Building an International Brand

Mikitani needs to have a winning side before he can make any impact. Ironically, the V9 Giants were the last opportunity for a global approach before the WBC.

This I think is the weakest of Jim's articles - he over-values the impact of MLB and its potential on world market. The true global sport is soccer and this has been the case for years, even in Asia. In America MLB is not the most popular sport - American football is and look how global that is. All the talk of club competitions will only follow when the WBC becomes established as the World Cup for baseball. Then Valentine and Son's dreams can be realized. But look how long it took for a soccer world club championship to become established.

However, he makes some very good points about NPB and its total lack of anything resembling marketing nous. As for highlights - I recently watched the Tigers 2006 DVD and noticed something. There were hardly any Giants games included because the Giants weren't forthcoming in granting rights. This kind of nonsense does need to be eliminated as soon as possible.

All the talk of club competitions will only follow when the WBC becomes established as the World Cup for baseball.

It will only come when MLB wants to commit to such a challenge and when they see it as profitable to them. This is how MLB works. Sadly, but true. There just is no interest to committing to a championship between championship teams. What they need is a championship between the MLB, NPB, KBO, and CPBL champions like what they have already with the Konami Cup. As mentioned in the article, MLB isn't interested in anything like that, despite this helping people in North America become more aware of baseball internationally.

[...] he over-values the impact of MLB and its potential on world market

Allen-san isn't attempting to over-value the impact of MLB on world markets, what he's saying is that MLB is seeing the value of expanding business into Asia. The NPB, on the other hand, is stuck in its old mentality or mostly unable or unwilling to expand the NPB brand internationally.

This kind of nonsense does need to be eliminated as soon as possible.

Yes, this nonsense needs to be eliminated, which is why the league (NPB) needs to start regulating merchandise, TV rights, et cetera instead of every individual team doing it.

Furthermore, teams in Japan have started to televise games online, but that is dragged down by corporate BS, not being able to view it outside of Japan (like Chiba Lotte and Nippon Ham). If they truly want to market the game internationally how in the world is this helping to do it? The only one trying to make a difference in this regard is Softbank, as the rest remain committed to their old stubborn ways.

They need to improve the way they market inside Japan, like actually televising a whole game, for teams to start developing a successful marketing plan (that aren't Hanshin and Yomiuri). Though the majority of the NPB isn't interested that either, since most teams can just leech off of revenue from knowing they get to play Yomiuri and Hanshin.

NPB has a choice; they need to radically improve the way they market and need to do it now.

NPB's day of reckoning will come soon, as over the long term, revenues will surely fall. As the Japanese saying goes, when the fire hits your behind ...

In 2003, the birth rate in Japan among adult women up to age 49 was about 1.3. The number of births was estimated at around 1,200,000. If Japan continues at this pace, which it has since 1989 when the birth rate hit 1.57, there will only be 600,000 kids born in the year 2050. This means the pool of potential baseball players and fans has to definitely decrease.

Right now the number of MLB fans may be negligible compared to NPB fans, but we still haven't had enough time to measure the impact of those NPB players who have gone abroad. In other words, the next generation of baseball fans will have grown up watching Ichiro, Matsui, et al. and who knows what impact this will have on their views of NPB. As for BS and cable, these media outlets will only grow popular among the coming generations. Old fogies may not want to watch BS right now, but the youth sure do. They'll be more tech and media savvy, and let's not forget you can see almost any MLB game you want on the Internet but not any NPB games, for the time being at least.

So IMO, crunch time for NPB should come about 10 or 15 years down the line. The old guys at the top are always a hard-headed bunch, but times change and they will have to as well.

Actually young people are more likely to go for soccer. This is the real threat, not MLB. BS is an NHK enterprise and NHK is the old people's channel. Cable and the Internet have more of a hold on the young people. NPB needs to get its act together, but it must not misidentify the real threat.

Yes. Soccer is a major indicator of where Japanese baseball has gone wrong. The J-League has taken a game that had a youth and adult-cult following in Japan similar to that in the United States and built it into something viable - because the dominant sports business, NPB, basically said "This is our product. It's good. If you don't like it, who cares?"

While NPB has tried to limit baseball, the J-League has a dream of putting at least one pro team (at different levels) in 100 different cities.

One look at who is watching the respective games shows you how bad things are for NPB. The same age groups watch both baseball and soccer but the proportions are vastly different. It sure looks like children, young men and women make up at least 75 percent of soccer's devoted fan base. In pro baseball, it is probably about 25 percent, with half being between 35 and 55 and more male than female.

These are just my impressions, but when young people I meet find out I am a sportswriter, 8 times out of 10, I hear a sigh of disappointment when they find out I write about baseball and not soccer.

Why they don't get a real minor league system (tiered) going I'll never know. Instead we've got these separate regional leagues popping up everywhere. One other benefit would be to have these teams based at some of these under-utilized ball parks which are often nicer than some of the pro-ballparks. I'm talking about Akita, Kurashiki, Matsuyama, Nagasaki, and Matsuyama to name a few.