TAPALUPÉ, TEQUILO - Welcome to the fourth season of Liga-TQ, Tequilo's premier domestic pitxi (football) competition; installment number four already? - How time flies when you're locked up! As ever, the briefest of summaries tells us that revenues are up, attendances were impressive, commercial opportunities are on the increase and we've even got some foreign types in the league now. Not to mention some fancy new graphics on the newswire... sit back, enjoy the gloss, and watch the season unfold.
THE CAROLINA PLAN
RESTRUCTURING FOR CHAMPIONS, SEASON FOUR
At Big Ten club Fábrica, the board of directors always seem to be too busy when the annual Liga-TQ General Meeting comes around, off on their jet-skis and speed boats in a fancy tax-free resort like Ipanema or Taxhavn or the principality of Mustardy. So they send poor put-on commercial shop manager Carolina Ruiz to the meetings, to listen to all that the powerful chairmen and women have got to say, take some notes, deliver any messages and to report back on how it all goes in the fancy meeting rooms of the Museo de Pitxi, the Tequiloan FA's HQ, in Tapalupé. Two seasons ago she got a bit ahead of herself and threw an idea into the pot that led to the adoption of the 'Cosmopolitos Amendment' - permitting unlimited foreign players to feature in Liga-TQ, largely for the benefit of widening television audiences, increasing shirt sales, encouraging pitxi tourism... generally leveraging as many chèlinpesos from the game as possible. Well done Señora Ruiz - it certainly worked.
Repeating her habit of uninvited interventions last season, she suddenly came up with a plan to help all the big clubs ensure they had a better chance of qualifying from the state championship to the money pot of Liga-TQ via the now widely known but barely understood ‘Carolina Plan’. To make the most of her strategic vision, and to stop her making all the chairpersons look stupid at this year’s meeting, the Unión have put her in charge of the disastrous City of Football project, to build new facilities for the national team - now eight years behind schedule. Of course, she has already got it back on track. She’s a very underrated shopkeeper, that Señora Ruiz.
It is only left for me to advise you that the Carolina Plan is well under way, and to explain to you how it will work this season - given that it adds seven and a half layers of extra complexity over an already indecipherable league structure that has aspirations to be as confusing as the old Farv leagues (before they upped their Confusionist approach to world class levels with the Banija-Busoga multi-association thingammy-whatsit). With the mass relegation of season three complete and the state championships suitably resized for the next edition of Liga-TQ, this is approximately what will happen:
The state championships will fight out a two-stage apertura and closura system. From the second tier (2-Sección) downward, the twenty-team divisions will simply play a home and away round robin totalling 38 games with the usual amount of promotions, relegations and play-offs at the end. They will play 19 games in the apertura, and 19 returns in the closura.
The top tier divisions (1-Sección) now have only ten teams in each of the six states. So, at the end of apertura, when the lower tiers have completed half their games, the 1-Sección divisions will have completed all their home-and-away round robin ties. Then it will be time to move into the closura, and the newly enlarged Liga-TQ. Each of the three Liga-TQ divisions - Primera, Proxima and Pequeña - will be expanded to ten teams. The important one - the Primera - will contain last season’s champion and runner-up, plus last season’s Proxima winner, and last season’s Copa Tequilo winner, leaving six remaining places for the winners of the six state championships, or the next best teams if they have already qualified by dint of one of the four reserved places listed.
The next ten-team division, the Proxima, will contain the winner of last season’s Pequeña, six state runners-up and the three best third-place teams, plus more if any have gone upward into the Primera because they won the cup or something. Finally the Pequeña will take the three remaining third-place teams and the next best teams per state filling up to ten. Each of these divisions will play out a home/away round robin, 18 games, as the closura that will end at the same time as the lower tier state championships.
For all those teams from 1-Sección who don’t make Liga-TQ for the closura (precisely half of them), they will play in three more divisions of ten in descending order of merit, called the Interstate League, or Liga-IS; with a single place for the champion of the IS being guaranteed a spot in next season’s Liga-TQ Pequeña.
There. Simple really.
THE COMMISSIONER’S ELECTION
NUMBER-CRUNCHER GETS THE NOD OVER SORCERER AND MEDIA DARLING
Not content with the huge shake-up at the Unión following the Kipolalia scandal - the infectious disease brought to Tequilo from the Iast IAC in Gibberwilde; and with sacking the national team management and coaching staff; and with appointing a competent person to manage the ruinous City of Football project; it was also time for the first election of the Commissioner’s post for Liga-TQ, held in the first place by the non-elected appointment of legendary former footballer and shaman Pablo Invocador. The man who once spoke a magic enchantment to make an opposing goalkeeper stand on his head whilst he took a penalty against the unfortunate fellow - and who got a red card for unsportsmanlike conduct for his efforts - had, by everyone’s general agreement, done a splendid job overseeing the foundation of the league and it’s immediate impact on Tequiloan pitxi society, where it had overturned the 120-year dominance of state football in only three seasons, increased crowds and television audiences, and consequently - and most importantly - trebled the income to clubs and chairpersons. It seemed a dead certainty that no-one would oppose the charming legend from Fábrica Tapalupé, let alone beat him in an election; but for all his charm and uncanniness, and for all his success in helping to establish Liga-TQ, he did not stand alone.
Sensationally, but perhaps not surprisingly, Motozintla chairman, billionaire owner and A-List celebrity Gedeó Dosrius decided he must stand in opposition - officially, to provide the sort of business sense, as the owner of a multiversal shipping consortium, that would take Liga-TQ to the next level of fame and fortune. Unofficially, of course, it was encouraged by the television production company that was still charting the fortunes of his club through the hugely successful fly-on-the-wall documentary series, Make Moto Great Again. Each season the producers were looking for a new angle, and having Gedeó compete for the Commissioner’s job at the league would make a perfect backdrop to the season ahead. Being a man of unlimited ego, constantly in need of exposure and attention, he was more than willing to oblige, and put himself forward on a ticket of making Liga-TQ not only the primary footballl product of Tequilo and the Wide Enness Ocean, but making it the biggest and best damned commercial sports enterprise in the whole flaming multiverse. When Gedeó left the producers office with his mind set, they must’ve known he surely couldn’t possibly win against Pablo Invocador; but they would be rubbing their hands with glee knowing how badly he would play up once he lost the election. It was going to be carnage, and they would be right there, cameras rolling.
As the owners of the clubs gathered for their annual meeting, joined as usual by the shopkeeper Carolina Ruiz representing for the Fábrica board who were off on their holidays, they were introduced to a lecturer allegedly from the Kelssek Electoral College who had been brought in in an advisory capacity, since it was widely agreed that, in order to keep with the tradition in Tequiloan football for massive, incomprehensible and needless complexity, a straight majority vote between two candidates would be boring and counter to the ethos of the Unión. As everyone knows, the Kelssek Electoral College (KEC) is the multiverse’s premier academic institution for the study of bestowing a deceptive perception of democratic process upon the selection of a predetermined-by-privilege individual or group to maintain a balance of power over a wider cohort of individuals and groups, and primarily by devising comprehensively complex and indecipherable filter mechanisms through which to accomplish this (Editor’s note: The Legalese Electoral Polytechnic (LEP) might with some justification dispute the assertion that KEC is the premier institution). Introduced simply as ‘Mr. Wilson’, the electoral advisor suggested a complicated system using repeating run-offs and blind ballotage contigencies with D’Hondt filter mechanisms and whatnot, (something like that anyway, no-one was quite sure what he was going on about really) which basically called for a third candidate with absolutely no hope of being successful also being on the ballot to lend some additional air of credence to the winner (who everyone knew was going to be Señor Invocador) and preventing the runner-up (who everyone knew was going to be Señor Dosrius) from being able to delegitimise the vote in any way.
No-one in the room of powerful and rich club owners wanted to volunteer to be the lame duck in a crapshoot, so naturally they all turned to the shopkeeper Carolina Ruiz for her thoughts, and probably rather hoped she would volunteer. But as we know, Carolina was by now about to quit her job as the manager of the Fábrica club shop, to manage the City of Football project; so all she could offer was some sage advice. She was of the mind that with two big personalities fighting it out in Señors Invocador and Dosrius, what they needed was someone who wouldn’t compete for air… an administrative type, someone who could be relied upon not to attract too much attention. When they looked around the room, there weren’t many of those types about. Just Carolina, and that fellow over there, from the Unión, in the grey suit with the grey tie, and the double-entry ledger on the table in front of him, who would soon do a statistical presentation for them on the cash flow forecast for the next three years which, if they didn’t turn the aircon down to just above freezing, would send them all to sleep.
Martín Escorinato.
There were two major surprises in the election for the next commissioner of Liga-TQ. The first was that Gedeó Dosrius had far more support from the lower echelons of the football community than anyone had ever imagined - his populist “I can make everyone great again” message, which didn’t really hold one drop of water when you actually thought about it, was very alluring to your Nómada Clubs, your Sardíneros, your Hipopótamus-Joaxhas and your Raití Tangos of this world. He rode a wave of approval on a ridiculous ticket right up to the desk of safe bet incumbent Pablo Invocador, who actually had made the league great and did seem to know what he was doing. The second surprise came in the form of Mr. Wilson’s ‘narrow margin Droop quotient separator’ mechanism for splitting indivisible ties. It seemed, though he had neglected to mention it in plain Tequiloan, that in the case where there was very strong support for one or other candidate with great resistance for the other, it was likely the middle-of-the-road, not-competing-for-air lame-duck-in-a-crapshoot third candidate would appeal to both sides as the alternative so as to exclude the strong unwanted second candidate. Señor Martín Escorinato won the election in the Droop-off to become the second commissioner of Liga-TQ. And after all, he did know how to make the league work. He had spent a lot of late nights and early mornings generating the data that kept the system running. He knew how to use the XK OpTeq simulator.
Quietly, and without leaving his invoice on the secretary’s desk, Mr. Wilson took his leave of the stunned board room, and grabbed an express taxi to the airport.
