The World Cup Draw

Well, if you read my last post and you followed the draw, you know that I think the USA got one the best possible draws -- as good as we could have reasonably expected. Overall, however, it was kind of a predictable draw, with few surprises and few really compelling story-lines in the group stage.

The USA's Group C is comprised of England, Algeria and Slovenia. England are a very strong side, but they have exploitable weaknesses at striker (other than Rooney, they are looking at the lumbering Heskey, the unpredictable Crouch or the untested Defoe) and certainly at goalkeeper (vis. "Calamity James"). And, England always struggle outside, well, England, but certainly outside Europe. They haven't made it past the World Cup quarter-finals in two decades.

Second and third match opponents Algeria and Slovenia are, at least by FIFA rankings, among the weaker teams in the tournament. Not that the US team couldn't blow it against either of them -- you'll hear a million times between now and June that there are no weak teams in the World Cup -- but believe me, Sunil Gulati and Bob Bradley were doing cartwheels in the aisles when they heard that we avoided both Ivory Coast/Ghana out of Africa, and France/Portugal out of Europe. And ESPN is going to market the fuck out of the England/USA opener, with Beckham and Donovan, the ghost of 1950, and the rise of the colonies to challenge the inventors of the beautiful game.

Mexico looked at first to have secured a dream draw in Group A against the pathetic hosts, South Africa. But Pot #3 produced the very good Uruguay, and Pot #4 cursed them with France. Heh. They still have a shot at advancing, but having to open against the hosts is never a great result. I think they could just squeak through, but I wouldn't be surprised if they finish last in the group.

Argentina, Holland, Italy and Spain received major gifts from the draw, particularly Italy. I'd be shocked if any of these four don't finish first in their respective groups. The English were feeling pretty good about their group, too, with only the game against the USA presenting a difficult match-up.

There isn't a clear Group of Death, but the best candidates are probably Group G with Brazil, Portugal, Ivory Coast and doormats North Korea; and Group D with Germany, Australia, Serbia and Ghana. You have to like Germany and Brazil to finish at least second in their respective group, but there could be some very big surprises. Mexico's Group A may not be Group of Death, but it's clearly a "Group of Grievous Injury."

World Cup Draw Preview

This Friday at 9:00am Pacific time, the iniquitous bureaucrats from FIFA, along with a handful of celebs and pols, will get together in Cape Town, South Africa for the once-every-four-years ritual known as the World Cup Draw.

This horrendously boring event, which can be cringe-inducing in its mock seriousness and cheese factor, involves grown men and women drawing 32 balls (representing the qualified teams) from 4 glass pots and placing them into eight groups. To punch it up, there are lots of speeches and terrible musical performances. Despite this, the draw, which is televised in 170 countries, is expected to be watched by almost 200 million human beings.

Why? Because the draw matters. Matters, at least, to the billion or so people who care about the sport of football and its ultimate tournament, the World Cup. The aspirations of teams and nations to footballing glory will hang, in some measure, on the result of the draw.

FIFA announced the seeding for the tournament today and produced a first surprise: they abandoned the tradition of seeding based on performance in the last two World Cups and went with FIFA rankings as of October 2009. On this basis, France were excluded from one of the top seedings (which prevent the best teams from eliminating each other in the first round); while Holland moved into France's spot.

The #1 seeds will be spread out across the 8 groups, and include hosts South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, England, Holland, Germany, Italy, and Spain. No arguments there. Excluding France was extremely fair, given their poor form of late (and the taint of their qualification over Ireland on Thierry Henry's handball). It was equally fair for them to elevate Holland, who have been on a tear and are FIFA ranked 3rd in the world.

The other major decision FIFA made was to put the North American teams in Pot #2 with the relatively weak Asia/Oceania teams, rather than with the unseeded but stronger South American or African teams, who went into Pot #3. This was clearly done to enhance the likelihood of African teams making the elimination rounds, but makes it much more difficult for the USA and Mexico, who would have had a high probability of drawing South Africa, the weakest seeded team by far, in the group stage.

From the USA perspective, the best case would be: 1. South Africa (or England, who always suck outside Europe); 3. Paraguay (or Algeria, if #1 is England); and 4. Slovakia or Slovenia. The worst case would be 1. Brazil or Spain; 3. Ivory Coast or Chile; and 4. France or Portugal.

And then there is the proverbial "Group of Death." Every World Cup has one, or at least a debate about which of the several tough groups truly constitutes this cup's Group of Death. The GoD refers to a group in which at least three strong teams are drawn together, meaning that one pre-tournament contender gets sent packing before the elimination round. There's a chance for a Brazil, Mexico, Ivory Coast, Portugal group, or a Spain, USA, Cameroon, France group.

When the dust settles, and we've endured Sepp Blatter, and Charlize Theron, and David Beckham, the freaking Soweto Gospel Choir, Johnny Clegg, et al., at least we'll have a tournament.

Confederations Cup Final

The heartbreaking Confederations Cup final, in which the tenacious but ultimately over-matched USA team went down 3-2 in the 84th minute to a fantastic Brazil side, made me realize that America has actually become a footballing nation. The collective anguish of hardcore football fans and bandwagoneers alike put us in an elite group of disappointed bridesmaid nations who get close but fail to lift silverware: the Portuguese of Figo's golden generation; the Spaniards who, prior to Euro 2008, were legendary big-game choke artists; and, frankly, the English, who've consistently underachieved on the big stage since 1966. Great.

We also join that short list of "teams who lost to Brazil in a final": Argentina (4-1) and Australia (6-0) in the Confederations Cup; Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Italy (twice) in the World Cup.

What a match -- and what a great advertisement for international football and next year's World Cup. The USA came to play, and after absorbing a few minutes of pressure, found some space on the right wing for Specter to launch a Beckham-worthy cross into the box, which Dempsey nudged into the net at the far post. It was a perfect start for the USA, up 1-0 after ten minutes. Fifteen minutes later, again under a lot of Brazilian pressure, Ricardo Clark pounced on a lazy pass around the American eighteen yard box and played an incredible through ball to a breaking Donovan, who played an equally perfect ball to Davies on the left, got it back and calmly beat the last defender and then the keeper for 2-0. And that was the halftime score.

The USA succeeded with a high-energy attack and aggressive defending. Again, they completely conceded the right wing to Maicon, as they did with Sergio Ramos in the Spain match, but that spacing hurt them much worse in this match. Fabiano's first goal was a great turn from a combination on the wide-open right side just 46 seconds into the second half. That Brazil goal, scored so quickly after a halftime where Bradley surely told his team to hang on for as long as possible, pulled the thread that unravelled the USA's dream start.

Specter actually did a decent job in the first half controlling Robinho, but in the second half Dunga made some tactical changes on the left, where Kaka abused Specter to create the second goal. By the 75th minute, the USA looked completely wiped and Kaka was rampant. Lucio won it with his late header, but Brazil had a half-dozen other opportunities turned away, and Kaka probably scored a goal that was not allowed, as well.

Brazil's comeback was both predictable and excruciating. It wasn't total dominance -- the USA had some good chances in the second half, including two nice strikes by Donovan and Dempsey around the 65th minute, two good but fruitless runs by Davies, and a couple of decent set pieces. But Bradley's second half plan was lame. He was slow to react to Dunga's changes, he made poor substitutions that were poorly timed, and he relied too much on deep defending and goalkeeping. His luck ran out.

The top USA players -- Howard, Dempsey, Donovan, Onyewu -- proved that they are legitimate international talents. The FIFA technical team named Dempsey the 3rd best player in the tournament, and Howard won the best keeper honors. On the other hand, DeMeritt, Bocanegra and Specter looked ordinary in the final. Altidore was utterly missing in action. Davies showed his inexperience. There was no depth in the squad, particularly with Bradley junior out of the final on a red card.

It's pathetic to point to the USA's brave and skillful performance in the final and say they won the first half, and won honor by improving from the previous 3-0 humiliation at Brazil's hands in the group stage. As Donovan aptly put it post-match, the USA doesn't need respect, they need to win big games when they get the chance.

It's equally pathetic to chalk a collapse in a winnable final up to experience, but I can't help but think that this was great learning for the team and coach. Four out of five matches against teams ranked in the FIFA top 5 (Italy, Spain, and Brazil twice), the fifth against the African champions in Africa. Including World Cup qualifiers, they had to play 7 matches in 25 days. If they can go to the nightmare of Azteca Stadium in August and get a draw or win against Mexico on the road, we'll see if this was truly transformative.

The good news is that the USA has a lot to build on. They were the youngest team in the Confederations Cup, with an average age of just 25.

The other good news is that we are certainly in for some great entertainment in next year's World Cup. The European powerhouses will be vulnerable, because they always struggle outside Europe (as we saw with Spain and Italy in this tournament). The Egypt and Spain wins, and the positive performance in the final against Brazil, will put the USA in good standing with FIFA for the all-important World Cup draw in December. Our crap seeding in 2006 got us drawn into a death group with Italy, the Czech Republic and an excellent Ghana. In 1998 we got Germany, Yugoslavia and Iran. We need a seeding where we are not the 3rd or 4th best team in the group.

USA in Confederations Cup Final

There's absolutely no way to make rational sense of it. The US men's national football team, who looked so pathetic and shambolic in their first two matches of the FIFA Confederations Cup, will play the final Sunday against either Brazil or South Africa after handily defeating Spain in the semi, 2-0. Spain, as in the Euro 2008 champions, FIFA's #1 ranked team in the world.

For those unfamiliar, the Confederations Cup brings together the national teams that win each of the six FIFA regional championships (Spain for Europe, USA for N. America, Brazil for S. America, Egypt for Africa, Iraq for Asia and New Zealand for Oceana) plus the defending World Cup champion (Italy) and the host of the next World Cup (South Africa). With the exception of Iraq and New Zealand, those are all good teams.

The Confederations Cup is clearly not the World Cup; it's more like a super-charged friendly tournament, and primarily functions as a tune up for next year's World Cup. Teams get to play in the same stadiums, stay in the same hotels, deal with the travel. So all the participating countries bring their best players, to get them accustomed to the conditions they will experience next June in the big show.

The USA was drawn into the group of death, with Italy, Brazil, and a very good Egypt team. Meanwhile, Spain got an easy draw, with an lucky-to-be-there Iraq, a New Zealand team that probably won't make the World Cup, and the mediocre host South Africans. Spain predictably cruised through the group stage, winning all three matches by a combined 8-0.

The group of death lived up to its name. The USA played Italy pretty close for 45 minutes, but struggling for 65 minutes with 10 men after a harsh red card ultimately wore them down and they gave up 3 late goals, losing 3-1. Meanwhile, Brazil only barely edged Egypt 4-3 on a questionable late call. In the next round, Brazil obliterated the USA 3-0. As my friend Ben Jones wrote me, "They look like boys amongst men." But in the other match, a tough Egypt scratched out a clutch 1-0 win over Italy, which set the stage for the insane third round in the groups.

The USA started the day dead last in the group, with zero points, a single goal for, and a -5 goal difference. They needed a 7 goal difference reversal vis-a-vis Italy and a win over Egypt, or a 6 goal reversal and more goals scored than Italy. I don't know what the betting odds were in London for that result, but it had to be 1,000-1. Yet that's precisely what happened.

The USA looked inspired against a fatigued Egypt, winning 3-0. And Brazil improbably defeated Italy by the same score. It was a nail-biter through injury time in both matches, as a consolation goal by either Italy or Egypt would have sent the USA packing. But the results held and the USA went through to the semi's. To face Spain. By any argument, the best team in the world at the moment.

And so, when the USA took the field today for the national anthems, you could have excused them for feeling more than a little lucky to be on the field, and looking only for a little experience against a great opponent before settling for certain defeat and the consolation game against South Africa. After all, a Brazil-Spain final seemed inevitable given the USA's earlier run of form.

Much to everyone's surprise, it turned out to be a fabulous game. The USA came out with confidence and really pressured the Spaniards in the first ten minutes. Davies had a bicycle kick off a Dempsey cross go wide left, and then Dempsey himself went just wide a few minutes later. The USA gave Spanish defender Sergio Ramos a ton of space to run up the Spanish right wing, and when he did so, the American's used their pace to counter-attack, often catching Spain with only three defenders.

Spain had chances, but the USA back four of Specter, DeMerit, Onyewu and Bocanegra, where huge. In the 27th minute, and not really against the run of play, Dempsey chipped a clever ball from the left wing to Altidore at the top of the box, who muscled an over-committed Capdevila, turned, and fired a rocket off the hand of Casillas, which deflected in off the post for 1-0.

The last 15 minutes of the first half and the first 15 minutes of the second were all Spain. The USA back four did what they could, but it came down to a heroic effort by Tim Howard, the USA keeper, who had, by my count, 6 great saves during that spell. Then, with about 20 minutes to go, the USA got a few good minutes of possession, and put a nice little sequence together when Feilhaber made a skillful run at the Spanish defense, played a nice ball out to Donovan on the right wing, who sent a dangerous cross square across the box. Sergio Ramos thought he had time for a touch before clearing the ball, but Dempsey pounced on his error and curled a low shot past Casillas for 2-0. Bradley got sent off on an idiotic straight red card a few minutes from time, but the 10-man USA held on for a famous win.

Why did Spain lose? For one, they simply had a bad day. They just didn't play up to their Euro 2008 potential, and were particularly weak passing in the attacking half of midfield, where they are generally so dominant. Part of it was the lack of quality of their group stage opponents, too. While the USA had a trial by fire against the likes of Brazil and Italy, Spain had no world-class teams to deal with during their group stage, so they were a bit rusty.

But credit the USA -- they really gutted it out and, as I said, had a great tactical plan. Old-fashioned American hustle. Played tenacious defense, got big-game goalkeeping (always an American characteristic), and took their chances despite being out-shot 29-9. The USA had only two shots on goal, and finished them both.

It was a thrilling match for fans of USA football. Can the USA win the whole enchilada? After this game, who can say?

Thoughts on the American Idol Finale

In many ways, this year's finale was an odd repeat of last year's: the earnest heartland guy overcomes the splashy stage kid for the crown. Last year it was Cook over Archuleta; this year it was Allen over Lambert.

Lambert was a much stronger competitor than the lightweight Archuleta, and would have made a worthy winner this year. He was made for television -- his histrionic goth/vampire vibe, his faux sincere mugging at the judges' constant praise, his risky interpretations and his vocal pyrotechnics were ratings gold for Fox. In a lot of ways, his theatricality was more reminiscent of David Cook, who has proved to be a mediocre recording artist now that he's standing on his own. Lambert was not my favorite -- I thought he always over-sang his songs. I think people who thought he was robbed of the title need to listen to him without looking at him.

A lot will probably be made of "America not being ready for a gay American Idol." I think that's mostly nonsense. Lambert's sexuality was never an issue in the competition (no more than Allen's background as a worship-leading neo-Christian). On TV, he read more glam than gay, and I think he suffered in a zeitgeist that doesn't value glam as much as authenticity. In a different America (a time of Bowie, or Boy George), he might have won hands down.

Allen can certainly sing. He is not nearly the "star" that Lambert imagines himself to be, but he plugged away all season and rarely missed the mark by much. I thought the pairing with Keith Urban during the finale was genius; Allen held his own, vocally, and you could imagine a crossover niche he could fill in the music industry after that performance. He was much less well-served by the horrible theme song "No Boundaries" penned by the relentlessly annoying new judge, Kara DioGuardi.

The finale also demonstrated that the best two contestants were in the final. In performance after performance, the eliminated contestants showed their limitations. The three numbers featuring the finalists -- Allen with Urban, Lambert with KISS, and Allen & Lambert with Brian May of Queen -- were the highlights of the evening.

As an entertainment franchise, Idol is a juggernaut. The steady string of industry talent on stage this season (Kanye, Flo Rida, Miley Cyrus, Slash, not to mention the parade of B-listers in the finale) is testament to the self-reinforcing nature of Idol. Fox & Freemantle aggregate huge audiences, the sponsors (Coke, Ford, etc.) drool over the kind of reach that no longer exists in network television, the industry talent lends legitimacy to the contestants, and that talent is motivated to show up by the potential of performing to the huge TV audiences. It's a perfect marketing virtuous circle.

Idol's ability to generate stars is somewhat less certain. In terms of sales, only two of the show's seven winners have generated any real heat: Season One winner Kelly Clarkson in pop and Season Four winner Carrie Underwood in country. Two other contestants have had great careers launched by the show: Jennifer Hudson, who won an Oscar for Dreamgirls; and the amazing Chris Daughtry, the North Carolina auto mechanic whose post-Idol record became the fastest selling rock debut in history. Oh, and Clay Aiken, whatever you want to make of him.

I am a sucker for reality TV that dramatizes creative people at work (i.e., Project Runway, Top Chef). Idol has clearly gotten a bit ponderous and self-reflexive lately, and it takes itself oh so seriously. But at its core, it's about talent and performance and character cast up in the tense high-wire act of live TV and popular voting. I don't see our appetite for that kind of entertainment going completely away any time soon.

A Costly Price War

I've talked quite a bit in the past about the turning point that the year 2004 represented in the video game business. To recap, in that year the internet revolution finally rocked the game business to its core, with electronic distribution and new business models reaching mainstream acceptance. Between the release of World of Warcraft, the launch of Half Life 2 through Steam, the Shanda, TenCent and JAMDAT IPOs, and several other events, 2004 was a watershed year for the industry. I've argued that the nature of value creation in the video game business, traditionally grounded on intellectual property ownership and retail distribution, was forever disrupted.

But something else of great importance happened in 2004 that often gets overlooked in critical reviews of the business. It was much more subtle and easy to miss -- a publisher launched a super high quality product and offered it for sale at a very low price. This relatively small act of busting the pricing cartel and using QPR (quality/price ratio) as a competitive weapon had profound implications for one of the industry's great companies.

The game was Sega/Take-Two's ESPN NFL 2K5. This American football simulation, developed by Visual Concepts, was first launched on the Sega Dreamcast in 1999. It was considered innovative, but hampered by it's exclusive association with Sega's poorly-accepted hardware platform. In 2001, the franchise went multi-platform, and in 2003 added the ESPN branding to its NFL license. Sega aimed the product directly at one of the most popular and successful video games of all time, EA Sports John Madden NFL Football, with limited results. In 2003, Madden outsold 2K4 over 10-to-1.

In 2004, Sega agreed to co-publish 2K5 with Take-Two. The companies, faced with a daunting entrenched competitor but possessing a high quality product, took an innovative approach: they offered the game at retail for $19.99, less than half the price of Madden. And they sold boatloads. They went from less than 10% unit share of the football category, to well over 30%, and expanded the overall market.

The success of the 2K5 strategy provoked an extremely aggressive response from EA. By the end of December 2004, EA announced a five year exclusive licensing arrangement with the NFL and the NFL Players' Association. By the end of January 2005, they added a 15 year deal with ESPN, effectively stripping the 2K franchise of its branding (and most of it's legitimacy as a football simulation).

But EA accomplished this at tremendous cost. At the time of the deal, there was speculation that EA paid in excess of $300MM for these rights. Let's do some math. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that number is correct. It creates a royalty burden of $60MM per year for each of the five years of the deal, that must be amortized across units sold. Assuming 5 million units sold at $35 wholesale (it's likely more units at a blended lower wholesale), that's a royalty burden of $12 per unit, or over 33%. Based on my direct experience as an NFL/NBA/MLB licensee at JAMDAT, that's almost twice what we paid for non-exclusive rights to the league and players' association in a typical deal.

Play that out a little further. That's over $25MM annually that would have dropped to EA's bottom line, or around 8 cents per share. Just to give you a little perspective, EA earned 75 cents per share in fiscal '06 and 24 cents per share in '07. They lost $1.45 per share in fiscal '08.

EA accomplished their goal of eliminating the 2K series as a competitive threat (in fact, they eliminated it as a product altogether), but at tremendous cost to profitability from one their most reliable profit contributors, Madden. At the time, the analysts lined up to praise the deal, assuming that EA knew what it was doing and that they could grow the football market to accommodate the increased royalties. But I wonder how many of them would think it was anything other than a Pyrrhic victory now.

Strat Planning

Following up on my post about OODA, I thought I'd expand a little on the reason for strategic planning and some specific methods I've used in the past to facilitate planning.

One of the important lessons that Colonel Boyd derived from his study of military history was the importance of decentralized decision-making and field-level initiative. As the military has applied Boyd's concepts on the modern battlefield, this lesson has been further reinforced. Quoting from the Boyd Wikipedia entry:

"... [T]he most effective organizations have a highly decentralized chain of command that utilizes objective-driven orders, or directive control, rather than method-driven orders in order to harness the mental capacity and creative abilities of individual commanders at each level."

This only works if you have (1) creative, intelligent commanders (or managers in business); and (2) a strategic framework that establishes common objectives and helps establish a context for orientation, the second "O" in OODA. This orientation context is vitally important -- I like to call it a "shared hallucination" of the company's place and purpose. Managers need the flexibility to make quick decisions, but unless those decisions are consistent with the overall strategy of the organization, the results can be haphazard and uncoordinated.

Clear, simple articulation of corporate strategy is crucial. I have primarily used two tools to help me do this: a recursive goal-objective-strategy-metrics approach to writing the annual plan, and a threat map.

In my recursive goal-objective-strategy-metrics approach, the CEO establishes the top-level plan. This plan is comprised of a single, overall goal for the company (a thing to be accomplished, not a mission statement), some key objectives that support the goal, the strategies necessary to achieve the goal and satisfy the objectives, and some metrics by which success can be measured. This top-level plan should fit on a single page.

The recursive aspect of this approach is that each of the strategies from this top-level plan becomes a goal for the next level plan. So if one of the top-level strategies is "Finish the product before Christmas," the VP of production gets this as her goal and will develop objectives, strategies and metrics to reach it. This can get pushed down even further into the organization, so departmental managers get an annual goal and articulate their objectives, strategies and metrics.

The beauty of this approach is that it rolls perfectly back up into the master plan. If you want to know why the art department is outsourcing to China, for example, you can see that it satisfies their goal of delivering all art assets in September for $1MM, which serves the higher goal of shipping for Christmas on budget, which serves the top-level objective of reaching cash flow break-even by the end of Q1. And if one of the lower-level strategies fails, if China outsourcing can't deliver by September, you can change it to something else consistent with the overall goal. And that change propagates up and down the chain.

In practice, I only used this tool at the top-level and one level down, as a way to coordinate strategy at the VP level. But it worked to keep everyone on the same page. Actually, the process of writing and critiquing the plan as a team was more important than the resulting document, because the process surfaced tensions, fostered debate, and led to a better plan.

The other strategic planning tool I really like is the threat map. The way I create a threat map is to put my business in the center of a series of three concentric circles. The first circle closest to the center represents the immediate, near-term competitive threats, the next circle represents the medium-term threats that might arise in certain circumstances, and the outer circle represents the long-term threats.

Radiating out from the center I draw several axes, representing the things that will make the company successful (or its key vulnerabilities). I then place the competitive companies and market trends on the map, in the temporal bands, near the axis along which they are attacking my company. In addition to clarifying competitive threats, this was actually a great way to see opportunities, set priorities, and think about candidates for alliance, business development, and acquisition.

For example, in the case of JAMDAT, we had three axes: intellectual property, distribution, and game quality/innovation. On our map, we identified EA early on as a medium-term threat to us via intellectual property, so we sought to license the most dangerous of their properties from them, effectively neutralizing their threat and co-opting their advantage against us for several years.

Another example: we identified content aggregators as threats to our direct distribution relationships with carriers. In response, we carefully avoided using them as an alternative to the lengthy carrier sales process, even at the cost of immediate and incremental revenue, so we wouldn't inadvertently strengthen the aggregators' collective market position against us. This is a perfect application of strategy to value creation; the default response of the sales team would have been to simply maximize revenue, but that would have diminished our long-term competitive advantage.

Ultimately, the threat map and the annual plan are just tools. Without intelligence, creative thinking, and decisiveness in execution, the best laid plans are worthless. These tools can help direct a good team, but they can just as easily reveal weak organizational design and bad hires. Caveat emptor.

Champions League Quarter-Finals

The UEFA Champions League semi-finals are set: Man. United v. Arsenal and Barcelona v. Chelsea. The winners will play the final in Rome on May 27th. There's a chance we will see a rematch of last year's Chelsea-ManU final, although I don't think that's the way it's going to go down. This is no symbolic tournament about national honor -- this year's winner could take home nearly $60MM in prize and TV money.

Once again, there are three English Premiership sides in the final four. It's the third year in a row that we have a chance for an all-England final -- Sepp Blatter's head must be exploding. Not only does it reinforce Blatter's rants about the excessive strength of the Premiership, but it also increases the English clubs' claims on the $300MM in Champions League TV revenue, giving these top clubs an even larger war-chest with which to acquire the foreign players that Blatter has been trying to limit.

There was some great drama in the quarter-finals, at least in two of the ties. In the two that weren't particularly competitive, Arsenal dismantled Villareal 4-1 on aggregate, and Barcelona absolutely shelled Bayern Munich 5-1 on aggregate. Barcelona's 4-0 win at home was particularly eye-opening; they dominated Bayern so completely, and looked so dangerous in attack, that match could have been 8-0.

The Man. United-Porto tie was surprisingly competitive. Porto came to Old Trafford and toughed out a 2-2 draw, grabbing two crucial away goals. That put United in position to have to win on the road in Portugal. Which they did, but only 0-1 on an early goal from Christiano Ronaldo. If Porto had managed a late goal and a 1-1 draw, the Portuguese side would have gone through on away goals.

But the most enjoyable tie was certainly Chelsea-Liverpool. Chelsea was on the road in the first match and punked Liverpool 1-3, setting a seemingly impossible bar with three away goals. Liverpool had to win 0-3 on the road to win the tie. They opened the match at Stamford Bridge with two first-half goals and Chelsea was clearly sweating bullets down 0-2 at the break. Chelsea roared back in the second half and went in front 3-2 with 10 minutes to go. But then Liverpool scored twice, making it 3-4, pulling to within a goal on aggregate, and, with 4 away goals, seizing the tie-breaker advantage. It was down to the wire until Lampard scored in the last minute to clinch it for Chelsea, 4-4, 7-5 on aggregate. Classic.

Predictions? I think Arsenal can beat United (they beat them 2-1 in their league match back in November), but I just don't think it's in the cards this year. I pick United to go through to the final again by a slim margin on aggregate. Barcelona v. Chelsea will be highly competitive, but this year the Spaniards are just too strong to bet against. They've scored 87 goals in 30 matches in La Liga, an average of almost 3 per match, and have an astonishing +63 goal differential. They are just humiliating teams this year. I think they go all the way.

Disrupting the OODA Loop

I got a lot of re-tweets over the weekend regarding a blog post by Kas Thomas on "The Principle of the Last Responsible Moment." Thomas' post has mostly to do with project planning and the fallacy of the complete specification. But the actual principle he's talking about is a military tactic which is oriented toward threats, or in the realm of business, competition.

I've always been a big believer in strategy, but I'm an equally big believer in execution. They are the yin and yang of business competition; execution limiting and informing strategy, strategy creating the pathway for execution. I've always thought it absurd when somebody describes a business as being either a "strategic play" or an "execution play" -- business competition is inherently always both.

The military has been dealing with the problem of strategy vs. execution for a long time. Everyone has heard the truism that "no plan survives contact with the enemy," but the military has a doctrine to deal with that fact, called "OODA" -- Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. OODA was first articulated by Air Force Colonel John Boyd, and it describes a continuous command and control feedback loop, in which unfolding circumstances inform changes in strategy and execution. It is to the military what agile development is to the software team.

To me, Boyd's key competitive insight is the idea of "tempo" -- the speed with which you can run your feedback loop compared to your enemy. The most profound disruption occurs when you can strategize and execute inside the decision-making window of your enemy. As Boyd wrote about aerial combat:

"Time is the dominant parameter. The pilot who goes through the OODA cycle in the shortest time prevails because his opponent is caught responding to situations that have already changed."

This is a massively important idea. Getting your opponent to respond to your moves prevents them from seizing the initiative and surprising you. I've seen this play out in business many times. In traditional video games, long development cycles created numerous examples of teams that conceptualized new products and delivered them to market while their competitors were mired in delays, grabbing market share and reinforcing brand. We've all seen supposedly weaker technologies vanquish more established ones through rapid, directed innovation in response to market forces.

Time is of the essence. If we've learned anything from the media and technology revolutions of the last 30 years, it's that things happen a lot faster than everybody thinks.

GDC Recap

This week I spent a day at Dean Takahashi's GamesBeat conference (where I did a panel with some sharp investors from other venture firms) and two days at the Game Developer's Conference (including a solo session in the business track -- slides posted here). Didn't get a chance to see many GDC sessions, given all the meetings and presentations, but I was able to see a couple, and walk the floor and check out what was on display at GDC. I also caught up with many old friends and colleagues over the course of my time there, and met with a number of entrepreneurs.

I went to my first GDC in 1993. Literally, the entire game developer community fit into a single banquet hall in San Jose that year. The next year, the "old timers" (Chris Crawford, Ernest Adams, etc.) were both lamenting and celebrating the explosion of newbies. They asked for a show of hands at dinner in '94, which indicated that about half the attendees were at their first GDC. Fifteen years later, with the demise of E3, GDC is now the pre-eminent show on the domestic calendar. This year's GDC was certainly as well-attended as any show I can remember.

What's great about GDC is that despite the huge surge in attendance, it still feels like a "gathering of the tribe" and the speakers are still remarkably forthcoming and candid about their craft -- you rarely feel like you are sitting through a sales pitch when you attend a technical session. I always learn more at GDC than any other conference.

There were a couple of big trends in evidence that I think are worth mentioning:

1) Digital Distribution: between the massively-hyped OnLive launch, the Qualcomm-backed Zeebo, the large number of MMO's and casual game plays, the frothy (and mostly misplaced and uninformed) attention given to iPhone/iPod Touch, and the frequent lamentations about long development times and huge budgets for traditional console and PC games, digital distribution was clearly the trend of the show. It seems to me that the old-line publishers are way out of position on this one. I predict that you'll see a strange detente between retail and traditional publishers (maybe a trade-off on used games vs. digital distribution) as they circle the drain together.

2) Virtual Goods: with advertising on an apparent decline as a way to monetize free games, a worry about how many online subscriptions an average user is willing to take on, and a yawning gap between the retail price points and free-to-play ARPU, virtual goods has emerged as the "white knight" business model for games. Easier said than done. I heard that Don Choi from OGPlanet gave a great presentation on the actual mechanics of virtual goods, but I sadly missed it (Don worked for me as a business development executive at JAMDAT before returning to Korea -- he's a very smart guy).

3) The Economy: not what you'd think. It was really the profound lack of visible concern about the economic melt-down that was so startling. Attendance was up. The "job fare" aspect of GDC seemed to be in full swing. Certainly the venture appetite for games is not what it was two years ago, but I got the distinct vibe that the industry expected to make it through the down-turn, with most job losses hitting the big publishers rather than the indy/next-gen developers.

4) Hardware Transition: again, significant by its general absence from the discussion. We're 4 years into this cycle, and historically at this point we would have been obsessing about Xbox vs. PlayStation vs. Wii, speculating about hardware and who was getting early access to dev kits, etc. I heard none of that. I saw a lot more MMO-enabling technology than console-enabling ones. It begs the question whether there will actually be a transition in the traditional sense. With the X360 and PS3 already moving well in the direction of being living room set-top boxes and home media hubs (with music, online services, Netflix, etc.), could we possibly see a disc-less PS4 from Sony?

Powerball vs. Moneyball

My friend Rick Heitzmann sent me a blog post by Stephen DiMarco from Online Metrics Insider titled Powerball vs. Moneyball Marketing. It is interesting reading. DiMarco's point is that there are two approaches to marketing: the Powerball approach, which is a high risk/high return, "swing for the fences" strategy; and the Moneyball approach, which (hat tip to Michael Lewis) is a metrics and measurement-driven strategy designed to "engineer outcomes."

I'm no marketer, so I can't really comment on DiMarco's post from that perspective, but I think his analogy is broadly applicable to the current state of the video game business. The packaged goods publishers are playing a lot of Powerball -- buying lottery tickets for new IP, spending horrendous sums of money up front with very little understanding or measurement of audience dynamics, and hoping for home run outcomes. The fact that every so often a new game becomes a monster success keeps everybody buying lottery tickets.

Conversely, the approach that companies like MiniClip, or some of the social network-based publishers are taking looks a lot like DiMarco's Moneyball strategy. I'd be willing to bet that MiniClip knows exactly the amount of traffic they can drive to a game featured on their home page, and structures their economics accordingly.

We once had a meeting with some senior executives from a well-known video game publisher when we were running JAMDAT. The head of studios for that publisher finished getting demos of our best-selling products and famously said, "A monkey could make these games." What he was responding to was the lack of whiz-bang 3D graphics, the lack of fanboy, nerd-core "innovation". He was used to playing Powerball. We, on the other hand, were playing Moneyball. We knew from studying our customer data that our audience didn't care a rat's ass about the kinds of things that Gamasutra editors cared about. They wanted simplicity, accessibility, and value. So we made products to "engineer" that result. And we acquired IP that fit into that mold, like Tetris.

What Michael Lewis described the Oakland A's doing in Moneyball -- buying players who were undervalued by other clubs but who were overachievers in the metrics which actually produced results -- is really quite similar to the the ideas of customer acquisition leverage and audience measurement in the entertainment business. I think there's going to be a lot of value created exploiting this in the future.

Why the Lahore Cricket Attack Matters

In Lahore, Pakistan, a group of up to a dozen terrorists brazenly ambushed two minivans carrying the Sri Lankan national cricket team and officials, killing 7 police and civilians, and injuring 9 of the cricketers.

Just another sad and pathetic day for Pakistan, fast becoming the Somalia of South Asia? A blow to Pakistan's government, which -- after the destruction of the Islamabad Marriott, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the Mumbai attack fiasco -- appears to have no control over the security situation inside its country? All certainly true, but I think, ironically, this incident is potentially more profound in its regional implications.

The government of Pakistan has recently embarked on a new strategy for dealing with its internal security issues. After failing to defeat the Islamic militants in combat over the last year or two (despite inflicting mass casualties on the Talibs in Bajaur and elsewhere), and after failing to root out the Islamist sympathizers in their internal security services, Pakistan has started a campaign of appeasement, including several cease-fires and an agreement to allow the propagation of Islamic sharia law in the Swat Valley. The theory seems to be to grant autonomy and an Islamic identity to these loosely-governed regions in exchange for peace in the rest of Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to assassinate Taliban and al Qaeda leadership inside Pakistan, with 4 CIA drone missile attacks killing 90 people since the new president took office. These attacks have been brutally effective but wildly unpopular inside Pakistan; viewed there as both a provocation of the enemy and an infringement of Pakistani sovereignty.

And, now, the Lahore attacks. This is not like Mumbai (an attack on an old enemy), or the Marriott (an attack on a symbol of American influence), or Bhutto (an attack on a controversial politician) but rather an attack on what is probably an institution second only to Islam in Pakistani esteem: cricket. If you think I'm exaggerating, you've never been to South Asia during a test match. I was in Mumbai and Delhi a couple of years ago when the Indian national team was visiting Pakistan for a series of one day internationals, and these huge cities were literally shut down during the matches. I was trying to get a deal done, and my Indian counterpart was getting a text message from his wife after every couple of balls were bowled. After India won, there was rioting in the streets of Mumbai.

The ICC (the FIFA of cricket) has already questioned whether Pakistan can participate in the 2011 World Cup as a host (they were going to co-host with India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh). No team is going to go to Pakistan to play, and it's equally unlikely that the Pakistan team is going to be welcomed abroad.

I think this could be the tipping point for the moderate majority in Pakistan. Up until now, I think you could be a moderate, worldly Pakistani and still be an apologist for Islamist terror. There is widespread popular support for the Taliban as freedom fighters in Pakistan, widespread hatred for the US and India, and the usual Islamic tendency to blame a long string of political, social, and economic failures on outsiders.

But this is by all indications a home-grown attack, on a national institution that will serve to punish and humiliate average Pakistanis in an area, cricket, where they are reasonably competitive (World Cup winners in '92, runner's up in '99). This attack is indefensible to even to the Pakistani apologist. There is not going to be a solution to the Pak-Afghan terror crisis without the political support of the majority of Pakistanis. And if there is not a change in mindset after this attack, it's likely time to consider a more aggressive worldwide censure and isolation of Pakistan.

Riot Games Releases "League of Legends" Trailer

Very cool stuff.

Champion's League Restart

Tomorrow is the first match day of the UEFA Champion's League knock-out stage (live on ESPN2 @ 11:30am Pacific, with other matches rebroadcast on Setanta later in the day). There are sixteen elite teams left and some phenomenal ties. It's a great format: they play a two match home and away series, with the winner determined by aggregate goals and the tie-breaker being away goals. It is hard to produce a single fluke result and get through -- the quality teams tend to do well in this format because they are heavily rewarded if they can score goals on the road.

Among the great games tomorrow (and the one ESPN is televising here) is Inter-Milan vs. Manchester United, the current leaders of the Italian and English leagues, respectively. They are two of the best teams in, arguably, two of the most competitive leagues in Europe. Manchester United won the Champion's League last year, beating England rivals Chelsea in a shootout in Moscow. Inter is coached by last-year's Chelsea coach, Jose Mourinho, who got turfed by his Russian billionaire owner, Roman Abramovitch, in the middle of last season's Champion's League knockout stage.

On Wednesday, the marquee match is probably Real Madrid vs. Liverpool, the current second-place teams in Spain and England. Madrid won the Champion's League in '02, Liverpool won in '05. But ESPN is broadcasting Chelsea vs. Juventus, which should also be a great match. Chelsea is currently third in England and Juventus is second in Italy. There's managerial drama here, too: the Juventus coach is Claudio Ranieri, who used to coach Chelsea; Chelsea is coached by current Russian national team manager Guus Hiddink, who stepped in last week after Abramovitch fired Big Phil Scolari (detect a pattern here?).

Pinch Media on iPhone App Usage

Pinch Media released an awesome presentation about iPhone app usage. I haven't validated their data directly, but if it is accurate it has some very important implications for the companies who think they can make a business with free, ad supported apps.

Check it out:

Most of this is pretty well-known to entertainment and e-commerce people: the hit dynamics, the seasonality, the pricing strategies. But the sharp usage drop-offs suggest that for most apps -- not the highly used, sticky ones, but the vast majority of apps -- too few impressions are being generated to justify an ad model. The key slides are #23-#25.

Futbol Fans, Set Your Tivo's

This afternoon at 4:00pm Pacific time on ESPN is the first match of the CONCACAF World Cup Qualifying "hexagonal" -- U.S. v. Mexico. All the stars are back from Europe for this intense rivalry.

These teams absolutely despise each other. The Mexicans dominated the series from the 1930's until around 10 years ago. But in the last decade the US is 9-1-2 against them, the only two losses coming at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, one of the toughest road games in the world. The nine wins include the humiliating (for Mexicans) 2-0 result in the 2002 World Cup finals in Korea, which propelled the US to the quarter-finals.

In order to prevent the Mexicans from enjoying a large expat crowd, US Soccer is holding the match in Columbus, Ohio, where only 2% of the population is Hispanic. They reportedly sacrificed over $1MM in gate revenue to hold the match at the most unfriendly venue possible for the Mexicans -- cold weather, small (24K) but vocal pro-US crowd, no Mexican population.

Should be a great game. Lots of compelling story-lines, including whether the Mexico coach, Swede Sven Goran Ericsson, keeps his job. As a US player once said, "When you beat Mexico, you're smiling for a month."

What I Learned About Platforms From Working With Carriers

Almost two years ago, I predicted that the future of the internet may look more like mobile than vice versa.

I was referring specifically to the growing influence of platforms -- i.e., large traffic aggregation points with API's and/or application eco-systems. It seemed inevitable that these platforms would end up playing a similar role in the internet to the role of the carrier in mobile. That role is something of a double-edged sword for the smaller companies in the eco-system: on the one hand, a phenomenally efficient means of customer acquisition; but on the other, a powerful and potentially capricious master, who controls the flow of money, owns the customers, and can snuff your business out like a candle if need be.

The precipitating event for me back then was Myspace's power move on Photobucket, where the social network blocked the photo sharing site for violating terms of service relating to advertising. Myspace was probably a third of Photobucket's business at the time. Thirty days later, Photobucket was acquired by Myspace's parent, News Corp. That felt to me like the kind of thing a mobile carrier would do to a vendor. Show 'em who's the boss.

Since then, my prediction has largely come true. I was talking to the CEO of a company the other day who makes applications for a large social network, and I had an uncanny sense of deja vu. He was losing sleep over whether or not the social network would change its terms of service, alter the economics of customer acquisition, or choose an incompatible monetization strategy and effectively kill his business. I remember having those same fears when we were launching services on the US carriers in 2002-3.

So, what did we learn from being in this position and growing a valuable, public company under this Sword of Damocles?

• Brands Matter. First, when we were jockeying for position with our largely undifferentiated peer group in the early days, having recognizable and desirable brands under license really helped us. Having exclusive rights to branded content cemented our distribution -- while other companies were offering generic, easily replaceable card or puzzle games, or original intellectual properties that nobody had ever heard of, we brought Tiger Woods Golf (interestingly, it mattered way more to the carriers than to customers -- JAMDAT Bowling consistently outsold Tiger). Later, the power of our own publishing brand, which had become increasingly recognizable and synonymous with quality and value, gave us a similar kind of brand leverage to what MTV or HBO had vis a vis the cable companies. If you were launching a new games service, you had to have us in the mix.
  
• Grab Market Share. Immediately after the launch of BREW on Verizon, we had >70% market share of the games category. In the US broadly, by the end of 2005 when we sold the company, we had close to 30% market share (this is huge share; my rule of thumb in media businesses is that the winner in every category -- music, video games, TV, theatrical box office -- aggregates roughly 15-20% market share). By 2005, mobile games were no longer experimental; our partners at the carriers had P&L's and were being compensated on the basis of financial performance. Therefore, with our huge share it became harder for them to mess with us too much and their relationship with us became more symbiotic (the proverbial "win-win"). Had we been a <5% player, they could have eliminated us without significant consequence.
  
• Understand Their Strategic Needs. The carriers had their own businesses to run, of which we were a very small part. But the mobile games category fit into a larger story they were telling their shareholders about the future, and it was imperative for us to understand their strategy for mobile data broadly and help facilitate its execution. For example, they needed to be able to show that they could attract world-class content, so our investment in globally recognizable brands played into their strategy. We tried to help anticipate and solve their problems. We always tried to see ourselves from their perspective.
  
• Don't Be Piggy. Our peers constantly complained about the revenue splits that the carriers were taking (in our case, 20-40% of revenues). We watched those splits closely, and argued fiercely to maintain them, but we were always cognizant of what we were getting in return: relatively frictionless customer acquisition, billing and collection, the benefit of handset subsidies, etc. If we did the math realistically, the toll we paid to the carriers was a relative bargain. As many of the iPhone companies are soon going to find out, trying to run a nationwide marketing campaign -- even a viral one -- to attract people to your content is very, very costly. Our better carrier partners would embed demos of our games with a link to buy on tens of millions of handsets every year -- reach that would have cost us millions of dollars in marketing if we had to pay for it directly.
  
• Plan for End Times. We understood the fragility our our place in the eco-system. Even when we had 30% market share, 4 of the top 10 games, including the clear #1, Tetris, a highly profitable $120MM a year business, etc., we were paranoid. About everything. We constantly talked about threats to our business -- direct or indirect, internal or external or orthogonal. In fact, we had a "threat map" to help us visualize our paranoia. And in every area that mattered to our business -- content innovation, distribution, brands, business model -- we tried to develop defensibility and a fall back position in case of disaster. When you are not in control of the platform, you need a resilient business and a Plan B. The rug could be pulled out from under you at any time.

Fascinating Mint Stats

If you don't use Mint, the personal finance site (disclaimer: a Benchmark portfolio company), you should. It's a killer service. Mint provides a simple, powerful, web-based alternative to the bloat-ware that Quicken and Microsoft Money have become as a result of the "feature war" they commenced a decade ago. In this environment, where everybody is taking a second look at personal spending, Mint is a great tool for gaining insight into your finances and patterns of behavior.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer wrote a guest column for TechCrunch today, providing some recession stats derived from Mint's 900,000 users. It contains some really fascinating data from real people, a counterpoint to the data we're getting about the recession from politicians, TV talking heads, and bankers.

Aaron sees the data revealing a recession that's less dramatic than the "Great Depression 2.0" news reports would have us believe (i.e., 10% spending declines across the board). But it looked pretty bad to me. A couple of grim numbers for consumer companies:

• Entertainment spending down 22%
• Home (services, furnishings, etc.) down 21%
• Travel down 24%
• Cash savings cut in half
• Debt up 10%
  

The gas/fuel decline of 32% isn't as meaningful to me, because it's likely driven more by the decline in gas prices since August than by changes in consumer behavior.

The decline in cash savings -- from roughly $11,200 to $5,500 augurs a much more troubling first half of '09. That number suggests that consumers have been deficit spending to the tune of $700 per month since the recession hit. Once that cash cushion is effectively gone, we could see the current average spending declines of $400-500 per month drop to over $1,000, or closer to 25% across the board. Since expenses like rent, utilities, and food are less susceptible to cuts, that extra $500 or so of reduced spending is going to hit discretionary categories -- entertainment, shopping, travel, dining out.

Whither Open

PocketGamer reported today that Apple will create a "premium" area of the iPhone app store for games priced at $19.99, and will restrict distribution to a "number of large publishers, rather than the thousands of smaller developers currently selling their titles on the main App Store." The move is reportedly to help combat the race to the bottom that I wrote about last summer. To me, it suggests recognition by Apple that there is some benefit to a managed platform.

This is something that the console manufacturers learned after the tidal wave of bad content killed the market in the '80's, resulting in the famous "ET in a landfill" period of the video game business. Nintendo brought the market back with tight gatekeeping of 3rd party publishers and the quality of the content they distributed. Since then, the symbiosis of platform management and marketing combined with publisher quality and standardized economics, produced an order of magnitude greater business opportunity than the more "open" PC gaming platform.

There is an article of faith in the venture community that open eco-systems create more valuable companies, and the example of the internet certainly gives credit to that viewpoint. But, as I've said before, the App Store itself is the "killer app" for iPhone -- the 15,000 apps available on the App Store primarily benefit Apple, rather than any single publisher or developer. It is extremely difficult to build sufficient market share to create enterprise value for a company when there are 20 free, me-too products in every competitive category.

Value Creation & Distribution

I read this interesting piece on Gamasutra today and it motivated me to write about the keynote I gave at the SMU-Guildhall conference on video game law and business earlier this month.

My topic was, broadly, the fallacy in the video game business that content innovation creates enterprise value. By enterprise value, I mean a return on equity for shareholders, usually at some multiple of revenue or earnings. Instead, I argued that while content innovation expands audiences and generates revenues, distribution innovation has historically driven outsized enterprise value creation in the video game business.

Here are my slides -- you can get the idea:

Ok, not that remarkable. I've spoken on this subject twice before -- once to an internal EA audience at their Vancouver online summit a couple of years ago, and I talked at some length on this topic on a panel that Dean Takahashi led at UC Berkeley last year.

But it's amazing how many people didn't get it. One person from a well-known market research firm challenged my thesis, arguing that "shiny disks are still a multi-billion dollar business." Well, so is the grocery business. So is the automobile business. But investors don't ascribe high multiples to those revenues.

Don't believe me? Do the math. THQ is currently trading at a $270MM market cap, despite $1B in trailing twelve month revenues -- .27X. Take Two is at .37X. Even EA is down to 1.22X.

The current valuation multiples in the video game business are predicated on earnings or revenue growth, and that's the context in which content innovation is linked to value creation. Activision gets a bump from Guitar Hero because that franchise supports Wall Street's revenue growth estimates, and because hit titles produce economies of scale that drive better margins and thus earnings growth.

But content innovation rarely produces long-term, defensible competitive advantages in the way that distribution innovation does. When EA created their global direct retail distribution platform in the early 90's -- highly innovative at a time when most of their competitors were still working through aggregators -- they created sales leverage that lasted for a decade, and created a market share and earnings multiple advantage that none of their competitors could match. It wasn't that EA had Madden & FIFA, it was that EA had those titles and could sell them in the four corners of the planet.

Meanwhile, the companies that have recently built innovative digital distribution platforms, often based on virtual goods sales or subscription revenues, are thriving, maintaining buoyant revenue multiples despite the downturn. Shanda, the Chinese MMO company, is trading at a 4X revenue multiple.

Content innovation is sexy. It's spectacular. It's what every editor wants to write about and what every gamer wants to play. But as an investor, you are better served looking for companies that are innovating on distribution.

Americans Abroad

Texan Clint Dempsey has been getting a lot of headlines in England for his good run of form at Fulham, particularly his double against Chelsea which allowed the Cottagers to steal a point in the west London derby. While he didn't seem to be particularly in favor with Fulham's dour coach Roy Hodgson early in the season, now he's a consistent starter and co-leads the team in goals.

However, the big news over the Christmas break was LA Galaxy star Landon Donovan's loan to my favorite team in Germany, Bayern Munich. Donovan joined the team on a tour of the Middle East where they played a few friendlies against local club teams. He scored a goal on the trip and seemed to get a fair amount of playing time.

With the winter break coming to a close, Bayern returned to Germany and played a couple of friendlies against top 2nd division Bundesliga teams Kaiserslautern and Mainz. On Monday against Kaiserslautern, Donovan came on as a sub for Toni after 60 minutes and promptly scored a terrific header (and performed a much subdued celebration from his Galaxy standard):

Then, yesterday against Mainz, Donovan scored the third and fifth goals in a 5-0 Bayern route. Here's his first goal, another superb header:

Bayern starts up the Bundesliga campaign again next Friday against Hamburg. Should be fun to see if Donovan can play at this level. He famously left Germany at the beginning of his career for MLS, seeking the chilled lifestyle of LA, more playing time, and the company of his actress girlfriend over freezing weather and bad food. Interesting to see if he's tempted to stay in Europe this time.