professional sport, what could be more necessary than a rule preventing one person or http://www.officialcardinalsbaseball.com/authentic-21-brandon-moss-jersey.html organisation from owning two teams? The potential conflicts of interest are obvious. One team could be used to help the other by, for instance, rolling over when they met at a crucial point in the battle for a championship, or by obstructing a third party in order to favour a stablemate. Formula One used to have a rule like that, but it was a distant memory by the time Dietrich Mateschitz came along. The man who bought the recipe for a caffeine-based drink from a Thai businessman and relaunched it in 1987 as Red Bull was already a multibillionaire by the time he decided to add a second F1 team to the one he had launched in 2005. That first team, built on the shaky foundations of the unsuccessful Jaguar team, was immediately renamed after the drink. When he bought the struggling Minardi team a year later, he rechristened it Toro Rosso – Italian for Red Bull, of course – and set it up as a kind of finishing school for young drivers working their way through the Red Bull junior scheme, giving him a source of talent for the top team. (We need only to mention the names of Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen to see how successful that strategy has been.) Leipzig before Red Bull: a city that can claim to be the home of German football Read more The contrast between Carlos Martinez Youth Jersey Mateschitz’s wealth – according to Forbes magazine, he is worth $16bn – and the diminishing number of people or companies willing to fund F1 teams perhaps explains why the sport was happy to let him get on with it. It was grateful that the Austrian wanted to spend his money with it and not on one of the many other sports which he uses as branches of his marketing operationBoth clubs, Salzburg and Leipzig, had not only their names but their colours changed to fit the Red Bull branding. Each plays in a stadium named the Red Bull Arena. But, to get around German league rules prohibiting the use of sponsors’ names in club titles, the club insisted that the “RB” stood not for Red Bull but for “RasenBallsport”: ball games on grass. Even a Uefa committee would not fall for that. Real Madrid reach Champions League final despite defeat by Atlético Read more The European governing body’s rules state that where two clubs in common ownership qualify for the same competition, the one finishing lower in its league must stand down – in this case meaning Leipzig. If push comes to shove and http://www.authenticmilwaukeebrewers.com/Ryan-Braun-Jersey Mateschitz’s lawyers cannot prevail against a Uefa ruling, it will be interesting to see whether he is inclined to favour the club of his home country, which has not managed to make it to the group stage of the Champions League for the past five seasons, or the project in Germany, which may have higher and more credible ambitions. The German football association has already forced RB Leipzig to modify a club badge deemed too close to the drinks company’s branding. Funnily enough, the only group with an allegiance to the name RasenBallsport is a band of ultras who set themselves up in opposition to other fans who embrace the corporate identity. “Disruptive innovation” is a phrase that turns up in Red Bull’s own marketing literature and as with Coca-Cola and Levi’s jeans in the past, the company’s marketing is based on an appeal that incorporates an element of youthful rebellion against the disciplines of the straight world. Whether the rules of a major international sporting competition are built to withstand the power of disruptive innovation, backed by a Scooter Gennett Youth Jersey virtually bottomless bank account, remains to be seen
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