Backpass: Potpourri
Crypto, Pid Army Helmet Guy, Alex Trebek, Gustavo Vallecilla, Mina Kimes, Jones BBQ & Foot Massage, & Omega 3 Fish Oil. This week's Backpass is just a clutch of SEO terms masquerading as a newsletter.
Note: my guy John Babiak is planning to head to Ukraine to volunteer. Consider supporting him. He’s legit a good dude.
There used to be only nine channels on TV on rabbit ears in my house – ABC, NBC, CBS, four local affiliates, and then over on high-number UHF was PBS and the weird public access channel – I would watch Jeopardy!1 after dinner, if only to procrastinate doing my homework just a little longer. Reader: I was a solid C+ student in high school.
And every so often, Jeopardy! would have the laziest, most random-ass category called ‘Potpourri’, which is, of course, a French word that means ‘a bunch of dried flowers and herbs and crap you put in the bathroom so that the guests think you’re classy but really its to absorb nasty bathroom stench.’
I didn’t really have much to say before or after last week’s match, and I’m not similarly inspired to write 1500 words on any one Rapids topic, so this week, you get potpourri. I apologize profusely in advance.
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Yesterday the Rapids traded $850K in GAM to FC Cincinnati for center back Gustavo Vallecilla.
Rapids fans have some takes.
Take 1: WHERE’S OUR DP STRIKER?!? (obviously)
My 2 cents: Yes. Yes. Hush, sweetie. This is the KSE Rapids. We can’t have nice things, and we need to get used to it.
Take 2 - Gee, $850K in GAM sounds like a lot of money.
My 2 cents: $850K IS a a lot of money for a transfer fee of a 22-year old centerback who played 1997 minutes for last place, Wooden Spoon winning Cincinnati. FCC conceded a league-worst 74 goals. One might immediately respond to a desire to sign any defender on that team with ‘Kill it with fire!’
However, GAM is a weird MLS crypto currency, in that its usage is so specialized, it doesn’t have the same intrinsic value as regular money. If you’re holding a boatload of GAM, and you don’t need to use it to pay down player salaries that year, and you know you can’t use it outside of the league, and the season ends in a few months and the GAM values reset every year , then the value of it varies widely. As you get closer to the end of the 2022 season, a lot of unused GAM on your books suddenly starts to lose value, especially if lots of other teams around the league have lots of GAM on their books. So if you see a guy you like, who fits a need, and is in-league, then yeah, you should absolutely spend that GAM to get him even if outside of MLS he’d only command half that much in a transfer fee or less. I assume by splitting the GAM over two seasons, Colorado further minimizes the real impact of this spend. Hashtag Let Pádraig Cook.
Take 3 - Wait, why do we need another Centerback?
My 2 cents: Auston Trusty is leaving for Arsenal in July. Aboubacar Keita tore his ACL and is out for the year. Drew Moor is 2,000 years old. And, based on this move and his start with Rapids 2 this week, I’m getting the strong sense that Colorado doesn’t feel like Michael Edwards is ready for The Show. The starting back three beginning in July would then be Danny Wilson, Lalas Abubakar, and either Keegan Rosenberry or the biggest guy seated in Centennial 38’s section 117 - I vote either Shea Ma’afala or Pid Army Helmet Wearing Guy.
Shea2 would be entertaining in that he’d let forth a stream of obscenities so foul as to likely draw a red within 90 seconds, and that’d be epic.
So I guess we need some more center back depth. I hope Gustavo doesn’t suck.
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Robin Fraser just got signed to a new four-year contract extension. Sounds about right. A three-year deal would feel a little more prudent to me - every relationship has an expiration date, and even Bruce Arena and Sigi Schmidt have been fired for their perceived failures. But I’m definitely quibbling with trivialities, and we all know Stan Kroenke can afford to pay a guy out for a year’s full severance if things go pear shaped. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but I assume that a) Robin’s gettin’ paid and b) whatever amount it is is probably not really enough because he’s awesome.
Robin’s great. Not a lot to add here.
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I reached out to the Rapids last week regarding the teams lack of a kit sponsor to ask a specific question, which is ‘what are the Rapids looking for in a kit sponsorship?’ And more explicitly ‘is there a price range that the team needs to reach in order to make a kit sponsorship meaningful for the team?’ I was shocked - shocked! - to find that the club declined to answer both questions.
Clearly, the Rapids do not want to degrade the value of their asset - the space on the front of the jersey - by getting lowballed for a price and then being forced to put ‘Jones Good Ass BBQ and Foot Massage’ on the front of the kit. Although I’m pretty sure that nearly all of us would go out and buy that kit immediately.
And that’s why I thought ‘hey, maybe the league has set some base number, and nobody in Colorado can hit that number.’ But even though it seems sometimes like the league is trying to set tight guidelines in everyone’s interests, it does seem unlikely that MLS would do cramp the style and profitability potential of the smaller teams. A one-size-fits-all approach to league sponsorships, even a league-wide minimum, seems like an unnecessary involvement in the free-market activities of the front office’s ability to make money.
I still don’t understand why we don’t have a kit sponsor. Matt and I are considering crowdsourcing/gofundme-ing for like $1,000 to get the team to put HTHL podcast on the kit, if only for a week. I’ll let you know how it goes, lol.
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Semi-related to the jersey sponsorship conundrum: have you watched much club soccer lately? Have you noticed that, especially at the English Championship/League One/MLS/smaller club in Germany or Spain level, there’s a lot a lot a lot of betting sponsors and cryptocurrency sponsors for modern football? I have. It gives me pause.
In the English Championship, Birmingham, Bristol, Coventry, Derby, Middlesbrough, Stoke all have betting companies on their kits. In the Premier League, you can add Burnley, Fulham, Newcastle, Southampton, West Ham, and Wolverhampton to that list.3
In MLS, there are currently no sports betting companies on the fronts of kits, but I’m sure it’s coming. The league had a policy against partnerships with alcohol or betting companies until 2019, but since then, it’s all free market capitalism, baby. If you’ve watched an MLS match recently, you’ve notice hoarding advertisements or pre-and-post game ads for MGM Betting, Fanduel, and Draft Kings.
Instead, MLS teams are embracing crypto - which is betting too, but just of a different kind. DC United’s new kit sponsor is XDC, a cryptocurrency exchange. Inter Miami have XBTO, another crypto-exchange, on their kits. The OGs in MLS of questionable kit sponsors are, of course, the LA Galaxy with Herbalife and FC Dallas with Advocare. Herbalife and Advocare are so-called multilevel marketing firms, in which products are sold to individual vendors who sign up friends and family and church members to also become vendors - and thus the products being sold become secondary to the profits. The primary profit stream4 is signing up more sub-vendors under you are in an organizational scheme that resembles a pyramid. If you want to hear a brilliant break down of this as it applies in MLS, listen to this podcast episode of the dearly departed ‘Dummy: A Howler Podcast’ with George Qureshi talking to Mina Kimes.5
There are also investment banking firms and hedge funds and financial planning firms involved in sporting teams too - and honestly, all of these segments of the economy are the same to varying degrees. Buying a stock, betting the Rapids to beat Real Salt Lake, dropping lots of coin on Advocare starter pack, or buying $500 of Shibacoin are all the same thing: putting your money into something on the hope that forces beyond your control will take your one dollar and make it into two. And that is fine. It’s more than fine. It’s capitalism.
The reason it gives me pause is that all four of these businesses are not your local bakery. You go to the bakery. You give them $5.50. They give you six bagels. You eat the bagels. Everyone wins. Betting, Crypto, MLMs, and even investment companies are in a business that involves winners and losers - bubbles and runs - bulls and bears. I worry a little about the losing side a little. Everyone absolutely has the right to spend their money on irrational or risky choices. We all have ours. You choose to put a ten spot on the match, while I’m at home drinking an Old Fashioned made with overpriced aged bourbon. Vices are vices.
I suppose my concern is more about the bottom falling out of any of these industries. Crypto goes up because more people buy crypto. Stocks, MLMs, same. But some of the investors in all of these things are betting the proverbial farm - investing money they may not really have. Getting a little kids favorite team wrapped up in all that legitimizes the zero-sum-edness of it all. Makes it seem less dangerous. ‘Bill Hamid’s my hero, and he wouldn’t sell me something positively ruinous’ one might say.
Yes. Caveat emptor - buyer beware. We are all responsible for our own decisions; even the ones that might lead us down the road to bankruptcy. And yes, I am being a bit of an old fuddy-duddy clutch-the-pearls stick-in-the-mud. I’m just asking legitimate questions about what happens if we keep feeding the beast - what happens to a league if it gets hooked on that sweet sweet speculative industry cash?
I definitely don’t have the answer. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe I’m being Chicken Little. But it’s still better to ask serious questions about who soccer teams are partnering with than just assuming that every team is doing their due diligence when it comes to kit sponsors. 6
obligatory ‘pour one out’ comment for Alex Trebek, who was the coolest.
I think Shea’s actually living in Norway this year. Shea is planet earth’s only known Pacific Islander/Viking/Astrobiologist/Soccer Supporters Group Mainstay/Death Metal fan. For this, I will stan eternally.
Nottingham Forest is sponsored by a box wine company, and I love their kit.
Allegedly. I have been informed by HTHL’s lawyers that if I just occasionally say ‘allegedly’ I can’t be sued if I say something that is opinion and not a proven fact.
This was 2016 Mina Kimes, before she was NFL-ESPN tv celebrity Mina Kimes. I remember listening and thinking: ‘ooh this is so interesting, I hope she does more soccer stuff.’ She, alas, pivoted to something else, which is soccer’s loss.
You knew I was going to invoke Ciao. You knew it.