The third year without audience cheers.
Text | Chen Meixi
| Stone can
On the evening of April 26, 2022, the CBA League of this season came to an end, and Liaoning Bengang won the fourth victory of the finals, sweeping the uneven Zhejiang Guangsha team with a total score of 4:0 to win the championship trophy.
With 50 seconds left in the game, head coach Yang Ming replaced Han Dejun, Li Xiaoxu, Guo Allen, Zhao Jiwei and Liu Zhixuan, the five players who accompanied Liaoning the longest, staying on the field to wait for the championship moment.
It was a victory that was not much suspense before the start of the match.
In the pre-match interview, the reporter's question about Liaoning coach Yang Ming even included that he was dissatisfied with the newly replaced Weibo avatar of foreign aid Moland.
I don't know if I learned to nag after coming to the northeast, this foreign aid is quite able to nag on Weibo, and when he is not five, he changes into the memes made by netizens as an avatar. At first, he only used his own emoji, and then simply changed into the ugly photo of head coach Yang Ming, and after being nagged by the coach, he not only changed into a more "excessive" emoji, but also told the story of his being forced by the head coach to threaten to change his avatar.
Liaoning foreign aid Moland recently used Weibo avatar, image source Weibo screenshot
That's where the pre-match interview came in. Hearing the question, Yang Ming seemed very relaxed, and even joked: "Wait until the end of the season, I will talk to him well." ”
Four years ago, when Liaoning won the CBA league championship for the first time, the opponent was also Zhejiang Guangsha, but the process was far worse than this time. That was the first time they had reached the championship podium after reaching the final six times and finishing runners-up six times. The 33-year-old Yang Ming did not appear in the finals, but became the person to lift the championship. Later, at the spit conference, Fan Zhiyi once complained about Yang Ming's good luck and mixed a championship before retiring. Four years later, when he met Guangsha again in the final, Yang Ming still sat on the bench and still lifted the championship, but his identity became the head coach.
Image source Migu Basketball official Weibo
In the last tens of seconds of that final, almost 10,000 Liaoning fans in the Liaoning Stadium stood up, their arms raised, wearing the cheering suits that the club had put on the seats in advance, and the white T-shirts were printed with "Dream 4300". - 43 million, that is a figure representing the total population of Liaoning Province. CCTV host Yu Jia explained in the background of the overwhelming cheers: "In competitive sports, there is nothing more romantic than winning the championship at home. "
Liaoning won the 2017-2018 season at home, Source Network
Unfortunately, this romance is gone in the era of the epidemic.
After the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, in order to reduce the risk of the spread of the epidemic, the remaining regular season and playoffs of the 2019-2020 CBA League were changed from home and away to the conference system. 20 teams left the station and played in Qingdao and Dongguan. In order to finish the game as soon as possible, the first two rounds of the playoffs were changed to a single-game knockout system, and the semi-finals and finals were also compressed from a seven-game, four-win system to a five-game best-of-three system.
For the next two seasons, the CBA League regular season and playoffs were played on a conference format, and the games remained empty for most of the time. That means players play two and a half seasons with almost no spectators, and the club also lost matchday tickets and peripheral revenue for more than two years.
In order to expand its influence, Chinese basketball has made many fruitful attempts. For example, the basketball variety show "This is a Slam Dunk", which has lasted for four seasons, has obtained more attention outside the field for domestic players; online marketing promotion is also continuing, the official CBA account has accumulated more than 10 million fans on platforms such as Douyin, Weibo, and Kuaishou, and on important game days, the relevant terms of star players are often on Weibo hot search.
Image source This is the official Weibo of the slam dunk
But for the team, the loss from losing the home field has not been erased.
The income of professional clubs mainly comes from three parts, event copyright, sponsors and tickets and peripheral income. Among them, tickets and peripheral revenue mainly depend on home match days, and losing home exposure will also reduce sponsors' sponsorship of the team. Affected by this, a number of CBA clubs are difficult to maintain breakeven, in the disclosed financial data, Guangzhou Dragon and Lions in 2021 loss of 16.05 million yuan, Nanjing Tongxi team loss of 24.32 million yuan.
Affected by the changes in the domestic basketball league format and the NBA's suspension of television broadcasting, Tiger Poker, which started with basketball forums, is also experiencing a long bottleneck period of development.
According to Analysys data, between January 2020 and January 2021, Tiger's daily active activity has hardly increased significantly, and has always remained around 2.5 million. This is the state after Tiger Poker got ByteDance's 1.26 billion yuan pre-IPO round of financing, according to the "First Finance" report, after getting this financing, Tiger Punch originally planned to quickly expand the scale of users, the target is 7 million dau. Clearly, the goals have not been achieved and are far from each other.
The epidemic has not brought scale dividends to Tiger Poker as an online forum, on the contrary, the partial suspension of the offline basketball league has made Tiger Poker, which is extremely dependent on the topic resources brought by the game, lose some vitality in the consumption of time. The pedestrian street section that discusses the short and emotional problems of parents has been placed in a more important position, and the topic of going out of the circle has changed from the discussion among fans to the annual "Tiger Poker Goddess Selection", JRS Although the user stickiness is extremely high, tiger poker is getting farther and farther away from the goal of listing.
All phenomena point to one conclusion: Tiger Poker is bidding farewell to its golden age.
Back to the original starting point, the reason why Tiger Poker can accumulate the first wave of users in the 3G era has two decisive factors. First, under the influence of the Yao Ming effect, the NBA League and basketball have unprecedented influence in China; second, around 2005, the information access channels for young people in China are still very single, and there is an urgent need to have a way to understand the progress and results of basketball games.
Graph source network
In the case of urgent needs of the public and extremely limited channels, Tiger Po has become the platform for insight into the business behind the information gap. From middle school students to office workers, young people are constantly refreshing the real-time scores on the forum or chatting after the game in an era when smartphones are not yet popular.
But these two decisive elements are slowly receding.
In the information age, fans no longer lack access to first-hand event information, live broadcasts, short videos, social media, there are countless ways to see the game screen, or their favorite players. Discussions can take place in any place, forums, live broadcast rooms, comment areas, and even B station barrages, the form of information becomes more diverse, and the platform for discussing information becomes more decentralized.
The influence of basketball has also suffered a slippery slope after many crises.
Back to three seasons in the shadow of the pandemic. Teams lose revenue, players lose cheers, fans lose sight, and every step of the professional league is incredibly difficult. At the same time, the next superstar of Chinese basketball that can attract the attention of the whole people has not yet appeared in the public eye.
Guo Allen, a local star who has performed well in the playoffs, is 29 years old this year. In the 2010-2011 season, the Chinese Basketball Association made adjustments to the age requirements for domestic players, and domestic players under the age of 18 were still not allowed to participate in the league, but national team players were not subject to this age limit. At that time, Guo Allen was the only young player to meet the requirements, so this new rule was also jokingly called the "Guo Allen clause" by fans.
What helped him make his early appearance on the CBA stage was the experience of following the national team to the 2010 World Championships in Turkey. That year, although Yao Ming had retired, standing in front of him were Yi Jianlian, Sun Yue, Wang Zhizhi, Wang Shipeng and other famous generals, and behind him was Zhao Jiwei, who was called Gemini Star. Ten years later, when Guo Allen grew up in scolding and Zhao Jiwei became the Most Valuable Player of the Finals, fans found that the Chinese men's basketball team no longer has the next generation of top rookies.
Graph source network
Once thought that it was common for players in the team to play in the NBA to rotate or even the main force, now it seems to be only the highlight era of the Chinese men's basketball team; once thought that cutting melons and cutting vegetables in Asia was a norm, and then repeatedly lost the Asian championship, and even missed the Tokyo Olympic Games, so that the audience's confidence in the Chinese men's basketball team fell to the bottom.
Competitive sports, results are the biggest source of cheers and applause. There is no doubt about the blow to the CBA league in the epidemic era, but the hidden dangers brought about by the decline in the record for many years have left a foreshadowing for the contraction of basketball attention as early as before the epidemic began.
The final whistle sounded. In the most important moment of the CBA league year, no fans cheered through the stadium, no championship slogan was held high, Liaoning players were enjoying their second championship moment, and young coach Yang Ming lifted the championship trophy in a new capacity.
In competitive sports, even if there is no home and no cheering, it is necessary to keep the game and play the ball, which may be another kind of romance. In the era when no superstar is immediately in front of us, as long as the league is still running, who can predict which game will be born; in the era of not being able to sit on the sidelines and fight side by side with the hometown team, as long as the league is still broadcast, who can assert that there will be no children cheering in front of the TV, Yi Jianlian and Guo Allen who are about to step on the court to become the next generation?
Both the CBA league and Chinese basketball are experiencing troughs in their life cycle. As a spectator, walking with them is also another kind of romance, just as romantic as witnessing them reach the quarterfinals of the Olympic Games.