“I’m traveling around the country just trying to get a feel for what Republican voters want, what Americans are looking for, and we’re going to make a decision in a relatively short period of time,” Hogan said Sunday.
If he decides to run, Hogan would join Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the Republican field. Several other Republicans have also teased the possibility of 2024 presidential campaigns.
Limited to two terms as governor, Hogan left office last month. His approval rating stood at 77 percent in one Gonzalez poll, though it was higher among Democrats than Republicans in one of the nation’s bluest states.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
He’s starred in updates of Baywatch and Get Smart, so the Rock has some experience of questionable reboots. Now we’re about to discover whether he can score a box office hit with the third version of the XFL.
The actor, AKA Dwayne Johnson, is a co-owner of the spring American football league, which kicks off on Saturday when the Dallas-area Arlington Renegades host the Vegas Vipers in Choctaw Stadium, the former home of the Texas Rangers baseball team.
The original XFL, a partnership between NBC and what is now World Wrestling Entertainment, imploded after a single season in 2001 as headlines pilloried “sex, booze and sleaze” and television viewers decided that a league promising cameras in cheerleaders’ locker-rooms and Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura as a pundit was not a serious proposition.
Another spring start-up aiming to capitalize on the growing market for live betting – the Alliance of American Football, backed by a Texas-based pickleball mogul – crumbled after only eight weeks in 2019 and filed for bankruptcy.
Still, the wrestling tycoon Vince McMahon tried again in 2020: resurrecting the XFL, dropping the gimmicks, pledging a competition free from anthem kneelers and criminals and reportedly spending $200m, only for the reborn league to shut after five weeks because of the coronavirus pandemic. It promptly filed for bankruptcy.
Enter Johnson, the former pro wrestler, who as a student hoped in vain to be drafted into the NFL then had a brief stint with the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League. He bought the XFL rights for $15m, partnering with his ex-wife, Dany Garcia, and RedBird Capital, a New York-based investment firm that owns AC Milan and Toulouse FC and has partnerships with the New York Yankees and Fenway Sports Group, the owner of Liverpool and the Boston Red Sox.
An XFL representative was unavailable for comment, but the investors clearly believe the 2020 edition was doomed by unfortunate timing, not a lack of potential. Johnson vows a “league of grit and hunger”, since many players nurture ambitions of reaching – or returning to – the NFL.
As in 2020, this year’s iteration features eight teams. Washington, St Louis, Houston, the Dallas area and Seattle return, while Los Angeles, New York and Tampa Bay are out – replaced by Las Vegas, Orlando and San Antonio. The St Louis Battlehawks were arguably the league’s biggest success three years ago as fans embraced the return of professional football after the NFL’s Rams deserted the city for Los Angeles.
To limit costs – which are considerable, given the large rosters, travel, venue hire and health insurance – each team will be based at a hub in Arlington, with players living in hotels and practicing in the area during the week, before travelling to games. There is another important difference from 2020: this time, the XFL has company.
The United States Football League (USFL) aimed to rival the NFL in the mid-1980s but collapsed, in no small part thanks to the hubris of the owner of one of its teams, the New Jersey Generals: a certain Donald Trump. Those days are long gone; the NFL is indomitable. Salaries are far below NFL levels and the XFL even has an agreement with the NFL to share “insights and practices”.
The rebooted XFL shut after five weeks in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic and promptly filed for bankruptcy. Photograph: Michael Owens/Getty Images
A new USFL with some of the old team names began play in 2022. The sides were named for cities in the eastern half of the country: Houston, New Orleans, Michigan (Detroit), Pittsburgh, Birmingham, Tampa Bay, New Jersey and Philadelphia. Oddly (but economically), all the regular-season games took place in Birmingham, leading to sparse crowds. This year the Memphis Showboats replace the Tampa Bay Bandits and the USFL will kick off on 15 April, its start overlapping with the XFL’s climactic weeks. Fixtures will be held in Birmingham, Memphis, Detroit and Canton, Ohio.
Meanwhile, the indoor Arena Football League, which went out of fashion at roughly the same time as center partings and Britpop and was last glimpsed in 2019 – plans to relaunch with 16 teams in 2024. Not to mention assorted other ventures, such as the interactive Fan Controlled Football, due to open its third season in May this year after deploying the former Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel and the 49-year-old former NFL great Terrell Owens in 2022. Preseason in the Canadian Football League begins in May.
Clearly, this is a lot, especially since the litany of past failures suggests that Americans have limited appetite for spring leagues. And there is only so much playing talent to go around, risking a dilution of the on-field product that turns off potential fans who have grown accustomed to the slick fare, packed stadiums and sense of occasion on offer in the NFL and at the top college level.
And yet … 113 million Americans – a third of the country’s population – watched the Super Bowl last Sunday on Fox while regular-season NFL games averaged 16.7 million viewers. The NFL accounted for 82 of the hundred most-watched US television programmes in 2022, according to Sportico, with college football appearing five times in the chart. Surely some of these viewers want more?
“These [new] leagues are going to live and die on how they are consumed and watched and accepted on television,” says Patrick Crakes, a media consultant and former Fox Sports executive. “If you base it on how much football Americans watch in the fourth quarter of every year, my God, you’d think there’d be room for 12 of these.”
Network executives are keenly aware of the value of live sport in a fractured media landscape. Viewing figures-wise, Crakes says, “Football has stayed kind of flat. So if you stay flat while everything else goes down because the attention’s lower, you gain value.”
Since the XFL has teams that actually set foot in the cities that bear their names, even if merely on weekends, it is likely to feel more authentic and generate more fan engagement than the USFL. The XFL, which has a television deal with ESPN, averaged 1.9 million viewers in 2020, according to Sports Business Journal – higher than Formula 1 and comparable with the highest-profile English Premier League matches.
The USFL averaged 715,000 last year. That may not look like much, but it’s twice as high as MLS, which had an average audience of only 343,000 on ESPN and ABC in 2022 – yet sealed a new $2.5bn, 10-year deal with Apple TV. Forbes reports that the average MLS franchise is worth $579m.
And as Crakes points out: “Fox basically owns the USFL”. While the XFL is beholden to investors who presumably want to turn a profit, the metrics for success probably look different to a broadcaster that runs its own league and so can exert tight control over costs and strategy while having deep enough pockets to fund the competition for several seasons even if it’s initially struggling to make money.
Fox Sports is said to have committed $150m to the USFL over three years. While still profit-driven, it can use the USFL as a proving ground for on-air talent, experiment with broadcast innovations that might graduate to its NFL coverage and refine the business model for possible use in other ventures. For Fox, Crakes says, “this is a low-risk shot to build a cost-efficient program with some value in a time period when they don’t have a lot going on.”
It’s a modest ambition and a far cry from the cultural and commercial phenomenon that is the NFL. But if history is any guide, merely surviving for more than a season or two would be no small achievement for one of these start-ups, let alone both.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
It appears it’s only a matter of time before the Kremlin orders another draft to replenish its depleted ranks and make up for the battlefield failings of its command.
This week, Norway’s army chief said Russia has already suffered staggering losses, estimating 180,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in Ukraine since February — a figure much higher than American estimates, as General Mark Milley, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, had suggested in November that the toll was around 100,000.
But whatever the exact tally, few military analysts doubt Russian forces are suffering catastrophic casualties. In a video posted this week, Russian human rights activist Olga Romanova, who heads the Russia Behind Bars charity, said that of the 50,000 conscripts recruited from jails by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s paramilitary mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group, 40,000 are now dead, missing or deserted.
In some ways, the high Wagner toll isn’t surprising, with increasing reports from both sides of the front lines that Prigozhin has been using his recruits with little regard for their longevity. One American volunteer, who asked to remain unnamed, recently told POLITICO that he was amazed how Wagner commanders were just hurling their men at Ukrainian positions, only to have them gunned down for little gain.
Andrey Medvedev, a Wagner defector who recently fled to Norway, has also told reporters that in the months-long Russian offensive against the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, former prisoners were thrown into battle as cannon fodder, as meat. “In my platoon, only three out of 30 men survived. We were then given more prisoners, and many of those died too,” he said.
Of course, Wagner is at the extreme end when it comes to carelessness with lives — but as Ukraine’s deadly New Year’s Day missile strike demonstrated, regular Russian armed forces are also knee-deep in blood. Russia says 89 soldiers were killed at Makiivka — the highest single battlefield loss Moscow has acknowledged since the invasion began — while Ukraine estimates the death toll was nearer 400.
Many of those killed there came from Samara, a city located at the confluence of the Volga and Samara rivers, where Communist dictator Joseph Stalin had an underground complex built for Russian leaders in case of a possible evacuation from Moscow. The bunker was built in just as much secrecy as the funerals that have been taking place over the past few weeks for the conscripts killed at Makiivka. “Lists [of the dead] will not be published,” Samara’s military commissar announced earlier this month.
To make up for these losses, Russia’s military bloggers, who have grown increasingly critical, have been urging a bigger partial mobilization, this time of 500,000 reservists to add to the 300,000 already called up in September. President Vladimir Putin has denied this, and Kremlin press spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also dismissed the possibility, saying that the “topic is constantly artificially activated both from abroad and from within the country.”
Yet, last month, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called for Russia’s army to be boosted from its current 1.1 million to 1.5 million, and he announced new commands in regions around Moscow, St. Petersburg and Karelia, on the border with Finland.
Meanwhile, circumstantial evidence that another draft will be called is also accumulating — though whether it will be done openly or by stealth is unclear.
Along these lines, both the Kremlin and Russia’s political-military establishment have been redoubling propaganda efforts, attempting to shape a narrative that this war isn’t one of choice but of necessity, and that it amounts to an existential clash for the country.
General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” | Ruslan Braun/Creative commons via Flickr
In a recent interview, General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” and that course corrections are needed when it comes to mobilization. He talked about threats arising from Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
Similarly, in his Epiphany address this month, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church said, “the desire to defeat Russia today has taken very dangerous forms. We pray to the Lord that he will bring the madmen to reason and help them understand that any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world.” And the increasingly unhinged Dmitry Medvedev, now the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, has warned that the war in Ukraine isn’t going as planned, so it might be necessary to use nuclear weapons to avoid failure.
As Russia’s leaders strive to sell their war as an existential crisis, they are mining ever deeper for tropes to heighten nationalist fervor too, citing the Great Patriotic War at every turn. At the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, which commemorates the breaking of the German siege of the city in 1944, a new exhibition dedicated to “The Lessons of Fascism Yet to Be Learned” is due to be unveiled, and it is set to feature captured Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles. “It’s only logical that a museum dedicated to the struggle against Nazism would support the special operation directed against neo-Nazism in Ukraine,” a press release helpfully suggests.
In line with Putin’s insistence that the war is being waged to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, Kremlin propagandists have also been endeavoring to popularize the slogan, “We can do it again.”
At the same time, there are signs that local recruitment centers are gearing up for another surge of draftees as well.
Rumors of a fresh partial mobilization have prompted some dual-citizen Central Asian workers — those holding Russian passports and who would be eligible to be drafted — to leave the country, and some say they’ve been prevented from exiting. A Kyrgyz man told Radio Free Europe he was stopped by Russian border guards when he tried to cross into Kazakhstan en route to Kyrgyzstan. “Russian border guards explained to me quite politely that ‘you are included in a mobilization list, this is the law, and you have no right to go,’” he said.
In order to prevent another surge of refuseniks, Moscow also seems determined to put up further restrictions on crossing Russia’s borders, including possibly making it obligatory for Russians to book a specific time and place in advance, so that they can exit. Amendments to a transport law introduced in the Duma on Monday would require “vehicles belonging to Russian transport companies, foreign transport companies, citizens of the Russian Federation, foreign citizens, stateless persons and other road users” to reserve a date and time “in order to cross the state border of the Russian Federation.”
Transport officials say this would only affect haulers and would help ease congestion near border checkpoints. But if so, then why are “citizens of the Russian Federation” included in the language?
All in all, manpower will be crucial for Russia to mount a spring offensive in the coming months. And Western military analysts suspect that Ukraine and Russia are currently fielding about the same number of combat soldiers on the battlefield. This means General Gerasimov will need many more if he’s to achieve the three-to-one ratio military doctrines suggest are necessary for an attacking force.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
