Oliver Griffiths

March Madness

As March Madness reaches its crescendo, I have been trying to work out why college sports are so popular here. The only student sporting event that gets any major media attention is the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, which was held last Sunday. By contrast, US college basketball and football gets wall-to-wall TV coverage. The best explanation I've heard is that professional basketball and football only took off in post-war America, allowing the college games to build a following that they have kept. Had the Football League not been formed in 1888, British workplaces could now be filled with team brackets ahead of the university football cup. 

It is interesting what sports can tell you about a country. I have been intrigued by the contrast between the Premiership (the top football league in England) and the NFL - and what it might say about attitudes to competition and foreign investment. These are not the things that you capture in the classic measures such as the World Bank's Doing Business report. 

You might reasonably expect the NFL to epitomise testosterone-fuelled competition. But it feels like 1950s dirigism next to the Premiership's Gilded Age capitalism. For one thing, there is promotion and relegation between leagues in the UK: come in the bottom three and you go down a league. If you have a bad season in the NFL you live to fight another season.

Another difference is that different teams win the Super Bowl. Unfettered capitalism leads to monopoly, yes? Only three teams have won the Premiership since 1995. In the past three seasons (and probably this season) the same four teams in the Premiership finished in the first four positions. There is remarkably little criticism about this. In the NFL the worst teams get to pick the best college players. There's none of that redistribution in the Premiership.

And where does the money come from? Of the top four Premiership teams, Americans majority own Liverpool and Manchester United, a Russian owns Chelsea, with a US-Russian bidding war rumoured for Arsenal. This state of affairs is not universally popular. But it's hard to envisage foreign ownership of the biggest NFL franchises in the first place.

Life can mirror sport. The success of the City of London since the Big Bang has been characterised as the Wimbledon effect: great tournament, few great domestic players. You see the same approach in Sunday's Boat Race. Undergraduates and postgraduates competed freely for places in the crews. The closest US equivalents - the Harvard-Yale race or the Eastern Sprints - are restricted to undergraduates. The result is an Oxford crew with an average age of 25 and five Olympians on board racing a Cambridge crew with an average age of 24. But it makes for great, multinational crews, from which the relatively few British participants that make the grade consistently step up to the very successful British Olympic rowing programme. And, having the same two crews each year, it also makes for easier bracket predictions.

Posted at 11:46 06 April 2009 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]

Our new website

As the most tech-savvy political operation most of us have seen takes up the reins of government in Washington, there is rightly a lot of interest in how the Obama Administration will use the internet. FDR was the first American President to use the radio effectively. JFK was the first to appreciate the power of TV. Will BHO be the first to really harness the internet as a tool of government? The potential is enormous, of course. And it goes well beyond sending emails and posting clips on YouTube. The internet is a two-way, indeed multi-way, technology, which could theoretically take us back towards a more direct form of democracy by allowing debate and conversations across any size of political unit. Will we witness a re-birth of democracy in a virtual Athens? What chance wiki-style policy making? But first will be the collision with government IT systems and security requirements - for example, see the claims that President Obama's blackberry could be hacked. And I say this from the perspective of someone who uses Windows 98 at work.

Anyway, we can be sure that there will be some excellent websites, judging from the revamped White House site. We wanted to do our bit as well, so we have launched a section on trade and globalisation on the ukinusa website. It is still early days, but our ambition is to create something that will be more than just a portal for dull government documents. We'd like it to be a useful resource and an interesting, thought-provoking read. An Aide for Trade if you will. So please have a look around and let me know what you think.

Posted at 13:04 17 February 2009 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]