<re-sending> 21.04.2021 Food | Football
Cooking up food waste; following football’s money
For the second time in two weeks Substack has published this newsletter without sending it out. So re-sending at the wrong end of the day.
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Cooking with waste food
IKEA is, it seems, taking the climate and biodiversity crisis seriously, even if it seems like an unlikely evangelist. The business has made a commitment to go fully circular by 2030.
In that spirit, IKEA Canada has created the Scrapsbook—a cookbook that gives you ideas on what to do with end of life food and things like banana skins that would go into the wastebin or perhaps be composted. The data point that opens the video (below) is that 63% of food waste can be eaten.
Chefs from across North America created recipes for the book that use a few different strategies to make sure you waste less in the kitchen. Some use disguise, say with a wilted greens smoothie... Others make the discarded ingredient center stage: How about broccoli stalk tacos or some banana peel bacon? There are also some “scrappy tips” to save nonedible food waste: You can grind egg shells into a calcium powder to remove limestone deposits in the bathroom, or turn coffee grounds into an exfoliating face mask.
Yes, there’s a book, but the company has also made that available as a free downloadable pdf. As Fast Company writer Lilly Smith notes, the top end photography definite helps reframe this as food and lifestyle rather than waste.
IKEA has supported the book with some promotional videos and even some online ‘masterclass’ sessions—there is still a couple of these to go, although they’re at 6pm EST, so it’s a late stint in the kitchen for European readers.
#2: Following football’s money
The proposed European “Super League” may be dead in the water by the time this piece appears in Just Two Things, but then again, it may have just been a negotiating ploy that backfired.
If you’ve been on a retreat since Sunday, the story in brief is that 12 leading European clubs—six from England, three from Italy, three from Spain—announced plans to create a “Super league” outside of the governing body which wouldn’t have relegation. The plan was for 20 teams in all, of which three would be permanent members and five invited from year to year.
It is the kind of proposal that owners and finance directors like, at least on the inside of the magic circle, and fans of sport hate. And players and managers hate it too: top sportspeople are competitors, not show ponies. Jurgen Klopp of Liverpool and Pep Guardiola of Manchester City, unconsulted, made their distaste as clear as they could when asked, as did both Liverpool players and the Manchester United player Marcus Rashford.
Well, as I learnt when I was a financial journalist a long time ago: when you don’t know what’s going on, follow the money.
The financial bet that the owners are making is that television networks globally will stump up for a diet of games in which Juventus plays Arsenal or Manchester City plays Atletico, over and over. Local fans will care quite a lot less.
And to this extent it’s probably being driven by a combination of the debts that many of these clubs have amassed during the pandemic (and before), the apparent plateauing of the revenues from pay-TV markets in Europe, and the fact that participation in UEFA’s European competitions—even though rigged heavily in favour of the larger rich clubs (and under the latest proposals even more so)—still involves an element of competition, both to qualify and to progress to the more lucrative final stages.
In this sense, the proposals are a reminder of the observation by venture capitalist Peter Thiel that capitalists and investors prefer monopoly to competition.
They are also a reminder that this proposal is the logical development of trends in football ever since the English Premier League broke from the Football League in the early 1990s to capture more of the revenues from the new pay-TV sports market created by BSkyB. (But they still had to live with the risk of relegation.)
Following the money, however, actually takes us to the American investment bank JPMorgan. It is JPMorgan that has raked up the €3.25 billion investment pool (laughably described as an “infrastructure grant” in the proposals) from which the clubs will also get their “welcome bonus” of xxx. On closer inspection, this turns out to be an advance against future revenues (this might even be described as “a loan”) which will be repaid at rates of 2-3% a year at a time when interest rates are under water. JPMorgan is also in line for some hefty fees.
So that all sounds like nice work if you can get it. But here’s the thing. As Matt Levine reported on Bloomberg, JPMorgan has a committee that is supposed to evaluate reputational risk, and it looked at this deal.
JPMorgan’s goodness/badness committee did take a look at this financing, but I suppose the goodness/badness committee is focused on more traditional risks and not full of soccer fans:
JPMorgan’s involvement was vetted by its internal reputation committee, which assesses high-profile and potentially controversial assignments, according to people briefed on the decision. But that committee didn’t fully expect the emotional reaction from sports fans that has flooded the airwaves around the world, these people added.
And there is a reason for this. JPMorgan are traders, and football fans are guardians. (This is Jane Jacobs’ distinction in her book Systems for Survival,
between systems based on territory (‘guardians’) and systems based on exchange (‘traders’). Most human societies need both. But when we get the distinctions between them blurred, breakdown and corruption follows.
They are complementary systems that shouldn’t get mixed up.
But the consequence of huge amounts of loose capital floating around the global economy, and the endless decline in productivity, means that it is difficult to make easy returns on investment on productive business, so finance instead looks to make money by turning the public sphere into markets.
Football fans, generally, are fans for life; they are morel likely to change their partner than their club allegiance. While they spend a lot of money on their clubs (for tickets, merchandise, etc), this is also about personal and local identity.
So if you’re sitting in JPMorgan in New York, in a culture of franchised sport, it’s easy to overlook this detail.
The owners also seem to have been surprised. They have been surprised that the big German clubs (which are fan controlled) haven’t joined in, nor Paris St Germain, which made a statement about the value of competition in sport.
They have been surprised by the vehemence of the reaction from fans—at time of writing, it seems that this has persuaded Chelsea and Manchester City to withdraw from the plan. And they have been surprised by the vehemence of the British government, which perhaps opportunistically announced that they would oppose the breakaway league by all means possible.
Two days in, with the clubs that went in pulling out as quickly as they can it looks like a miscalculation. UEFA had to postpone today’s (Wednesday) vote until April on the new European competition rules, but if it wants to, it could now push back. Rule one of negotiation is never to carry out a threat unless you know you can go through with it.
j2t#081
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