FINA And ISL Are Competing Over the Hearts of the Athletes, Not the Fans

The latest parry in the ongoing battle between the International Swimming League and FINA came on Monday as the governing body for the spot internationally announced a new World Championship that cuts right into the pro league’s June competition schedule. This has set up a new showdown between the two biggest (and richest) forces in international swimming right now.

It’s clear that FINA didn’t ask for ISL’s opinion before re-scheduling the World Championships. And for ISL to expect that, given the relationship between the two organizations, would be laughable. But it’s also clear that the ISL’s season announcement was an attempt to take advantage and pull market share when FINA canceled its World Championships.

It’s a power battle with little cooperation, one makes a move and the other makes a counter move.

There are a few battlegrounds where the two sides are now squaring off.

• The two sides are still locked in a court battle over FINA’s attempt to block athletes from ISL competition – a tenet that has been dropped by FINA. The ISL, on the other hand, is trying to keep athletes out of the FINA World Cups, albeit using financial incentives rather than threats of suspension to do so.
• The overlapping schedule of the World Championships and the U.S. tour of the ISL
• Rumors of overlapping World Cups with stages of ISL
• Escalating prize money
• Exclusivity clauses
• Athletes’ Association intention to negotiate over an increased share of Olympic revenue, inevitably to the financial detriment of FINA.

In each of these cases, the two organizations are warring for the attention and commitment of the athletes, not for fans, not for spectators, not for ticket buyers, but for the hearts of athletes. It’s not clear that either organization really believes in fans, but rather both prefer an idea of fans that they can use to sell hosting packages and advertisements, without actually doing the work to engage those fans that they’re selling.

Maybe more so than any other sport in the world, swimming has held on to old-school habits that swing the balance of competition focus wildly in favor of athletes. Things like race scratches and no-shows, meaningless regular seasons meets in college swimming (and, for the most part, the ISL), coaches trying to bury results and race videos – all things that benefit athletes to the detriment of would-be fans who could pump would-be money into the sport.

I hate battles over the morality of the prioritization between fans and athletes, because the reality is that there needs to be a balance for a sport to thrive competitively and financially. Everyone in the room at the decision-making table needs to be striving for balance to maximize revenue and maximize profits. Any other wins are an unsustainable house of cards.

Offering athletes financial incentives to stay with the ISL at the expense of other commercial competition is great for the ISL, but it’s bad for fans, who want to see their favorite swimmers race more often. Having the World Championships interrupt the ISL is great for FINA, because they know most athletes will choose their meet to the detriment of the competition.

Neither organization has done a great job of engaging its fans or the public at large. The ISL, so far, has tiptoed so as to not upset the athletes and risk losing their commitment to the league. That’s a big reason why we’ve seen hesitancy from the league to force real parity. FINA, meanwhile, mostly cares about the votes of its federations – and even those federations, like USA Swimming, which are beholden to a membership base, don’t butter their bread with their domestic populations on the basis of World Championship hosting decisions.

I’ve long held the belief that elite swimming needs corruption to exist as it does. Without corruption, the math doesn’t make sense – the massive hosting fees, the massive stadiums that sit empty most of the time – none of those wheels turn unless they’re being greased somewhere.

Until the money in the pockets of administrators is directly tied to the number of butts in seats and eyeballs on TVs, it’s too easy to assign ulterior motives – not that I’d expect more money to magically erase the corruption either.

And that’s for both sides of this aisle. It’s as easy to assume that FINA only cares about using the athletes to deepen their own pockets as it is the ISL. After all, the people who run the ISL would benefit significantly if the athletes negotiated for a big piece of the Olympic revenue, because they also run the athletes’ association and have a contracted “management fee” that could net big returns.

Maybe this is a first step. Maybe both sides feel as though they need to control the athletes in order to produce the best product for fans. But between the confusing calendar, the black-holes where the information about these competitions live, and the increasingly-confusing rules, fans are becoming disenchanted with both.

I don’t know if cooperation or competition would create a better outcome, but I don’t think that it has to be all-or-nothing either. In soccer, FIFA, UEFA, and the Premier League work sometimes in cooperation and sometimes in competition, and all generate fantastical revenues annually in the low billions.

So who, in this increasingly-crowded room, is going to put a hand up and say ‘what about the fans?’ We for sure will continue to fight that battle, though every time we do, the powers-that-be try to push us further to the fringes. So long as those who carry interests of the fans are penalized, it is hard to see anything changing.