why are riders under contract allowed to sign with another team
yirgster
This is so obviously a conflict of interest situation, especially in a
sport as team oriented as cycling.
There are large fines handed out for tampering with players in the NBA
and NFL. Marc Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, was recently fined
$100,000 just for saying, before he was a free agent, any team would
like to have Lebron James (wow, who would have thought?) and it might
work on a sign and trade basis for the team. I believe even heavier
fines have been laid on teams found more obviously tampering. In the
one case I know where a team, the Minnesota Timberwolves, made under
the table contractual arrangements against league rules, they were
really socked. In 2000, they were fined $3.5 million and lost their
first round draft choice for 5, right, 5, consecutive years!
In a less draconian case, the San Francisco 49ers were found tampering
in 2008 with a Chicago Bear linebacker and lost a 5th round draft
choice and had to swap 3rd round picks with the Bears.
Why couldn't something similar be done in cycling. All the major races
are sanctioned, no? You tamper you, i.e., the team doing so, is fined
a huge amount. And if your team is in a current tour or race, it is
automatically disqualified. Or if it isn't in a current one then for
the next major races extending into the next season. Or similar. Then
it would stop, no? That is, stop to the same approximate extent it
still occurs in the NBA and NFL.
One of the announcers on the Universal Sports coverage of the vuelta,
said the cycling federation (UCI?) had attempted to legislate that
riders not make public that they had signed with a team while still
riding for another, but that they couldn't enforce it.
This seemed like such a pathetic joke: allow the practice, which is
the problem, but not speaking about it, and penalize the riders.
It would seem to me there's no interest in having and enforcing
policies like the NFL and the NBA. Instead there's a very unseemly
and in my mind, unethical, situation affecting integrity. Why would
the UCI or whoever want to allow this?
Fred on a stick
> Why are riders under contract allowed to sign with another team?
>
> This is so obviously a conflict of interest situation, especially in a
> sport as team oriented as cycling.
Dumbass,
This is a feature, not a bug. It's just one in a long list of things
that makes bike racing much, much better than those other sports you
name where only two teams compete at a time. There are twenty team with
different goals. It's n-person game theory with temporary coalitions,
side payments, reneging, bluffs, threats, calls, unenforceable
contracts, payback, prisoner dilemmas -- and to achieve your goal you
nearly always have to collude with riders on another team until the
moment when you pull out the shiv and stick it in their back. Being able
to sign riders on another team is just one more variable to juggle.
yirgster
wrote:
Come on, it's hardly the same. There's no financial conflict of
interest to help another team to the detriment of yours in your
colluding along the road. How you collude, for example, might be quite
different seeing you've been signed for another team and want your
collusion to help them. (Don't know if you were being serious, but I
gave the serious reply.)
Fred on a stick
Like when am I not serious?
Financial conflict? You're going to have to explain the economic model
that is being endangered. On the Pro Tour, how much do the teams collect
from ticket sales? How much from broadcast rights? For the riders, what
fraction of their income comes from winnings?
Fred on a stick
(American football, basketball, and baseball) have a player draft, and
why is this related to the issue of player contracts and tampering?
Revtom
wrote:
> BTW, here're two related questions: why do the sports you mentioned
> (American football, basketball, and baseball) have a player draft, and
> why is this related to the issue of player contracts and tampering?
Because there are hundreds of millions of dollars involved, from owner
profits, concessions, and advertising, to name a few. When cycling
becomes a multi-billion dollar business cartel, as are major league
(and, really, big conference college) sports, there would likely be
more concern about athlete collusion. The player drafts are a nice
little exercise in low-level drama for the gamblers. In the larger
scheme(no pun intended), the only concern is siphoning as much money
from the beer-addled couch potatoes who consume the "product" that
sport is.
Fred on a stick
Well, I don't want to get all Chayanovian on your ass but there's also a
draft in professional lacrosse and in women's basketball where there
aren't hundreds of millions of dollars involved.
Plano Dude
You're pretty clueless about motorsports and rider contracts, aren't
you?
William Fred
$1...@news.eternal-september.org:
> Well, I don't want to get all Chayanovian on your ass but there's also a
> draft in professional lacrosse and in women's basketball where there
> aren't hundreds of millions of dollars involved.
I had to check because I wasn't sure, but it seemed like this thread might
have been crossposted to rbt. Anyway, carry on.
--
Bill Fred
Fred on a stick
> I had to check because I wasn't sure, but it seemed like this thread might
> have been crossposted to rbt.
I'd've been ruder had it been crossposted.
yirgster
wrote:
> BTW, here're two related questions: why do the sports you mentioned
> (American football, basketball, and baseball) have a player draft, and
> why is this related to the issue of player contracts and tampering?
I'll assume this is a straight question, since you took me in last
time.
The purpose of the draft is for the teams to acquire new players not
previously in the league. In the NFL these are from college, in the
NBA from college and overseas, in MLB from college and high school. I
don't know if they draft players directly from other countries, such
as the Dominican Republic.
Teams draft in inverse order of their finish the previous system.
Supposedly this allows the weaker teams to acquire better players. So
punishing a team by taking away or lowering their draft picks hurts
them in acquiring talent.
In the NBA teams are notorious for tanking, and often laughably
obviously so, at the end of the season (and sometimes much earlier) to
put themselves in a better draft position. It became so egregious that
the NBA instituted a modified weighted lottery system to try to
mitigate this. Instead of the team with the worst record getting the
first draft pick, etc., now the non-playoff teams are in a weighted
lottery for the first three picks with the team with the worst record
having the best odds, etc. After the first three picks are so selected
all the remaining teams draft in inverse order of finish.
Not that it's done much good.
yirgster
The riders shouldn't be fined. They're mostly pawns.The teams should
be fined. Big. That's what will stop it as in the nba and nfl, for the
most part. They're hardly poor. They don't need ticket sales. It's not
the economic model (how insightful of me!) of bicycle racing and
sponsorship.
Fred on a stick
> On Sep 8, 10:24 am, Fred on a stick<anonymous.cow...@address.invalid>
> wrote:
>> BTW, here're two related questions: why do the sports you mentioned
>> (American football, basketball, and baseball) have a player draft, and
>> why is this related to the issue of player contracts and tampering?
>
> I'll assume this is a straight question, since you took me in last
> time.
Well, they're straight questions but sometimes (as you might've seen
from my question to Zencycle in the iBike thread about torque) sometimes
they supposed to indicate a direction for the answer.
> The purpose of the draft is for the teams to acquire new players not
> previously in the league.
Companies hire college graduates without a draft, and some of those
companies generate billions of dollars in revenue. Nope, that's not it.
The hint was Chayanov, and the labor market in peasant economies. The
answer is: a draft is a way for teams to collude in the labor market.
This is why baseball and football and some other sports require
anti-trust exemptions. These oiigopolistic behaviors are justified
because of their economic model which involves selling a product through
ticket sales and broadcast rights. As you noted in your other post, that
economic model doesn't apply to cycling teams.