Jul 30 2008
Richard Branson Will Give Us a World Champions League
A few weeks ago, I was having an IM chat with our pal Unsilent Majority, he of Kissing Suzy Kolber and Deadspin fame. He started prattling on about how there would be a Worldwide Champions League in 20 years, with D.C. United, Boca Juniors, Ajax and Inter Milan in Group A. I asked him how they planned to pull off the travel for that. His reply?
“Tubes. There will be tubes. Like the internet, but for people. I have some patents pending.”
Yesterday, Richard Branson introduced us to White Knight Two, the new Virgin Galactic mothership that will carry the winged rocket tube known as SpaceShipTwo into the air to make astronauts out of anyone with $200,000 to burn. For now, the press is making suborbital space flight sound like a flight of fancy, but Branson has a much grander vision of the future:
“If, in 10 or 15 years, we’re not getting to London in 45 minutes from Sydney, then we will have gone backwards.”
Ponder that for a moment — Sydney to London in 45 minutes. Would that not be the biggest game-changer in world football this side of Lionel Messi? If getting halfway across the world was doable, why couldn’t you have a World Champions League? Imagine the top footballers in the world becoming astronauts, zooming over the stratosphere to their next big match, filling stadiums in cities they can’t pronounce, playing for the highest stakes imaginable. Hell, Virgin Galactic would probably sponsor the competition, just to show people how they made it possible.
Of course, we’re decades away from this. SpaceShipTwo only holds about 8 people, so maybe by SpaceShipFour or so, Virgin Galactic will launch a rocket capable of carrying an entire football club anywhere on the planet in less than an hour. Then there’s the matter of organizing the whole competition around domestic league schedules and international breaks, and there’s a pretty good chance MLS still won’t have its collective head out of its arse by then.
Plus, if the rockets of the future make the Association game a truly global game in this fashion, what happens to all the other football codes out there? Would the AFL and NFL never escape their home countries? Would rugby union remain “stuck in a ghetto”? Would the flavor of regional sports be blown away by a planet-wide monoculture of soccer, basketball and Twenty20 cricket?
I suppose you can’t eliminate the barriers to world travel without side effects, especially when it comes to world sport. Still, I hope I’m around long enough to see Branson pull this off. It would make for a more interesting world.
Good luck with those tubes, UM.
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Hmmm. Of course a “Munich Air Disaster” in the era a stratospheric flight would be a pretty big show; you could probably see the fireworks from hundreds of miles away. Sort of like the Space Shuttle reentry disaster of several years ago, only with several billion dollars worth of footballers on board.
Something tells me it won’t be the Brazilian National Team heading to the 2018 World Cup who’s the first to try the new technology. The world continues to be an exciting place to live, though.