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Professional Sports in the CSA

Nick_Crenshaw82

Active member
If the CSA did survive the Civil War would they have the same professional sports as the Union and if so when would be good dates to start the various leagues?
 
It could go any number of ways, depending on if the nation survives to today and what kind of government and social structure it has. I also think national alliances -- I see the CSA allied with Britain and France, the US with Germany -- play a part, especially in soccer.

The first thing you have to do is determine what kind of country a 2020 CSA actually is. What kind of government, what kind of social structure, is it multicultural, or biracial and overwhelmingly Christian, or a country ruled by a rich white elite with blacks and poor whites living as indentured servants working their asses off for Confederate and CSA-friendly corporations? Or something else entirely, like a communist state?

Once you determine what kind of country the CSA is, then you can talk about sport, because that one issue determines how sport develops and which sports are popular.
 
It could go any number of ways, depending on if the nation survives to today and what kind of government and social structure it has. I also think national alliances -- I see the CSA allied with Britain and France, the US with Germany -- play a part, especially in soccer.

The first thing you have to do is determine what kind of country a 2020 CSA actually is. What kind of government, what kind of social structure, is it multicultural, or biracial and overwhelmingly Christian, or a country ruled by a rich white elite with blacks and poor whites living as indentured servants working their asses off for Confederate and CSA-friendly corporations? Or something else entirely, like a communist state?

Once you determine what kind of country the CSA is, then you can talk about sport, because that one issue determines how sport develops and which sports are popular.
I'm not sure what sort of country in would be entirely but certain are probably going to occur. First with strong relations between the CSA and Britain & France slavery will most likely be abolished by 1870s or 1880s but some sort of Apartheid will probably be set in the CSA. There'll like be Latino immigration to the CSA, Mexicans in Texas and Cubans in Florida. The border between the CSA and USA will probably be similar to that as OTLs USA and Mexico but involving African-Americans trying to escape the CSA.

You have any ideas on they kind of country the CSA would become and how will affect sports?

Soccer or rugby maybe slightly more popular in the CSA. If not American football may take a different route, similar to Canadian Football. Was Prohibition strong in the south, because if not NASCAR may not exist without bootleggers running moon shine. When did baseball become popular in Latin America. Ice hockey may not become popular in the CSA because it's to difficult to maintain the ice to play but it may develop into a professional field hockey league.
 
When did baseball become popular in Latin America.

Second half of the 19th century:

Baseball was first introduced to Latin America by Nemesio and Ernesto Guilló in 1864 in Cuba with the foundation of the Habana Baseball Club (1). Other Latino countries quickly picked up the game, with Mexico being introduced to it in 1882, Nicaragua in 1888, and Venezuela starting its own league in 1895. Esteban Enrique Bellán of Cuba became the first Latino player to play for a professional team when he played for the Troy Haymakers and the New York Mutuals of the National Association (2).

What the CSA - and remaining USA - does in Latin America may or may not affect how that goes. (It's not like cricket has suffered from being a sport introduced by colonists)

This also brings up "only light-skinned Latino players were allowed admission into the Major Leagues, while black Latino players could only play in the Negro Leagues", which may go on for a lot longer in the CSA than USA and would affect the sport.
 
I could easily see a divergence in oval ball sports - given some western schools played rugby rather than American Football pre-WW I, the dominance of the game developed in the north-eastern US (and how it developed) are all open to butterflies.

I'd also suggest that any shared sports could get very competitve, not only in international competiotn, but in signing players from the 'other' league
 
Something I hadn't thought about before is the color barrier. It seem obvious it'll exist in the CSA and it'll be an official policy but would the USA intentionally go out of their way to ensure that it doesn't happen or will it still happen in an unofficial way like OTL? If not does the USA make a bigger effort to recruit colored players in Latin America?
It seem like that what baseball league that forms in the CSA will in time include some Mexican border teams like OTLs MLB and Canadian teams
I'd also suggest that any shared sports could get very competitve, not only in international competiotn, but in signing players from the 'other' league
So instead of a World Series or Super Bowl we instead get an American Series and/or American Bowl between the CSA and the USA?
 
Short of an invasion, I would expect your US to do everything it could to encourage POC and sympathetic whites to leave the CSA. Anyone who was successful and talented in any field -- including but not limited to business, athletics, art, journalism and music -- and seemed to have a worldview more in line with a free North than an apartheid South -- would be targeted. I would think the federal government would set some kind of ground rules so everyone is on the same page -- you don't have a civilian organization going rogue, for example, and screwing up the work done by the CIA and the Underground Railroad, or worse, doing something that sparks a war the feds don't (yet) want.

Back to sport: I'll say at some point the rich upperclass decides to create a middle class as part of an initiative to catch up with the modern world -- the Confederacy ends up doing rather poorly in an economy split between a small (white) elite and a large poor mass divided up between 'free' whites and enslaved Blacks (plus the native Americans put away in what will become the Confederate state of Sequoyah). This is when organized sports starts to take off.

In short: colleges and universities begin organized play and develop the kind of following we recognize IOTL, and that TTL's universities and professional baseball clubs in the north are developing on their own. Baseball happens, brought down to the poor South, turning into organized competition for the masses, then turning into the Dixie League (the CSA's version of the American and National Leagues), complete with a major league and feeder minor leagues. It's segregated for a long time, then turns into a league with limited integration, always drawing from allied Latin American nations to replenish a talent supply that's constantly being drained by the US Major League Baseball.

I'll have AMerican football developing the same as IOTL. There are rival leagues, the Confederate league dealing with the same talent issues as Dixie League Baseball. The Super Bowl happens, first as a game between the northern NFL and AFL, then between the NFL's confererence champions. Political and public pressure in the north prevents any play between the NFL and the CFL (Confederate league) until the Confederacy makes political and social changes that ALL of the various factions up north find acceptable. It affects baseball, basketball, soccer, golf, every sport.

In fact, the only time Confederate and Union sides play is in international play -- the CSA is far enough from Apartheid South Africa that FIFA and the IOC allow its national teams to compete. But no one up North is fooled by the "cultural revolution" that President Johnson and his lackeys in the Confederate media and entertainment fields pushed forth in the '60s, after Dr. King's peaceful revolution -- they know the deal for a POC to live and thrive down south is to act white and act Christian. There is no room for anything else (unless you're one of the Indian tribes in the Confederate west, and even then they have to act Christian and tone down the native religious stuff).

Soccer exists, and is played on a European schedule.

The dynamic that led to the creation of NASCAR happened, too, and now NASCAR is the No. 2 sport in the land behind pro football. In fact, when you mention auto racing to the typical Confederate, they tend to think ONLY of stock car racing.

Ice hockey wasn't a thing, until the Russians began courting the CSA as an ally in the '90s. Field hockey is a girls' only high school and university sport.

Pro wrestling is HUGE and more like the north's UFC than that WWE and AEW crap they flung up north, y'all. WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
 
Edited and added to my above reply.

Confederates of Color (CoC) who still live in the country do follow the national and their local teams, but on the whole tend to follow Yankee teams a lot more. CCAA football is seventh in popularity and CFL football ninth among CoC fans; the other top ten sports are all Yankee, topped by the NBA, the NFL and NCAA basketball.

But that is just one interpretation.

In another timeline, where the Confederacy succumbed to a Communist revolution in the 1920s and wasn't liberated until the Third World War in 1963, sports is just now beginning to come back on a grand scale. The sports societies set up by the regime in 1926 were professionalized and are largely farm clubs and subsidiaries of Yankee pro teams or Yankee corporations and billionnaires. The popular sports are the ones popular up north -- football, baseball, basketball, soccer, rugby, volleyball, boxing, and ice hockey, among others. The oldest surviving sports club/society/franchise that is recognizable to OTL readers is the Chattanooga Lookouts, who have teams in baseball and football.
 
I'm not sure what sort of country in would be entirely but certain are probably going to occur. First with strong relations between the CSA and Britain & France slavery will most likely be abolished by 1870s or 1880s but some sort of Apartheid will probably be set in the CSA. There'll like be Latino immigration to the CSA, Mexicans in Texas and Cubans in Florida. The border between the CSA and USA will probably be similar to that as OTLs USA and Mexico but involving African-Americans trying to escape the CSA.

Why would slavery be abolished so quickly when that was the entire reason the country was created?
 
Political and economic pressures put on them by Great Britain and France.

Why would Great Britain and France even want to associate with a slaver-state when they could pretty easily make up the difference in domestic cotton production? Hell, for that matter, why would the Confederacy even listen to Britain and France? Ending the thing they founded their nation on seems like it would be a non-starter. Slavery could potentially be phased out of a surviving Confederacy (over a long period of time) but there's no way they would abolish slavery within 25 years after the end of the Civil War.
 
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Political and economic pressures put on them by Great Britain and France.
Slavery was the basis for the Confederacy. To quote Confederate VP Alexander Stephens "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. The Confederate Constitution explicitly protects slavery. The CSA was so into slavery that they seceded from the Union and fought the bloodiest war in American history to maintain it. This is not a nation that would give up slavery lightly, and they would be willing to take an extreme amount of economic punishment if it meant maintaining the peculiar institution. To say otherwise is Lost Causer nonsense.
 
I could see slavery phased out from 1900 to 1920, to be replaced by an "non-racial" convict leasing program, that hyperfixtates on black people lasting as long as the CSA survives, while getting european investment because it's not slavery. Hell, Tsarist Russia still got investment in spite of turning the serfs into debt peons.
 
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