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the zaffre zone: title cards, joaos, and other oddities

Well.

Actually, I'm reminded of this story by @Gryphon from 2015, which features a chapter that details exactly how much the planet the main characters are visiting is in the pocket of a few capitalists/warlords - including, at the very end, the fact that they own baseball teams that are just straight-up named for them. The piece turned out less useful than I was expecting for this - that last part had stuck in my mind for some reason, but it's basically how Japanese baseball works, so it's not even that weird.

In any case, I'm an absolutely crap sports writer, but I can provide my usual service of wildly speculating back and forth with no real focus.

A question we need to answer is how exactly the tournament is constructed. Do we have clubs owned by the economic players or some sort of "national" teams representing individual asteroids? Undoubtedly it'd make more sense logistically to have local teams, but OTOH, I don't really see an amateur cup gaining much ground in the economic climate of the Belt - maybe as an internal OPA thing.

There's also the question of gravity, which isn't that much of an issue when dealing with Earth/Mars competitions as it is when gravity is a yes/no dichotomy. I don't even know how football would work in zero-g (handball or basketball OTOH might work better), let alone how to settle the difference when a team from Ceres with its 1/6g meets a team that's literally never trained down a well before.
You'd lose the ball in no time unless it was in some sort of cage, surely?

Think Blitzball from Final Fantasy X if you've ever played that, but without using arms - remember in football, contact is allowed with any part of your body except lower arms pretty much, unless you're the keeper in his box.

Also the goal would probably have to be set back in the centre of the cage rather than at the bottom if everyone is floating around
Glen did an interesting alternate football/rugby split in his Dominion of Southern America.


Hmm, all food for thought. I am willing to consider basketball if that seems more space-practicable, since I am also a fan of that (my commentary on either would be equally uninformed, don’t worry).

A hottake on what the space standard could be: centrifuges all set to generate the same gravity (my guess is Ceres-norm) in which case the game would essentially look like it was being played in a giant cylinder, with goals at each end.


if you want to make this more outre (and less book-accurate, since tbh it’s been a while since I read them) we could go with the idea I suggested of a uber rich bizarro-Belt divided into the equivalent of dozens of Monacos.
 
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I like thinking about alternate / future sports.
This reminds me that i need to post about the sports from my political intrigue world at some point. Specifically the versions of hockey and "american" football (actually more like a cross between Rugby League and Canadian football, but to most people it will look like American football), since baseball and football are more or less as OTL.
 
@all (including @Ares96)

have been putting more thought in - the *illogical* interesting set-up is for the Belt's bid for the Worlds Cup to finally be accepted through a mix of a) threatening to leave b) the only other legitimate bid dropping out beforehand for unrelated reasons - with the result being that after the game being on Earth for years and years, when it is finally played in substantially lower g, the normally shit Belter teams that are in the bracket generally demolish the less prepared Earthers, w/ it becoming very much tangled up in regional pride. Our hero is of course the commentators, but also the somewhat mediocre player from Earth who was exiled to Hygiea United for years and is one of the only things standing (rather ambivalently) in the way of Total Belter Domination.

thoughts?
 
@all (including @Ares96)

have been putting more thought in - the *illogical* interesting set-up is for the Belt's bid for the Worlds Cup to finally be accepted through a mix of a) threatening to leave b) the only other legitimate bid dropping out beforehand for unrelated reasons - with the result being that after the game being on Earth for years and years, when it is finally played in substantially lower g, the normally shit Belter teams that are in the bracket generally demolish the less prepared Earthers, w/ it becoming very much tangled up in regional pride. Our hero is of course the commentators, but also the somewhat mediocre player from Earth who was exiled to Hygiea United for years and is one of the only things standing (rather ambivalently) in the way of Total Belter Domination.

thoughts?

yo so by thoughts I meant “what might the state of the World Cup be in ~2350, also please explain how football works”

I have some rough ideas for the story but in terms of understanding who/how many teams a far future World Cup is likely to have, general spitballing would be useful, if people have any suggestions.
 
Well the world cup is growing on average by one team every 2.74 years so in 324 years from 2024 (the next confirmed world cup with 48 teams) it will have another 118 teams (166 teams) assuming they don't decide to just cap it at some point.

You can work out how the group stages work.
 
I mean, would people even still play football in 2350? The game has only existed in its organised form for a little over a hundred years.

I mean no but then there’s not a story

would probably be modifications tbf but I’ll have to think about that

Well the world cup is growing on average by one team every 2.74 years so in 324 years from 2024 (the next confirmed world cup with 48 teams) it will have another 118 teams (166 teams) assuming they don't decide to just cap it at some point.

You can work out how the group stages work.

ah yes, the famed 83 team round robin

under the (vaguely justified) assumption that population / number of country growth is going to slow down in future, I’m going to go out on a limb and say, oh, 96 teams as 16 groups of 6 and top 2 of 6 go on or whatever

(yes I know that makes 272 games but zaffre content is supposed to be a bit ridiculous)

any interesting potential future powerhouses that aren’t “hurr durr clearly the US will apply itself right before the 2030 midterm wikibox”?
 
#1 in FIFA WORLDS CUP

———

The ROUND OF 96, also commonly known as the FIRST STAGE consists of 24 groups of 4. Each group A - X holds a round-robin tournament of six matches to determine standings in the group.

The first match, between a host and the third seed in its group (this year to be between Vyesta and Paraguái) is customarily held at 6:00 P.M. Cairo time, with subsequent matches held every three hrs for the next eighteen days.

The teams that place first and second in each group, as well as the top half of teams placing third, advance to the ROUND OF 60.
 
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