I started with the NFL, and the following thoughts:
Football makes (to use a technical term) metric assloads of money each season that the league (including the players, which is important) don’t want to miss out on.
There are all sorts of storylines, like Brady and Newton, set up to draw in viewers.
They saw the ratings for the draft, and how starved viewers are for sports.
COVID is screwing everything up, obviously.
So if they’re that eager and desperate, I thought: maybe they’ll play in a foreign country that’s mostly beaten COVID? They could test first, move everyone who needs to be on field to, say New Zealand, quarantine them for as long as needed (with immediate flight home being the penalty), rent some square yardage, and play there. Yeah, it’d be expensive, but more expensive than not playing at all? They don’t need to think about live fans. There’s time zone differences to consider, of course, but social media blackouts and the very fact that spoiling may not actually repel viewers will help. And yeah, this would take time, but even if the season started a month or two late, just knowing it was coming would build up anticipation.
You could extend that to other sports leagues for next year, if need be. MLB in Japan? NHL in Canada only? You could even do something similar with the Olympics by having everyone arrive early.
There are still unknowns and risks, of course, and if the worst happens, they’ll be out a lot of money, but not having the season is a definite loser for both management and labor, so the latter may actually be willing to sign some level of indemnification against lawsuits. The leagues have money; they can figure this out if they’re really motivated, and I think they’re really motivated.
Why would NZ accept 1000’s (players, trainers, coaches, technical staff, reporters, support people) of potentially infected people from an embargoed country? These countries have beaten COVID-19 by not doing stuff like this.
With a quarantine similar to returning overseas residents and enough money, I think so. And you could stagger it so that you don’t do all teams and staff at once.
Of course, countries more willing to do this would probably be more likely to have not beaten the virus, but like I said, practically anything the league could do at this point would be a financial gamble of some kind.
Besides, there’s a reason why I put the word “crazy” in the title thread. But I really do think that the leagues in general will be desperate enough to try something like this, especially if pro sports pick up again overseas.
The UFC has been recently broadcasting from a facility in Las Vegas without any fans or extraneous media. Everyone present is tested (not sure how thoroughly…) and wears masks if not fighting. Maybe other franchises could do the same.
I don’t see the advantage for the American sports leagues to do this rather than play in empty US stadiums.
Baseball won’t work since there are no baseball stadiums overseas at the MLB level except in Japan and South Korea (that I know of, maybe there are some). Football can probably be played in a soccer stadium, as they’ve done in England and Mexico, but that requires a bit of work. Still it’s been done before and could be done again. Hockey and Basketball are played in enough places that this wouldn’t be a problem.
But again, what’s the advantage to doing this rather than playing in empty or limited seating venues in the US? You can fill the stands for the 3 NFL games in London each year, but who’s filling the stands for a Jets-Cleveland game being played in Brussels on week 11?
Getting to play at all? Staying in this COVID-infested country, with all the freedom from precautions being home entails, is a recipe for disaster, and I don’t think the leagues or the players would want to take that much of a chance. If it were play in the States or cancel the season, I’m actually leaning towards expecting them to cancel.
If these games aren’t being played in front of fans, then what’s the advantage of playing in an empty stadium across the world versus an empty stadium here? Quarantine all the players like they plan with the NBA tournament. Overseas, you have the added problems of finding a country willing to host the teams, stadiums or parks capable of hosting the games, and the timezone difference, which I think is a much bigger challenge than you admit.
Because they’re in the middle of a world virus hotspot. Getting together everyone and isolating SOMEWHERE where the virus is much less prevalent seems to me to be the best way to guarantee compliance with precautions and keep those not sick from getting sick. Sure, players will want to party, but they’ll have no opportunity to go home to see friends and family, for example, which would make a difference in how said players and owners feel about the risk of playing.
Like I said earlier, and as you seem to agree, if it comes down to playing in the States under any circumstance and postponing or canceling the season, the players, owners, and maybe even league will probably choose the latter. So everyone will do everything possible to look for another option, and I think this one is there. It’s extreme, but people will do extreme things for a fraction of the money at stake here.
Not being in the center of a seething pool of disease? Some reassurance that your teammate from Florida can’t go home and make out with his carefree girlfriend?
“Nothing jeopardizes the sanctity of the American hamburger”
Fix up your own mess.
If for the great unwashed 'merkin public being denied the viewing pleasures of NFL, MBL, NBA, NHL et al is an incentive to follow the health protocols that your own medical experts recommend, that’d be much more than fair squeeze, it’s in your own pure, unadulterated, self interest.
How about staying at home, fire up your cable TV and watch the sport that is being played now in countries which have squished the COVID-19. Broaden the mind, that sort of thing.
Not that having several hundred jocks quartered in splendid isolation such as the Tanami desert doesn’t have a nice reality TV “NFL meets Big Brother meets Deadly Critters of the Australian Outback” ring to it. Would rate it’s socks off. Couldn’t miss.
There are plenty of places in the US that aren’t virus hotspots. You can isolate players and staff from interacting with the outside world anywhere. Flying them off to NZ or Romania or Zaire probably involves more risk, placing them further from advanced medical care, completely isolated from their families in case they’re needed at home, etc.
And when one player comes down with Covid you now have your entire league quarantined in the middle of nowhere, with little support network. Players are opting out of playing this year here in the US, why would they agree to this plan?
Uh, I don’t know where you got your idea of New Zealand’s medical system, but I’m gonna assume it’s probably incorrect, unless I have an extremely wrong impression of that country. And I think they’ll at least consider it, because it’s a lot of money and NFL careers are short.
And that’s part of the point; if sports start up in other countries, with this much money at stake, do you not think they’ll investigate every possibility they can?
I would have no worry about New Zealand’s medical system.
That said, I do not think that the New Zealand government, which has done an outstanding job of handling COVID (helped, in no small part, by being a relatively small island nation), would have any interest, whatsoever, in having several thousand* citizens of a country where the disease is spiraling out of control come visit for six months.
NFL teams have, IIRC, 54-man rosters. That’s 1728 players alone, plus hundreds of coaches, training staff, replacement players, broadcasters, etc., etc.
I presume the “they” of which you speak are the NFL not the New Zealanders?
The Kiwis locked down their entire economy down for over a month.
They didn’t even play rugby union.
So your notion of sporting colonialism is a non starter.
Notwithstanding the impact on NFL careers and whatever bucket of trinkets are tendered is small beer.
Well if they trimmed that back to the bare squad of 11 plus a couple of reserves, who played both offense and defense. Used one coach, a couple of orange boys and a trainer. Played for 80 minutes without time-outs and breaks for high value advertising jingles then they might have a spectacle … but the Kiwis are already pretty good at rugby.
…our medical system is more than fine, it can do most things, but the distance from “advanced medical care” is probably the least problematic thing about your suggestion.
Our borders are only open to returning New Zealand citizens and even with those limitations the system is under strain. We have basically had to reinvent how our society works in just a couple of months. They have nearly run out of space for quarantine and managed isolation in Auckland and are now looking elsewhere in the country, including Queenstown, for places for people to stay.
A few weeks ago we had two (not two-thousand, not two-hundred, but two) travel the country, leaving managed isolation without a test (for compassionate reasons) and they ended up having covid-19: it dominated the news cycles for days. People were angry, talkback radio raged, op-eds were written, the army got called in, it was a huge ordeal.
We simply aren’t ready to do this. It wouldn’t be on the table, not for at least a year. There is already controversy over the Americas Cup that is scheduled for March 2021. Almost nobody here would want this. So thanks, but no thanks.
I think Banquet Bear’s comments here illustrate the problem - for any country that both has the facilities to host 16 games a week and has managed to maintain a low infection rate, the amount of money it would take to get them to accept a high-profile group of at least a thousand people from a high-infection country (realistically you’re not going to have the players play two-way even if you cut a lot of reserves) is “there isn’t enough money in the world.”
The US is a pariah nation right now. Nobody wants Americans right now, possibly not again in my lifetime. Maybe instead of trying to figure out how to play football, instead figure out a way to fix the underlying problem. Hell, right now I want nothing to do with Amiricans and I was born and raised here.
I listed a few other countries that might be considered hosts, and you selectively edited my post to remove the others. There are multiple reasons why each of the options are unlikely to work for this scenario, both from the potential host country and from the players/staff/league side. If I gave the impression that I thought each obstacle applied to each hypothetical location, I apologize.
You have yet to present a scenario where it makes sense for any of these leagues to move overseas to somewhere that qualifies and would want them to come when there are options to play in empty stadiums in the US.
I cut off the other countries because I read your statement of lacking “advanced medical care” as applying to all the countries on your list, and I found it funny and odd.
And my entire point is, I don’t think there ARE any options to play in the United States. The virus situation is too godawful for that to be a possibility anymore. My thinking is that the league must be investigating going out of the country (not necessarily to any specific country) because they realize that they will never be able to safely and comfortably start the season in the United States of America.
But I really do think that the leagues in general will be desperate enough to try something like this, especially if pro sports pick up again overseas.
And I think they’ll at least consider it, because it’s a lot of money and NFL careers are short.