[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Responding to your point about Trump, something I like about football is the way that it's politics without (significant) social consequence. (Partly why I like art, too: where you can be as irresponsible and as experimental as you like, knowing that ultimately nobody dies, nobody starves, etc. I know the arguments against that but it's increasingly how I feel and actually see it as a strength rather than a limitation) Anyway, I certainly wouldn't want Britain or any other country to be run the way the Prem is but something about the sentiment-free brutality of its economics does appeal to me, albeit only conceptually, which is why I oppose things like Financial Fair Play, fan ownership, salary caps, etc, and embrace (as an idea, anyway) teams like RB Leipzig, PSG, Man City, and Chelsea.

yeah it was yeats that said that poetry makes nothing happen as i recall. and i agree with that mostly.

and sure that is exactly the thing with games: it's just games!

so from that perspective i see the value of a darwinian experiment in fast forward, to paraphrase william gibson (i think it was at the beginning of neuromancer, when he describes chiba city).

the question of the open-market leagues seems to be "if money is no object, what is the best war machine that we can build?"

large/established clubs already operate like that; what open markets allow is for large injections of capital to transform other/smaller/non established clubs into such behemoths.

and in that respect it's a great thing to increase the parity between teams and enhance the spectacle.

on the other side of the issue it seems to be that some games aren't just games. they're social pursuits/institutions/identities/more. and in darwinian experiments some survive and some go extinct. so, while extinction is of little consequence in a pure/abstract game, in social situations involving culture and identity and traditions, extinction is a great source of pain.

so, the social non-game component (fans, institutions, etc) tend to balance against destabilizing ("interesting") forces in various degrees. and here's where it gets fun for me to watch this as an external observer:

on the socioeconomic front, the germans have been pretty successful at balancing the forces of capitalism with social demands. they're both prosperous in business and socially equitable. which is a rare thing in a world where these things are presented as polar opposites.

and now that large capital is becoming more dominant in football, with global tv and the economic dominance of the prem and la liga, plus the prospect of a growing china-- how will the germans adapt? can they have a competitive social democracy in football? how will they cope? ha ha ha. it's an interesting question for me-- as a purely game of ideas anyway.

as for why i favor dortmund over leipzig-- i just know them more and therefore like them. but there are other bundesliga astroturf clubs-- hoffenheim is another one of them actually, backed/invented by a software magnate, ha ha. wolfsburg and leverkusen less so, but still.

anyway-- games today! i gotta get some work done before that...