Better Together

It's a Polycentric World

Karl Urban as Butcher in “The Boys” (2019): “You see, when they’re apart, they’re absolute f***ing rubbish. But, you put them together, they’re the goddamn f***ing Spice Girls.”

“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

I’m stepping back from higher education and AI this week to take note of a big development in institutional design and governance from the world of professional sports.

The Board of Governors of Major League Soccer (MLS), North America’s top-level professional soccer league, have voted to shift the regular season MLS schedule from spring-to-fall to late-summer-to-spring, beginning with the 2026-2027 season.

That will bring the MLS season into alignment with professional soccer leagues around the world, and especially in Europe, for the first time … ever, not only for MLS itself (which kicked off way back in 1996 (I was there!)) but also for US professional soccer, going back to the formation of the original North American Soccer League (NASL) in 1967.

In short, the highest level of North American engagement in the world’s most popular game is moving in the direction of more rather the less international coordination.

Why?

One cluster of answers is obvious: money and influence. MLS has come a long way since the league launched, but it still trails in the global table for media revenue, and revenue is the first of the several ways in which the league needs to grow in order to attract better players in the global soccer marketplace. As The Athletic put it:

Media rights are the lifeblood of the sports business. MLS needs to increase revenue via a more competitive national media deal in order to invest more in the product and compete better globally. The business can not move forward if driven mostly by gameday revenue.

(One irony in this is the fact that the pivot to gameday revenue followed a failed launch strategy in which MLS tried to focus heavily on season ticket subscriptions, mirroring other US professional sports leagues. It turned out that soccer fans have their own attendance patterns.)

The second cluster of answers is obvious, too, in a way. Making North American soccer relevant internationally - meaning getting players, managers, broadcasters, advertisers, and others to take the North American game seriously - means getting meaningfully in the talent game. Money (reason one) is key to that, but so are answering additional questions of institutional design. Aligning season schedules means that players around the world can make apples-to-apples decisions when it comes to moving from club to club. MLS is also looking carefully at the design of transfer windows, which vary a little bit from national federation to national federation, to maximize the league’s ability not simply to attract talent from elite leagues in Europe but more importantly, to attract up-and-comers from the second- and third-tier leagues.

MLS’s championship match will shift from being played in the late Fall, when weather is apt to be poor and playoff matches are likely to be interrupted by the international break, to the late Spring, when the weather is likely to be excellent and international commitments do not create conflicts for players.

For a very long time, and especially with the NASL, North American soccer was righteous about standing apart from world sport. The model then was US football, baseball, and basketball, entertainment venues where the US essentially ruled the global roost. NASL executives tried to get US sports fans to choose soccer over other alternatives, relying on entertainment quality (of a sort) and star power (of a sort) rather than borrowing the best of patterns established elsewhere. The NASL experimented almost endlessly with the rules, trying to persuade American fans that soccer was more fun than they thought it could be: operating a game clock that counted down to zero (and that was not controlled directly by the center referee); adding an “offside” line that was 35 yards from the goal; a penalty shootout to resolve tie matches (including, for a time, a shootout that resembled the tie-breaking shootout in NHL ice hockey); and a points system that offered points for goals scored, regardless of the game’s outcome.

I watched a lot of NASL games from the stands of the old Spartan Stadium. Those who were there will remember the original “Krazy George” and the “Earth … Quakes” chants that he led, with the two sides of the stadium in a call-and-response pattern. The warm Summer nights were welcome, and the atmosphere was family-friendly and even cozy, but the game was always a little less exciting than it might have been. I saw a parade of international stars playing out the ends of their careers: Pele, Chinaglia, Best, Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Eusebio. Still, he NASL was never able to attract top international talent playing at the top of its game.

And despite Messi at Inter Miami (and Son in Los Angeles), MLS still is not doing that.

It is notable, too, that MLS is not adopting a promotion/relegation system to parallel what most other national federations use. I suspect that promotion/relegation has relatively little impact on players’ perceptions of their marketability and move-ability. A great player on a relegated team wants to imagine (and is probably right to imagine) that a move to a different team in a top league remains possible. The team sinks; the player moves on. Pro/rel, as it is called, has a larger effect on ownership (the risk of relegation tends to depress team valuations, as Simon Kuper has shown) and has something to do with binding teams to communities and fan bases, a la Joni Mitchell and Big Yellow Taxi (“Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til its gone?”).

The title above invokes the idea of polycentricity, meaning a characteristic of an institution or system defined by multiple, overlapping areas of decision-making. That’s soccer: a polycentric social system. (“Soccer”, by the way, is a perfectly serviceable English word for the English/Scottish game.)

The North American version of soccer may not quite be rubbish, to build on the quotation in the opening image, but it is likely to get much, much better in the future by leaning toward polycentricity and building toward the world.

I confess that I love the Spice Girls.

What others have to say

My inner humanist enjoyed this elegiac essay from Hollis Robbins, riffing on the decline of Venice and its parallels with her forecast of the decline of higher education:

There are a lot of faculty and leaders inside higher education who don’t yet have clarity about AI. The buildings are still standing. The endowments are still large. Students still show up and pay tuition. The credentials still have market value. It’s possible to sit in a Harvard seminar room and believe that everything is fundamentally fine, that professors just need to adjust their assignments to account for AI. Like most people in Venice in 1500, most people inside successful elite universities don’t see the future yet, because everything looks and feels normal.

She raises a question, to which I am inclined to steer toward contributing answers:

What’s next? Suppose you’re a professor, or a graduate student, or a dean, or department chair, or provost, or university trustee, or someone with decision-making power in a state-level department of education? What should you be doing, right now, if you’re motivated to believe that she is right?

Ruskin was writing about a dead civilization, explicitly. Venice by the 1850s was still functioning but impoverished, living off tourism and past glory. The republic had been dissolved by Napoleon in 1797. Everyone knew Venice was finished. Ruskin’s task was to document what had been beautiful about it before the last physical traces disappeared.

Ruskin had three and a half centuries of Venetian decline to document. Higher education has perhaps ten years.

One answer: skim to the end of this podcast between Azeem Azhar (Exponential View) and Revelio Labs CEO Ben Zweig.

And go to Venice. It’s still there, of course, no longer the center of a global trading empire but a fabulous relic and stage set for the art world, filmmaking, and opulent weddings. I’ve been to Venice six or seven times over the last 50 years, and eventually I figured out how to see the place properly: how to avoid the crowds without getting lost, how to enjoy and learn from the art and the history, and how to do all of that without spending an absolute fortune.

My bookshelf

Completed: Simon Garfield, “All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia” (Harper Collins, 2022).

The publisher’s blurb:

The encyclopedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Created by thousands of scholars and the most obsessive of editors, a good set conveyed a sense of absolute wisdom on its reader. Contributions from Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Orville Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, Marie Curie and Indira Gandhi helped millions of children with their homework. Adults cleared their shelves in the belief that everything that was explainable was now effortlessly accessible in their living rooms.

Now these huge books gather dust and sell for almost nothing on eBay. Instead, we get our information from our phones and computers, apparently for free. What have we lost in this transition? And how did we tell the progress of our lives in the past?

All the Knowledge in the World is a history and celebration of those who created the most ground-breaking and remarkable publishing phenomenon of any age. Simon Garfield, who “has a genius for being sparked to life by esoteric enthusiasm and charming readers with his delight” (The Times), guides us on an utterly delightful journey, from Ancient Greece to Wikipedia, from modest single-volumes to the 11,000-volume Chinese manuscript that was too big to print. He looks at how Encyclopedia Britannica came to dominate the industry, how it spawned hundreds of competitors, and how an army of ingenious door-to-door salesmen sold their wares to guilt-ridden parents. He reveals how encyclopedias have reflected our changing attitudes towards sexuality, race, and technology, and exposes how these ultimate bastions of trust were often riddled with errors and prejudice.

With his characteristic ability to tackle the broadest of subjects in an illuminating and highly entertaining way, Simon Garfield uncovers a fascinating and important part of our shared past and wonders whether the promise of complete knowledge—that most human of ambitions—will forever be beyond our grasp.

Publishers are trying to sell books. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Fortunately, Garfield delivers. He admits that it’s a potted history of the encylcopedia (or encyclopaedia, to many), but the work is thoughtful, readable, informative, and witty. Borges gets his due, among other things. Plus, there are welcome detours into Monty Python and The Two Ronnies, both of whom made much of the legends of encyclopedia salesmen. For anyone interested in rounding out their knowledge of knowledge, this is highly recommended.

Next on my list, and not coincidentally in light of that review: Jimmy Wales [founder of Wikipedia], ”The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last” (Penguin Random House, 2025).

Thanks for sticking with me.