〓Tens of thousands of balls are consumed around the world every day. Baseball is still a niche sport in China, and its popularity is low. Baseball has never been popular in China due to high venue requirements, relatively complex rules, and few event broadcasts.
Baseball is very close to us. You probably have a handsome baseball cap or a cool baseball jacket in your wardrobe; baseball is also very far away from us. Not many Chinese people can understand how many people play in a baseball game. What is the difference between baseball and softball, and what does "home run" mean.
Baseball is undoubtedly still a niche sport in mainland China. In fact, baseball was included in the competition as early as the first National Games in 1959, and the Chinese Baseball League officially started in 2002. However, since its development, baseball has a weak market foundation in mainland China. There are few people who understand baseball. The equipment is expensive, the venue requirements are high, and the rules are relatively complicated. This sport has not become popular in China.
After the 2008 Beijing Olympics, baseball was kicked out of the Olympic events due to reasons such as too long games. This made baseball even more difficult to survive in China. In 2012, the Chinese Baseball League was suspended due to lack of sponsorship, and its official website was closed in 2013.
According to public data, there are currently only about 50 ordinary baseball fields in China, with more than 1,000 registered players. "There are now tens of thousands of football fields in China. According to the national plan, the country will reach 70,000 by 2020. People in the circle are joking. It is better to study a topic, how to use abandoned football fields to make baseball." An industry insider laughed. .
Due to the small number of people who pay attention to baseball, domestic media platforms do not focus on baseball as the focus of broadcast events. In January last year, LeTV Sports announced the introduction of the media rights of the American Professional Baseball League to broadcast MLB events. In the world sports industry market share, the baseball industry accounts for 12%, second only to football and rugby, and is the sum of basketball and F1 racing. Among them, the American baseball industry is the most developed, with more than 50% of Americans participating in baseball. In 2015, the annual output value of Major League Baseball (MLB) was close to 10 billion US dollars, ranking second among the four major professional sports leagues in the United States. In Japan, South Korea, and Cuba, baseball is also the national sport. The baseball industry in Taiwan, China accounts for 8% of Taiwan's sports output value. According to incomplete statistics, 100,000 games are played around the world every year, and tens of thousands of balls are consumed every day.
In the process of transformation from sports to sports industry, theoretically, the baseball industry is almost in line with all the elements of the new economic normal trend: the middle class is the mainstream consumer group, has a huge international mature market and the Chinese market depression, and is typical of personalization. Consumption, new industries and service industries, etc.
However, the successive experiences of players in the Chinese baseball market show that it is not that easy to directly copy the popularity of the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to China, and capital investment has not created miracles.
When the Chinese Baseball League started in 2002, it was operated by Japan's Dynasty Corporation, and was later taken over by SoftBank . After SoftBank withdrew in 2008, Chinese-American Huang Jianhua, a partner of the New York Yankees, signed a 15-year agreement with the Chinese Baseball Association to be responsible for developing the domestic baseball market and youth baseball. The cooperation ended prematurely in 2013. None of the parties are willing to talk about the specific reasons why this cooperation failed, but it was obviously extremely unsuccessful and the Chinese Baseball League was forced to suspend.
As early as 2003, Major League Baseball (MLB) tried to open up the Chinese market and signed a cooperation agreement with the Chinese Baseball Association. In 2007, it officially established a Chinese representative office. Over the past nine years, MLB has done a lot of "paving the way" work, cultivating and waiting for the rise of the market, and invested hundreds of millions of dollars.
In September 2014, the Handball Baseball and Softball Management Center of the State Sports General Administration and the Chinese Baseball Association packaged all relevant rights and interests of Chinese baseball to Hengda United Investment (Beijing) Co., Ltd., entrusting it to engage in complete business development, training, and development of Chinese baseball. The two parties signed a 16-year contract on various matters related to Chinese baseball such as venue construction, industrial research and development and promotion.
Hengda United thus obtained all the commercial development rights of Chinese baseball and became the official operation team. After taking over, Hengda United quickly took up the post. In more than a month, Hengda United hurriedly prepared to host the National Baseball League, which had been suspended for two years. Carrying the banner of industrialization, we want to make baseball popular in mainland China.
From a policy perspective, baseball has indeed caught up with a good time. In October 2014, the State Council issued the "Several Opinions on Accelerating the Development of the Sports Industry and Promoting Sports Consumption" and proposed a development goal of 5 trillion yuan for the sports industry. In July 2016, the "13th Five-Year Plan for Sports Development" even proposed an industrial plan for the sports industry to reach 3 trillion yuan in five years, and proposed the main goals and systems for sports development during the "13th Five-Year Plan" period. Reform occupies a priority position, encouraging qualified sports projects to take a professional path and developing professional leagues.
On December 30, 2015, the State Sports General Administration released the "Mid- and Long-term Development Plan for China's Baseball Industry (2016-2025) (Draft for Comments)", which mentioned that by 2025, the total number of baseball core industries, compact industries and related industries will be The scale exceeds 50 billion yuan.
Even though the country continues to release various benefits in terms of sports policies, under the beautiful call of "the total scale of the baseball industry exceeds 50 billion yuan", practitioners have personally experienced that in the long-term dominance of the "whole-country system", there is no separation of management and administration. Under this situation, the industrial chain is broken, and professionalization has been a difficult problem to be solved in the Chinese sports field for many years.
As early as 2002, Shen Wei, secretary-general of the Chinese Baseball Association, said that the Chinese Baseball League cannot be called "professional" because it does not yet have the conditions for professional baseball. For example, the level of competition is not high enough; the conditions of the stadium are far from enough. There is still a long way to go to meet the requirements of professional baseball; the ball market is not yet mature enough, including the venue, baseball atmosphere, audience, and fan base are limited. If these conditions are not met, it is useless to call oneself a professional. "After 14 years, the situation seems to be the same. There is not much improvement, the level of competition, court conditions, and commercial value have not changed significantly, and "career" is still out of the question.
Almost no one doubts that China's sports industry will usher in an explosion. Mainstream sports such as professional football and basketball have already taken the lead in setting off a wave of capital. It is difficult for emerging capital to enter the mainstream sports field with a huge mass base, so it will focus on niche industries. The market tries to find gold. The small-ball market, which is popular in overseas commercial sports such as baseball, rugby, and ice hockey but is sparse in China, has heated up. In the card game, baseball became the representative of the breakout.
