Sports Illustrated layoffs

I wonder why Tom Verducci is still there, and why they haven't axed him. They still have a couple good baseball writers (who don't have his conflicts of interest, but of course thats not a concern to Maven). He must be raking in great coin from Fox & MLBN. He could surely write for MLB.com or The Athletic (then again, maybe not The Athletic, as he doesn't have a Twitter account and TWITTER MUST DRIVE SALES lol The Athletic). Why deal with the bullshit?

 

Soccer is only a modestly compelling beat stateside. Most of the best American players are relatively boring, fairly wealthy white suburban kids, travel writing soccer has its readership and cost limits, too and there’s not much of a middle class/working class fan base. USWNT is interesting and dominant, but the media will only allow the team to be viewed through a single, triumphant lens, which limits the team and women’s sports in general. (The lone exception is women’s MMA, which probably why it’s so popular.)

 

Maybe he had the clout to work out some sort of guaranteed contract. If he's gonna get paid, fired or not, might as well keep him on the payroll.

 

"Here's April 2020 - the 1st through the 4th."

 

If the soccer writer gets $350k, an accomplished baseball writer should be north of a half mil.

 

Hometown discount? He's been there for 27 years.

 

His salary has nothing to do with the sport he covered.

Grant Wahl had been with Sports Illustrated 24 years, including 20 as a senior writer.

It's not like he signed that contract three months ago as a free agent. He earned his contract by winning multiple awards, by getting access to people the public wanted to know about (he wrote an entire book about David Beckham's arrival in the US with the LA Galaxy), and has written countless stories that have earned a spot on the cover. It's not about soccer versus tennis versus baseball. It's about a guy who busted his ass to do good work getting paid well to be a notable figure on a magazine's staff.

People are naive if they think this was really about money. It's about power. Wahl dared to speak ill of Maven and James Heckman as he continues to torch everything valuable within Sports Illustrated. That gave Heckman an excuse to fire him, using salary as an excuse. Wahl could have made $30,000 a year and Heckman still would have fired him.

Heckman is a despotic toddler and Maven is the scythe he's using to gut the premier sports magazine on the planet.

 

Wahl didn't get one. Maybe not being on Twitter and not speaking the truth to power has its benefits.

 

OK, this spun out of control, sorta.
My initial post on this said a person deserves to make as much as somebody will pay him and I side with the players over the owners in any labor dispute. I'm sure Wahl is fantastic and deserves every penny. I just don't think a soccer writer in the U.S. deserves to make that much money. The ROI simply doesn't compute. So I guess my reality is, SI is either overpaying him or mis-using him on soccer ... or both.
And if you're going to bring up books or cover stories, SI has always been known for its lack of editorial judgment. So much so that their decisions launched the SI cover jinx and are laughed at in sports departments far and wide.

 

I have no idea what that means, but I assume it is one of your tired culture takes.

 

Or maybe you're undervaluing the soccer market.

Tiger's 2019 Masters win was watched by 7.7 million people. The 2019 US Open had a 7.3 million watching.

The 2019 Women's World Cup Final had 14.3 million and the 2018 Men's Cup Final 11.4 million people watched.

 

Some people keep terming this "a bad move." For it to be that, you have to assume Wahl's kind of stupid. I don't know him, but haven't seen any evidence of that. He had to have known this tweet could get him fired.

In the tweet that led directly to this, he raised concerns about layoffs looming this summer. I saw some reporting that Maven wanted to work on a new contract with him, but who knows. He may have felt his days were numbered anyway and decided he'd rather poke the bear and deal with whatever consequences came his way. He's been making plenty of money, and his wife is, too. Maybe he felt he and his family were in such a position he didn't have to play bullshit games with the jackasses at Maven.

How many nationally known writers are still at SI? Two or three? If you're one of them are you simply thankful, or are you assuming your exit is looming? I'd imagine it's the latter, and I don't begrudge someone beating Maven to the punch with a big middle finger.