Some major pitches were in play during the past week.
The biggest: on the soccer pitch, which featured the leadup to June 6’s kickoff to FIFA Women’s World Cup Canada 2015, a potential international sports business win for Canada and a potential shot in the arm for local women’s sports development and the overall profile of women’s sports, which still attract a fraction of the sponsorship dollars of men’s sports.
Bigger still on that pitch: the unexpected but roundly applauded resignation of FIFA “president of everybody” Sepp Blatter amid the rising tide of revelations about his tainted FIFA regime.
Cleaning house will take much more than Blatter removal in the largely unaccountable mega-billion-dollar “non-profit” organization that currently has around US$1.5 billion in cash reserves and doesn’t pay taxes on its profits, which were US$141 million in 2014 on revenue of just over US$2 billion.
Major surgery will be required. And not just in FIFA’s executive suites.
Questions remain over why Blatter was allowed to maintain his grip on power well beyond his best-before date. For example, which of FIFA’s major stakeholders – global sports sponsors – really pushed for change in the organization as corruption revelations began piling up? And if they didn’t, why not?
Meanwhile in media pitchland, PwC released its Global entertainment and media outlook 2015-2019, which forecasts where it sees the world’s entertainment and media money flowing over the next three years.
Digital? Of course. Mobile? What else?
No surprises there.
But traditional stalwarts like print – surely a surprise for the Twitterati in-crowd – will still be very much in the game. In Canada, for example, PwC sees newspaper circulation reversing recent declines and on course “to go on growing.” Digital as the sole way forward, it appears, is a misguided business plan. As the report pointed out, while many publications have or are planning to launch iPad editions, digital newspaper circulation revenue in 2013 (US$9 million) represented a mere 1% of Canada’s newspaper circulation revenue.
One trend to watch here, according to PwC: newspaper publishers increasing the amount of video content they feature online to compete with TV, traditional purveyors of which are likewise under significant marketplace pressure from the Internet advertising drain. Revenue heading online in Canada is projected to increase from 2013’s US$3.67 billion to US$7.04 billion by 2018.
On the weather front, Swedish furniture design and housewares colossus Ikea announced a US$1.13 billion commitment to address what it sees as the growing impact of global warming in developing countries by sinking the investment into renewable energy and other green initiatives. Ikea CEO Peter Agnefjäll vowed that Ikea would go 100% renewable in energy and switch its lighting products to LED technology.
Good on Ikea. More corporate leadership is needed on the weather front.
However, all is not bad when it comes to climate change. A story in The Times reported that rains, caused by rising greenhouse gas levels, had returned to Africa’s Sahel region, which has been victim of chronic devastating droughts between 1964 and 1993. Crop yields have consequently increased and helped the local population in the sub-Sahara region feed itself without having to rely on foreign donations.
Meanwhile on the waterfront: according to the Journal of Commerce, two U.S. senators introduced a bill Friday that would give the American president the power to intervene in port labour slowdowns and strikes.
The Protecting Orderly and Responsible Transit Shipments Act is the most recent political response to labour disruptions that slowed container cargo flow through West Coast U.S. ports from mid-2014 through early 2015. The cost of the protracted longshore contract negotiations has been estimated at around US$7 billion.
Last but not least on this week’s pitch list: another curveball from China and its social media censors, who are targeting another set of dangerous words and phrases to eliminate from the Internet.
They include “your mom,” “green eggs” and “howling monster” and join previous unpleasantries on the censors’ hit list such as “meow” and “Hoobastank.”
Dangerous words indeed, any one of which could be usefully employed to shame some of the backroom boys pulling the money strings at FIFA under the Blatter regime.
Unless, of course, you happen to be in China.
