In Case You Missed It

Well, the bye week is finally over, time for the game as the Pittsburgh Steelers play the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII. As always, there’s tons of numbers swirling around the game, from jersey’s to per half second commercial costs along with firsts and lasts, highs and lows and over/unders. Watching the game with non-Americans is an experience as all the nuances and ins and outs have to be explained, often involving long-winded descriptions delivered during the plethora of commercial breaks, then remembering that the commercials are why many people are watching the game. However, I do miss the Super Bowl party most of all, snacks and drinks and wacky side bets involving everything from who will win the coin toss to the colour of the Gatorade poured on the winning coach.

I’m looking for a Steeler victory, somewhere in the 29-28 range; could be wishful thinking though as I’m even figuring in a safety for the Steeler defence to go along with a few touchdowns and a field goal. This year’s game will at the very least mark the first time the Cardinals have made it to the Super Bowl, a championship created by the merger of the AFL and NFL leagues in 1967. Kurt Warner will be trying to win his 2nd, his first came in an MVP performance with the St. Louis Rams in 2000, a game that featured one of the all-time best endings in SB history; the last two plays were absolutely riveting. It’s hard to get video as the league is quite active in enforcing their copyright claims, hope this link holds up. Damn, Eddie George was good and look at Isaac Bruce!

One day someone will have to explain to me why the league would want to make it impossible for someone who can’t get to a TV to at least see the game. Isn’t it about exposure to the commercials? The commercials… They were having a hard time selling the last of them this year according to the grapevine, but managed to get them all sold thanks to lots of early pre-selling. Not surprising considering the $3 million per 30 second cost. If you happen to live in the Peugeot Sound area, or get KING outta Seattle, you can even see a 1/2 a second add for a seafood restaurant. NBC also claims to be running the first 3D commercial, promoting the upcoming DreamWorks Monsters vs. Aliens movie. However, I swear I have a memory of Coke trying the same thing once. This time it’s Pepsi, through its Sobe Lifewater that’s trying the gimmick, distributing the 3D glasses which apparently can be used again the next day for some NBC show called “Chuck”.

The bigger commercial news seems to be ads we won’t see. FedEx and GM have opted out, a good call considering their financial situation. Wrong signals and all. Last year FOX decided against political adds, this year PETA made a pro-vegetarian add that, NBC declined to run because, get this, ” it depicts a level of sexuality exceeding our standards“. Guess I need another video here:

Umm, did they say something about standards? Guess they don’t remember the catfight ad that proved so successful it spawned a sequel the following year:
miller light catfight

The game itself isn’t stirring quite as much hype as normal. There’s a lot at work here, Arizona being a lesser known small market team, post-inauguration hangover and of course the financial firestorm. That said, I’m looking forward to an interesting game, the quintessential big offense versus tough defense battle. Warner and the Cardinals have the trifecta firepower at wide receiver, with Larry Fitzgerald, Anquan Boldin and Steve Breaston all going over 1,000 yds receiving this year and Fitzgerald in particular stepping up to big time playmaker status. Meanwhile the Steel Curtain defense has lived up to it’s historic legacy. Look for the Cardinals to jump out early again just as in the NFC final, but the Steelers to grind out a final minute victory. Billions will be going through Vegas where the crisis won’t dent profits much if at all. So called propositional (prop) betting has exploded in popularity ever since William ‘the refrigerator’ Perry made many a little richer by scoring in the Chicago Bears ‘85 Super Bowl victory and paying off at 20 to 1. My favourites this year are whether Cardinal owner Bill Bidwell’s bow tie will be red or not, the over/under 1:54 for the rendition of the national anthem by Jennifer Hudson (a former American Idol contestant?), and who the MVP of the game will thank first (pssst, betcha there’s a deity favoured).

While I won’t get a Super Bowl party again, I can still play Super Bowl drinking games while watching the game between the commercials. Back to those, I’ll leave you with my top five all-time Super Bowl commercials, from Mean Joe Greene and Coke and a time when we called copies duplicates, through the Bud frogs and Cindy Crawford in the 90’s, sandwiched in between, the iconic ad that launched the Apple Macintosh in 1984.

Mean Joe Greene 1979

Xerox monks 1977

Apple Macintosh 1984

Budweiser from 1995

Cindy Crawford Pepsi

Dot-com bubble. Check. Housing bubble. Check. Commodity bubble. Check. What could be next, hmmm, let’s look into the ol’ crystal ball here… getting something, yeah, definitely getting clearer, but, no, it can’t be, it just looks like a bunch of men chasing some kind of ball, not profit, this can’t be the next financial bubble surely. Sadly, it could be sports fans, as the value of professional sports teams has grown exponentially in the last couple decades it has become a prime candidate for the next bubble to burst.

With the countdown to the NFL’s Super Bowl (yeah that football, the American kind) down to just two weeks, there’s a chance the opposing teams combined value will be under $2 billion - like the Arizona Cardinals a bit of a long shot in a league where 19 of the 30 teams are valued over a billion bucks. I’m picking the Eagles to end the Cardinals improbable run, but it’ll be great watching the NFC Conference final in the desert on Sunday. If that happens along with the Steelers taking the Ravens in the AFC, the combined worth of the finalist will be almost exactly 2 bil, $1.92 billion.

There are 24 professional franchises worldwide valued in the ten digits; in 2004 there weren’t any. Top spot worldwide goes to Manchester United. It’s hard to put an exact figure on their worth, in many a Premiership fans’ hearts as well as hard currency, but it’s about $1.8 billion. Bubble buying in their league is exemplified by Manchester City’s Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed. Spending boatloads on Robinho and now looking to land Kaka, he may wind up with a team relegated from the Premiership (note to US readers, the lowest and highest teams fall and jump to the next league each year). The sheik’s family’s only worth a trillion so I guess he can afford to do what he wants. Almost makes Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich look poor. The professional sports team perhaps hit the hardest by the crisis also plays in the Premiership, West Ham. Icelandic owner Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson lost hundreds of millions of pounds last fall due to the collapse of the banking industry, forcing the team to sell players to keep afloat. Malcolm Glazer’s bold maneuverings to take control of Man U were so successful that he now fully owns the team. When he reached the 98% threshold of outstanding shares (causing a compulsory buyout of remaining shares in June of 2005 the final valuation made them worth 800 million pounds, or $1.5 billion at the time. Glazer also owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL so you know, he only owns a couple billion dollars worth of professional sports teams.

His Bucs won a Super Bowl a few years back, the Cowboys have won five, helping Dallas, along with a new stadium for next year (and the all important new stadium deal!) to be worth $1.6 billion, the second highest valued sports franchise. The Steelers would be one win away from six rings with a win Sunday. I’m taking Pittsburgh to beat the Baltimore Ravens as the Steelers D shows who was number one this year and the Ravens will be tired and holes will appear in the league’s number two defence. Think the Steelers may even run it up a bit, dare I say 30-10 provided steady rookie sensation Joe Flacco throws up a couple picks. Philadelphia takes care of the Cardinals 39-35 in a wild finish. Kurt Warner will put up 5 TDs in a losing cause: 2 to Anquan Boldin whose back this week to join fellow 1000 yard receivers Steve Breaston, who’ll snag a touch, and Larry Fitzgerald, who looked like the best in the NFL last week, getting a couple.

Arizona plays their home games at the silly-ly named Sportsman’s Park at Cardinal Stadium, sure to be renamed soon as there is huge money to be made. An unlikely number 10 on the world’s richest list are the most recent NFL expansion team, the Texas Texans (another awful name) helped by the fact that their home field’s name, Reliant Stadium, brought in $300 million. FedEx stadium, er, the Washington Redskins come in 3rd on the list at $1.5 billion, Gillette adds to the Patriots 3 recent Super Bowls, boosting New England’s value to fourth at $1.32 billion. Next are the only baseball team in the top 10, unsurprisingly the New York Yankees - being worth $1.3 billion somehow allows them to throw over $400 million at 3 free agents this winter, um hello, crisis, what crisis? Real Madrid’s $500 million in revenue, string of signings (remember Figo, Ronaldo, Beckham, Owen, Van Nistelrooy) and Santiago Bernabeu, the only stadium in this list I’ve seen a game at, despite shrinking from 120,000 to 80,000 max attendance in the past few year, make them 7th at $1.29. Emirates push Arsenal to 8th and $1.2 billion.

Rounding out the top ten are the two New York NFL teams, the Jets and last year’s Super Bowl victors the Giants. If you’ve made it this far and don’t like sports you may wonder how these kind of valuations are possible. Speculators thrive in environments where logic and value stop co-existing. Perhaps the first recorded speculative bubble was Tulip mania. Back in the 16th century the market for tulip bulbs exploded, you can’t make this stuff up. A future’s market in the bulbs was opened in 1636 and the price of bulbs skyrocketed amidst a bubonic plague outbreak. And you thought buying people mortgage’s on future’s markets wasn’t a good idea. Talk about toxic assets, the flower’s vivid colours and therefore value jumped partially because of a virus that many carried. In tulips, the virus caused flame like colouration to occur on the petals, while the financial system has suffered from the contagion of unbridled banker and investor greed causing it to crash, a la Phoenix.

So, could professional sports be another bubble? We’ve got oil wealth, real estate and the Russian mafia all bidding up prices for players and signing TV contracts to extreme prices, all in the irrational chase for paper profit. The last sports bubble was in trading cards of all things, where a Honus Wagner card is worth $2.8 million. Coincidentally Wayne Gretzky once owned this card along with Bruce McNall. His sale (I mean of the actual player Wayne Gretzky) to McNall’s LA Kings from my hometown’s Edmonton Oilers marked a new phase of growth in player salaries, league expansion and franchise values in 1988. The greatest player in the history of a sport was deemed worthy of sale for profit. The numbers don’t shock today as they did then, but the deal involved a couple other players (with more talent coming the Oilers way) the Kings number one draft pick plus $15 million, putting his price tag near $20 million. Nowadays, a Kaka turns down 100 million pounds, the Yankees drop $400 million on 3 players and somehow value ratios are way out of whack. Value, yeah that’s the kicker, many blame today’s crisis on the loss of perspective of what constitutes value, the price is going up, so it must have value! I love sports but sadly see that the beginning of the end came the day they sold Gretzky.