UK orders commission to study women's football; rising TV prices warn of commercial monopolization

Karen Carney in 2019
(James Smed CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

The UK has announced "an in-depth review into the future of domestic women’s football" and appointed the decorated footballer and today commentator Karen Carney MBE to chair.

In the United States, this year marked the historic equal pay settlement for the blockbuster Women's National Team (USWNT). And in the UK, England hosted and won the 13th UEFA Women's Euro 2022, delayed two years by the pandemic, in a nail-biter over Germany.

Though to say women's football is coming into its own is an assertion decades late, just as it is decades early to say that women's football has at last been afforded parity with men's in social and commercial recognition.

The UK announced three points of focus for the review:

[1] Assessing the potential audience reach and growth of the game—by considering the value and visibility of women’s and girls’ football in England, including the potential to grow the fanbase for women’s football and whether current growth still supports home-grown talent and can be achieved without overstretching infrastructure.

[2] Examining the financial health of the game and its financial sustainability for the long term. This will include exploring opportunities and ways to support the commercialisation of the women’s game, broadcast revenue opportunities and the sponsorship of women’s football.

[3] Examining the structures within women’s football. This includes the affiliation with men’s teams, prize money, the need for women’s football to adhere to the administrative requirements of the men’s game; and assessing the adequacy, quality, accessibility and prevalence of the facilities available for women’s and girls’ football for the growth and sustainability of the game.

The UK does have already a system for youth development in women's football that looks sophisticated from the U.S. vantage point. Carney is a case in point. Even in the 1990s, Carney came up through the ranks of Birmingham City since age 11. She became one of England's top capped players, scoring 32 goals for the national side from 2005 to 2019.

After three years at Arsenal, in 2009, Carney moved to the United States to play for the Chicago Red Stars, a team then affiliated with the Women's Professional Soccer league (WPS). The WPS was a short-lived installment in the fits and starts of women's pro soccer in the United States. The league collapsed after scarcely a year. Carney returned to England in 2011 to play for five years again for Birmingham City, then three years for Chelsea.

Today, Carney comments on both men's and women's football for Sky Sports and Amazon Prime. The Chicago Red Stars play today as part of the National Women's Soccer League.

Sky, like NBC in the United States, is a division of Comcast. The anti-competitive bundlings of these interrelated companies is making it unaffordable for viewers in the UK and in the United States to follow a team. I'm not sure how long UK viewers and regulators will tolerate the exploitation. Some Latin American governments have been increasingly ruffled about commercial efforts to make access to football a privilege of the elite. I've speculated that in the United States, NBC is effectively killing the goose that laid the golden egg. U.S. viewers will never commit to world-class Premier League football if they're given access only to different teams and lower priority matches week to unpredictable week.

Unfortunately, commercial development of the women's game presents the same conundrum. Commercialization in the priorities of the Carney review is presented as an undisputed good. To be sure, that's where the money is, and it will take money to bring the women's game to gender parity.

At the same time, there is evidence already in the United States that commercial success, ironically, invites audience exclusivity and, thus, narrows public appeal. USWNT television rights presently lie with ESPN and Fox Sports, both divisions of Disney. But Disney+ viewers won't find the USWNT there, nor in the Disney+/ESPN+ bundle, as "+" seems to be a number less than (ESPN)2 and (ESPN)3.

In March, US Soccer awarded USWNT and men's team rights together in an eight-year deal to HBO Max and Turner properties, all divisions of AT&T by way of WarnerMedia. An HBO subscription doesn't come cheap, and different Turner channels require subscription to different bundles.

With media empires now controlling access to football on both sides of the Atlantic, fans' budgets will be stretched thin, and appetite for allegiances to new endeavors, such as expanded women's football, might prove difficult to stir. If the women's game is to be kept from becoming a victim of its own success, the goal of commercialization should be viewed with a discerning eye, wary of monopolization.

A call for evidence in support of the Carney review is expected from the UK Football Association in the coming weeks. HT @ lawyer Paul Maalo, writing for the Wiggin digital commerce team in London.

NBC resists TV free market, overcharges U.S. viewers: PL football costs $20 in Canada, $70 in United States

Each year, I become freshly enraged at the cost of seeing Premier League football in the United States, a ready example of antitrust non-enforcement in the communication sector.

The Sporting News had the audacity, or stupidity?, to describe NBC carriage of PL matches in the United States as a "luxury." I guess it is, a luxury only the rich can afford. To follow one's team, one must, at minimum, subscribe to NBC partner FuboTV for $70 per month. Access via FuboTV costs just US$20 per month in Canada.

The tangled cross-ownerships of what used to be broadcast TV are indicative of the dearth of consumer protection in the area. NBC "competitor" CBS (Viacom) owns a stake in FuboTV. The legacy broadcasters are using their weight in contracting power to lock down content in channel consolidators that emulate the old cable TV business model, by which consumers were compelled to overpay for a sliver of content in a library they didn't want. Hardly the free market promise of streaming.

But the FCC long ago left the helm unmanned on consumer protection when broadcasting gave way to cable. And the FTC and DOJ have had little interest in expanding their purview in times of corporate-captured governance. As usual, the United States purports to model free market capitalism in an oligopolized market that is anything but.

FuboTV in Canada at left, United States at right.
The package in Canada has fewer channels,
but if PL is all you want, that's not an option.

Covid court backlog, solved: 'Night Court' returns

I've been reading about how courts are struggling to overcome coronavirus backlogs in their caseload.  To me, the answer is obvious.  I saw it on TV.

Anderson, 1987
(Alan Light CC BY 2.0)

Created by writer Reinhold Weege after his Barney Miller wrapped up, Night Court (wiki) ran for 193 episodes over nine seasons on NBC, from 1984 to 1992, a hit by any measure.  Harry Anderson, who passed away in 2018, managed the underbelly of New York criminal process as Judge Harry T. Stone.

Night Court launched many ships.  If already 10 years into his acting career, John Larroquette became a household name as deadpan prosecutor Dan Fielding.  Selma Diamond is unforgettable as gruff bailiff Selma Hacker, even though she appeared only in the first two seasons, passing away in 1985 at age 64.  (Read more about her at the Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.)  A parade of guest stars passed through Judge Stone's Manhattan courtroom, including some who went on to greater notoriety, such as Michael Richards, Seinfeld's Kramer, and Brent Spiner, Star Trek's Data.

"Night court" is a real thing, here and there, in the United States, not just in Manhattan.  Like in the TV show, night courts specialize in preliminary criminal proceedings, namely arraignment.  The courts don't run through the night, but after hours, Manhattan's wrapping up around 1 a.m.  Many jurisdictions have found night courts efficient to handle arraignments on drug charges or to settle minor matters, such as outstanding misdemeanor warrants, for people whose life challenges will be compounded if they're forced to get to court during the usual workday hours.  How many times have I complained that the retail counter of the post office should be open at night, when people have time to wait in line?  Though for obvious reasons, night court doesn't work as well for American jury trials. 

Rauch, 2013
(Dominick D CC BY-SA 2.0)

Night Court should be one of those sitcoms that doesn't stand the test of time.  Its humor seems to me pretty specific to the cultural moment of the 1980s.  Nevertheless, Night Court stuck around over the years in cable reruns, and, lately, with retro content pouring into streaming services and being discovered by new audiences, the show has earned its own little niche as a cult classic.  The real Manhattan night court has been a real thing since 1907, according to the New York Post, but in recent years, in part thanks to a listing in the Lonely Planet, the Manhattan night court has become a tourist attraction, appealing to visitors from around the world.

Whether real night court might help unjam our covid court backlog, I don't really know.  But TV Night Court might be getting a new lease on life.  According to a Deadline exclusive in December 2020, Melissa Rauch, The Big Bang Theory's Bernadette Rostenkowski, was a fan of the original in her New Jersey childhood and pitched a reboot to NBC.  Rauch is now set to executive produce the new show, which will feature "unapologetic optimist" Judge Abby Stone, daughter of the late Harry.  John Larroquette is lined up to return as an older and wiser Dan Fielding.

Ted Lasso heads to UK, will coach AFC Richmond

From The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (Oct. 6, 2020)

A new Apple TV+ show has Saturday Night Live alum Jason Sudekis playing southern-drawl-wielding American football coach "Ted Lasso," as he is recruited to coach an English Premier League (PL) soccer squad.

Lasso's fictitious team in the Ted Lasso comedy series is "AFC Richmond," but Sudekis wore an authentic Manchester City FC (my team) hoodie for his interview with Trevor Noah on last night's Daily Show.

Financially regrettably, this show compels my wife and me to re-subscribe to Apple TV+.  We shelved the channel, pending new content, after we finished the highly gratifying For All Mankind (blog), and after I finished the sufficiently compelling if after all tritely pedantic Morning Show (both shows 2019, second seasons forthcoming).

Ted Lasso is a co-creation of Scrubs (2001-2010) creator Bill Lawrence, which scores dispositively in my playbook, though I don't think Lawrence has since re-created that Scrubs magic.  Ted Lasso is a spin-off, or spin-up, of NBC Sports promotional shorts imagining Lasso's appointment as head coach of Tottenhan Hotspur.

 

Incidentally, I'm a consistent critic of NBC's intellectual-property monopoly over PL broadcast rights in the United States.  NBC carves up the PL season so that one would have to subscribe to an impossible, and impossibly expensive, range of commonly owned services to follow a favorite team.  Americans would never tolerate such exploitation of American football broadcast rights.  NBC and the PL are greedily short-sighted, because inculcating loyalty to a single side is essential to sell British soccer to the American viewer in the long term.  It remains to be seen how UK regulators would react were NBC, since merging with Sky, to dare to try such such shenanigans there, where team loyalty is a multi-generational sacrament.  Other sports-loving countries won't have it.

Sports comedy is supremely watchable when it's well executed.  I thoroughly enjoyed Hank Azaria's Brockmire (2017-2020), though I have not watched baseball in many years.  And who can forget comedy-drama Sports Night (1998-2000)?  The West Wing (1999-2006) is too often credited for Aaron Sorkin's introduction of fast cuts and fast-paced dialog into small-screen canon, but it was on Sports Night that he pioneered the art.

The Sudekis interview appeared on The Daily Show just a day after Trevor Noah opened with some Premier League humor (cue to 1:13), noting Aston Villa's defeat of both Manchester United and Liverpool, the latter 7-2.  Noah is a Liverpool supporter.

Here is the trailer for Ted Lasso.

Conn. high court hears argument after non-dismissal of Sandy Hook parent suit against Alex Jones

As reported in my Sandy Hook update a couple of weeks ago, today was the day for Connecticut Supreme Court oral arguments over a discovery dispute in the Alex Jones case.  The Connecticut Supreme Court usually gets audio up within a day.  Check here. [UPDATE: Now posted and embedded below.]

Alex Jones (by Sean P. Anderson CC BY 2.0)

This is the defamation lawsuit against Jones and InfoWars brought by Sandy Hook parents for the broadcasters' assertions that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, perpetrated in media with the help of "crisis actors."  Megyn Kelly, making her mark after jumping ship from Fox, (in)famously interviewed Jones on this matter in 2017.  You can watch that weird-meets-weirder interview at NBC.  Kelly and NBC managed to infuriate both Jones and Sandy Hook advocates.  The latter objected to giving Jones the platform to sell his brand of crazy and included a few paragraphs on the interview under the "Campaign of Abuse" heading in the May 2018 complaint.

The case is Lafferty v. Jones, No. UWY-CV18-6046436-S.  The complaint is available from the Connecticut docket.  Besides defamation and defamation per se, plaintiffs claim false light, negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress, deceptive trade practices under statute, and civil conspiracy on the common law claims.  After removal to and return from federal court, the Connecticut trial court allowed limited discovery over the defense's anti-SLAPP motion.  Thus we are in Hartford.

News coverage so far is lackluster.  "Lawyer Norman Pattis told the Connecticut Supreme Court on Thursday that Jones exercised his free speech rights," Dave Collins wrote for The AP (e.g., via WaPo) this afternoon.  To be fair, this appeal focuses on a discovery compliance dispute, which is tangled up in First Amendment considerations, but does not squarely present the anti-SLAPP problem.  The Hartford Courant has more detail on the merits and procedural posture.

Meanwhile...

Also as reported earlier, the Sandy Hook gun manufacturer liability suit against Remington is pending with a defense cert. petition in the U.S. Supreme Court, since the Connecticut Supreme Court allowed plaintiffs a narrow theory to circumnavigate Remington's federal statutory immunity under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (at The Savory Tort). That case is now Remington Arms Co. v. Soto, No. 18-A-1185.

Amici in Remington Arms piled in to the Court on September 3 and 4 and are collected on the case page at SCOTUSblog.  The NRA, 22 members of the U.S. House, the State of Texas, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the Gun Owners of America, and Professors of Second Amendment Law filed briefs.  The latter comprise "Randy Barnett (Georgetown), Royce Barondes (Missouri), Robert Cottrol (George Washington), Nicholas Johnson (Fordham), Joyce Malcolm (George Mason), George Mocsary (Southern Illinois), Michael O’Shea (Oklahoma City), Joseph Olson (Mitchell Hamline), Glenn Reynolds (Tennessee), Eugene Volokh (UCLA), and Gregory Wallace (Campbell)," with counsel for the Firearms Policy Coalition, the Independence Institute, and the Cato Institute submitting the brief.

Oral Argument in Lafferty