I high level member of a global marketing team in the beer industry once asked me to help him understand why the return on investment in Sports is so difficult to calculate for. I looked at him and gave him the answer I was sure he was looking for: “There is no return on investment in Sports”.
Of course, I was being facetious while pointing out that the murky underworld of finance and money in Sports and Entertainment meant the true return on investment was only ever known to the owners, and their accountants.
Case in point, Steve Cohen paid 2.4 billion dollars for The New York Mets and now, as I type, the team with the highest payroll (364 million dollars) and the best chances (they were in the top 8 when you look at World Series Odds at +1100-compared to +800 for The Atlanta Braves-the current team to beat) hjas a record of 71 wins and 81 losses.
With 10 games to go they are 750-1 to win the World Series and they must go on an unprecedented winning streak (so far, their best in the 2023 season is 6 games) to achieve a .500 winning percentage. Also, let’s be clear, the series of Black Swan (less than 2 percent probability of happening) events required for The Mets to win 10 in a row, make the playoffs at all, and then go on to win the ‘whole thing’ means it will not happen. I am not usually one to accept ‘impossible’ but this ship has sailed.
So, if this article is not about Sports, then what is it all about?
2023.
This year is shaping up to be the year when the unexpected is nowhere to be found. Nothing that has happened anywhere, that I know of, has occurred outside of the universe’s normative limits or anywhere near the realms of the unexplored.
The strikes?
Well, Trotsky famously published The Crisis of 1923 in October of 1924 and explained that everything from the San Pedro Maritime Workers strike (Local 510) to the invasion of the Ruhr by Belgium and France were part of a larger surge where the people were finally rebelling against the way, they themselves, as labor were being treated.
What was he talking about?
In about 1856 we discovered Oil. 50 years later we had already destroyed Whaling and invented flight and railroads. By 1923 We had cars and electricity. We INVENTED dozens of industries, including The Motion Picture industry by 1923.
6 years later we paid the price for 3 things:
The effect of The Spanish Flu on the world economy. A pandemic. The poor treatment of Germany by the World after they were defeated in WW1. The poor labor conditions everywhere from Illinois to California. Hyperinflation. Corruption. A massive divide between the rich and the poor. Terrible trade deals with Mexico and Germany. Frugality (austerity) as the leading economic driver in President Calvin Coolidge’s administration. A raucous political climate in the UK where despite a General election win Baldwin cannot hold a majority. The point?
With a little digging we can see that once again, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is right: the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
Most would expect me to quote Santayana (George) but the problem is that he may have not been the first to realize, or the last, that ignorance raises the odds of not learning from others’ mistakes.
Well, as the stock market falls, and the job market shakes, and the labor unions strike and The Mets (who did not exist in 1923) fail to meet expectations, we might look closely at our own list 100 years later and realize what to do before it is too late.
How do we do that?
Let’s start with some questions:
What is the ACTUAL impact of the pandemic on our world, our planet, ourselves, and our shared economy?
What impact will the political landscape have on our economy?
How will the economy suffer from the fraught labor relations and devestating strikes we are seeing?
How will 92 dollar Oil impact us in 2024? Economically? Environmentally? Emotionally?
How close are we to another stage where Covid (and it’s variants) are restricting more than half the Global population? The UK population? The US?
When will a billionaire pay the taxes they owe and opt out of the subsidies they enjoy before paying 2.4 billion dollars for a sporting franchise?