Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2013 May 31

= May 31 =

The Island - Dr. Merricks Tower
After watching The Island the other night, I was interested about the tower looking building that Dr. Merrick was using to create & house the clones. What information is there about the facility ? 194.74.238.137 (talk) 11:34, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * It's my recollection that the entire Merrick facility was built into an (unrealistically cavernous) decommissioned nuclear missile silo. As such, some buildings were built inside that silo, but the views of the whole facility (which present it as a free standing structure) are holographic illusions meant to trick the clones. The Island (2005 film) only talks about locations other than the Merrick facility, suggesting it was all studio and CGI. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 16:53, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Also, in the scene where Lincoln Six Echo & Jordan Two Delta excaped from Merricks facility, they emerge on the surface through a massive silo door (I think thats what it is). Is that the same thing/ location used in Impostor when Spencer Olham escapes the Earth Security Administration (ESA) facility ? 194.74.238.137 (talk) 10:08, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Are professional footballers slaves?
With apologies if the headline is emotive, but I can't think of another way to phrase it.

Clubs are reported as "buying" and "selling" their players. According to headlines, having been sold by their clubs, they then have to move, wherever they're sent. There's a headline today about one saying he wants to leave, but his club insisting "he's not for sale".

This might just be use of terminology that's accepted in the sporting world without realising how it looks to those of us outside it - or is it actually the case that they're bought and sold, don't get to decide for themselves who to work for, etc? I'd imagine that if they played poorly nobody would want to buy them and they regain their freedom, but barring that, are they actually functionally enslaved, going where they're told by people who've paid money for them?

(in confusion) 94.169.111.118 (talk) 14:36, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't know the technicalities, but Transfer (association football) is the relevant article. Some people might not mind that kind of slavery. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 14:42, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * What's for sale is the player's contract of employment. Football players do have unusually long contract terms (most employees in western countries can terminate their employment with a month or two of notice, if not less), but other sportsmen (like F1 drivers) and entertainer (like pop musicians) also have lengthy contracts. As in all contracts, the footballer has given up some rights; courts can consider whether they've been fairly compensated (mostly in money) for the rights they've sold. I assume (looking at your ISP) that you're asking about association football; this is something of a special case, as FIFA (and its constituent organisations) has a de-facto monopoly over professional (and organised amateur) football worldwide - so a player who chose to break his contract with say Grimsby Town couldn't (without FIFA's permission) go and play for Everton or Juventus or LA Galaxy). That's a significant restraint on his ability to work and earn a living, and for it to be legal the contact has to be fair, and the process for dealing with disputes itself has to be legal.  In practice a footballer's contract doesn't grant his club total control - he has a veto over transfers (so he can't be unilaterally moved around like livestock) and he gets a share of transfer fees. But certainly it's still a very restrictive environment, and for players in the lower leagues, who aren't getting massive compensation, it does seem like an imposition.  The Bosman ruling held that the restrictions that pertained then in Europe were unreasonably restrictive and contravened EU employment rules, and had a significant effect on the European football transfer market as a result. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 16:41, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you, very much, very interesting. I've been curious about this for years, but never knew really where to look or how to ask search engines the question (assumption always seems to be that people already know how this works). Presumably the unusually large amount of freedom given up is one of the reasons for the very high wages the top players command (as you say, seeming like more of an imposition for the lower ranked & paid). I suppose the veto's the most important thing - years of listening to newsreaders say "x has been sold to " had my brow furrowed! :) Thanks again. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.169.111.118 (talk) 17:39, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * An interesting side note on this is the title of the biography of baseball player Curt Flood is titled A Well Paid Slave, and refers to the (now abolished) Reserve clause in Major League Baseball that basically meant that once a player signed a contract with a specific team, the team held perpetual rights to the players services; unless the expressly released him from those rights, there was no such thing as free agency, as the player was bound to the club for his career; unless they traded his rights to another team, at which point the new team had total control. Players had only two choices in the matter: sign the contract offered to them each year, or stop playing baseball.  While Flood was blackballed from baseball for legally challenging the reserve clause, it was another five years before Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally successfully challenged the rule and had it overturned with the help of Marvin Miller in the landmark Seitz decision.  The use of the term "slave" in the case of Floods case is deliberate: there were distinct racial issues in 1970s America, and the fact that a black ballplayer would fail where two white ballplayers would succeed a short time later resonated for a long time... -- Jayron  32  18:04, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * They are not literally "slaves", because no one has forced them to play football. But the reserve clause and its variants are and were a type of "ownership" of players. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:01, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * In team sports in the U.S., athletes are free to go into another line of work if they choose. What is restricted, for the most part, is that they have limited choice as to the team they play for within a specific sport. In most sports, amateur athletes are drafted by pro teams, and they can only negotiate with that team. That is to prevent teams from getting into bidding wars over a player. If a player signs a contract, he or she must honor it. However, teams can trade, buy or sell that contract among each other. When a contract ends, a player becomes a "free agent" meaning he or she can negotiate with any team. This is highly simplified, of course; there are very complex regulations that both teams and players must follow. This is all legal because the players unions and the leagues have negotiated these terms into their basic agreements.  → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 23:09, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
 * The issue with the reserve clause was that that wasn't the case. Whenever a players contract expired, the team who had that contract was given the automatic right of first refusal, to the point where teams could sign players to successive one-year "reserve" contracts in perpetuity.  They really didn't have the power to negotiate freely after the contract expired.  This has all changed now, but in baseball (and other major North American sports whose contract structure mirrored it) it really wasn't the case until 1975; the NFL took another decade to eliminate its reserve clause and institute a true free agency system.  -- Jayron  32  00:00, 1 June 2013 (UTC)
 * That's essentially the same as European soccer before the Bosman ruling, which was only made in 1995. When a player's contract expired, so long as his current club were prepared to offer him a new contract (even if that contract was on worse terms than the old one), he couldn't sign a contract with anyone else without a transfer fee being paid. Jean-Marc Bosman, a Belgian player, challenged that, and the European Court ruled that was an unlawful restraint on the free movement of workers. Now when a player's contract is up he's a free agent and can sign with any club that'll have him. He can even open negotiations with other clubs in the final six months of his contract. Clubs will usually try to renew the contracts of players they want to hang onto at least a year before they're due to expire. --Nicknack009 (talk) 21:42, 2 June 2013 (UTC)


 * The exception would be if a player was unconditionally released, which usually meant he was pretty much done anyway. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:58, 1 June 2013 (UTC)


 * At least into the 1970s, the relationship between English cricket authorities and individual professional cricket players was downright feudal, and it's not a complete exaggeration to compare it at least to serfdom. Cricketers little job security and unlike footballers weren't compensated highly (even though, by then, top level cricket was raking in hefty sponsorship and television fees). Cricketers often weren't paid by their clubs over the winter - some worked as visiting professionals in Australia, but the numbers who could were limited by working-permit limits, and obviously upping-sticks for months at a time, leaving one's family to work at the antipode for only a very modest salary is less than ideal. Cricket authorities still had the idea that their cricketers were gentlemen, who had either independent means or professions, which they could return to and from which they could derive their living when they weren't given the privilege of playing for the county or the country. But many players were solely professional cricketers, and the standard of play and the summer schedule asked of players meant that the idea of someone maintaining an independent career was increasingly unreasonable.  Cricket authorities (the TCCB), run by blazered gents from yesteryear, resisted the modernisation of players' terms (while not resisting all the money that was coming into the game).  Some players, I think justly, felt they were being exploited, and railed against their inability to negociate better terms inside the restrictive system that pertained.  Some turned to World Series Cricket, others to South African rebel tours (the latter, while disreputable, was entirely legal). A similar dissatisfaction obtained in Australian cricket too - see the lengthy and rather bitter quote in Ian Chappell's article, about Don Bradman's "tight-fisted approach". The cricket establishment (in England and internationally) boiled with fury and moved to ban anyone who'd played WSC from ever playing test or county cricket ever again,  depriving dozens of the best cricketers in the world their livelihood. Backed by WSC owner Kerry Packer's money (the first time players had the clout to fight the authorities in court) they sued and won, the court finding that the TCCB's ban was an unjust and unlawful restraint of trade and an unreasonable infringement on the players' rights to employment. The Packer case was cricket's Bosman and transformed the game; modern developments like Indian Premier League, which pays foreign professionals very high fees, is a direct result of Packer's breaking of the ICC/TCCB monopoly. 87.115.55.93 (talk) 20:31, 1 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Golfers are. Look, they even have a tournament for their masters. Clarityfiend (talk) 01:01, 2 June 2013 (UTC)