				$211,297

That’s right 22 of 218 reporting schools did not lose money on athletics last year.  From the chart it is pretty clear that some schools were pretty big winners, with Oregon and Alabama really raking in the money for the 2009-2010 season.  What is very nice about the USA Today site, is that one can even go look at the breakdowns school-by-school for both revenues and expenses.  Curiously, many of the schools who are still making big profits are also taking extra money from their universities in the form of student fees.  Really, the students are helping to finance extra revenue for some of these programs.  This blog notes that some schools such as Ohio State and Florida do give back some of their revenues to help finance academics, libraries and other projects.

The question does exist about the other 196 schools on the list who did not make a profit and how they spent their money.  I know some schools like Missouri and Illinois are right on the borderline of the break even point.  Illinois notably made it to a bowl game for the first time in several years, and ended up going.  The cost of the trip surely exceeded a million dollars, and this amount would seem to make up the difference.  Additionally, the choice to give an extension to their football coach Ron Zook may have proved to be costly as they fired him last week.

In all, this shows that while money talks in college athletics, there isn’t necessarily a lot of athletic departments making money, and it would seem some poor decisions are keeping some schools from being profitable.  Of course many, such as the Knight Commission, would note that spending in college athletics is out of sync across the board, and really there is a real need for change and reform when you look at these numbers.