Sport in Megelan

Sport in Megelan has a long tradition; pallone col bracciale - first codified in 1555 - is considered Megelan's national sport; over the course of their careers, professional players of the sport earned fame and honours, not to mention considerable sums of money, not unlike those earned by the star athletes of today.

Other traditional sports, such as bocce and scherma tradizionale, are also widely practiced and enjoyed by spectators in the country; annual athletic contests pitting the districts of a city or the villages of a civil parish against each other in horse racing, archery, jousting, crossbow shooting and similar medieval sports are also popular.

From the 19th century onwards, other sports, that originated elsewhere in Tyran, were introduced in Megelan and began to spread through the education system, such as association football, basketball, volleyball and cycling; professional communities for these sports began to be established in the late 19th century and the early 20th century.

Megelan also has a strong tradition in motorsport, being home to several automobile and motorcycle manufacturers, and several closed track circuits adhering to international standards. In some of the above-mentioned sports, Megelan is extremely successful, considering its population, managing to compete at a comparable level with countries that have several times its population.

History

Annual athletic contests pitting the districts of a city or the villages of a civil parish against each other in horse racing, archery, jousting, crossbow shooting and similar medieval sports began to be contested between the Late Medieval and the Early Modern period; once purely a matter of local rivalries, many have now become events that are staged with an eye to visitors and foreign tourists.

Traditionally, pallone col bracciale - first codified in 1555 - is considered Megelan's national sport; over the course of their careers, professional players of the sport earned fame and honours, not to mention considerable sums of money, not unlike those earned by the star athletes of today; by the 19th century, capable and passionate entrepreneurs hired athletes as if they were actors: they paid their players and scheduled their tournaments, granting a cash victory prize to the winners.

Other traditional sports, such as bocce and scherma tradizionale, are also widely practiced and enjoyed by spectators in the country, but their popularity has waned in favour of those other sports, that originated elsewhere in Tyran, that were introduced in Megelan and began to spread through the education system from the 19th century onwards, such as association football, basketball, volleyball and cycling; professional communities for these sports began to be established in the late 19th century and the early 20th century.

Megelan also has a strong tradition in motorsport, being home to several automobile and motorcycle manufacturers, and several closed track circuits adhering to international standards; motorsport first reached Megelan in the early 20th century, and exploded in popularity during the Futurist period - popularity that did not wane even as the Futurist state collapsed.

In the early 1990s, it was discovered that several of the personalities involved in the Neoliberal conspiracy had used their ownership of several sports clubs as a way to engage in money laundering and other illegal activities. Moreover, some officials were convicted on match fixing charges, and some players were convicted on doping charges.

After a series of fan riots, that saw several of the people involved lose their life at the hands of hooligans and supporters, a radical restructuring of sport in Megelan took place, in order to ensure its financial stability and transparency, and to tackle the doping and match fixing issues as well.

Organization

The organization of sport in Megelan is led by private associations of private businesses, that can carry out a variety of tasks on behalf of the Community in exchange for being subject to a variety of regulations and restrictions; in particular, they have to be owned by fans, staffed by current and former athletes and, just like other guilds in Megelan, they are required by law to to devote a certain amount of their resources to free or low-cost services for the impoverished or indigent, especially in the physical education and physical health sectors.

Professional leagues are run not according to a franchise system, or according to a promotion and relegation system, but according to a somewhat byzantine system where, every four years, attendances, financial health and on-field results determine which teams are promoted to the higher leagues or relegated to the lower leagues; features such as drafting, revenue sharing and salary capping, weighted in favour of those teams that have just been promoted to the higher leagues, are in place to ensure an equal competitive and financial playing field.

Moreover, to prevent match fixing, professional leagues in Megelan are contested according to a system in which the teams making up a given league are divided into pots according to their ranking; then, a computer generates a schedule for every team, involving teams from every single pot; all teams are then ranked in one, collective table. This system also allows for a flexible, peculiar kind of unbalanced schedule in which the number of teams making up a given league can be much higher than the number of matches played.

In amateur and professional leagues both, rules are in place that establish the minimum number of local players and the maximum number of foreign players a team should field, with Megelanese players hailing from outside a team's own local area making up the rest. Sponsorships are allowed, but only if the sponsor hails from a team's local area; in a few cases, unintentionally hilarious sponsorships have happened due to this rule, especially at the amateur and lower levels of competition, a quirk that the fledgling teams involved are quite willing to exploit in order to encourage jersey sales.

School and sport

In 1866, a Megelanese school teacher belonging to the Walser ethnic group, Emil Bauer, published and put into practice a Gymnastics Manual for Elementary Schools, in order to try and tackle the various health and physical issues his pupils, students in a poor and rural area of the Community, were afflicted by; the resounding success of his initiative inspired other teachers and schools in the following decades, leading to the spread of several local and foreign sports through the education system.

To this day, plenty of schools in Megelan provide their pupils with several opportunities to play various sports, either for a moderate fee or as a free after-school activity; contests and tournaments for all sports on the local and national level are held every winter and summer, some of which have an inordinate level of popularity among fans, comparable to that of professional sports.

Sports media

Local outlets play a much bigger role in the coverage of sports in Megelan than national outlets, with radio sports coverage and sports newspapers being ubiquitous, and focused on athletes native to, or on teams based in, a newspaper or radio's local area, down to recreational and youth leagues; a practice that has ensured the survival of local, private television stations as well.

Magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations with a nation-wide perspective on sports coverage exist as well but, while they attract more sales and viewers than any individual local outlet - in fact, the leading sports newspaper in Megelan is the leading newspaper in Megelan, bar none - the latter far outperform the former if considered as a coherent whole.

Élite level team sports

There are three sports in Megelan, not native to the country, which operate high profile professional leagues: association football, basketball and ice hockey. Moreover, floorball, handball and volleyball operate semi-professional leagues whose athletes, even though they receive regular payment from their teams, frequently have full time employment elsewhere.

Indoor sports are usually played during autumn and winter, and outdoor sports are usually played during spring and summer; stadia are designed to be easily used by multiple types of events. The Megelanese national teams usually wear white jerseys for home matches, and black jerseys for away matches, with both jerseys having blue and yellow details and accents.

Élite level individual sports

Boxing, cycling and golf are contested at a fully professional level in Megelan, with the Community being the most devoted country in Tyran to road bicycle racing, and the Tour of Megelan being the oldest and most prestigious event in the sport as a whole, its demanding course often favouring climbers with a strong sprint finish.

The popularity of the event, first held in 1905, allowed it to be held without it being ever cancelled or interrupted; even during the Megelanese Civil War, the sides involved in the conflict would declare ceasefires in order to let cyclists pass through, with snipers of all sides, such as Allegra Lupone, providing security.

Motorsports

Megelan has a strong tradition in motorsport, being home to several automobile and motorcycle manufacturers, and several closed track circuits adhering to international standards. Megelanese individuals have achieved great success in the major international series of automobile and motorcycle racing, a legacy that began during the Futurist era - as speed and technology were revered by Grolli's artistic, literary and political movement - and that never really died down, despite the backlash against Futurism that followed the Megelanese Civil War.

Motorcycle racing is, in fact, popular enough in the Community, that Megelan has been able to run a fully home-grown and professional motorcycle racing championship ever since 1911; due to the country's low road density - around 1 kilometer per capita, with the length of the country's paved and unpaved road network being concentrated in and around city limits - racing in street circuits utilizing public roads has always proven more enduring and popular for racers and spectators alike than racing in purpose built closed circuits.

Controversially, Megelanese racers are known for a rather aggressive and daredevil, bordering on suicidal, driving style, even by the lax standards of élite motorsports; enough so for them to be given the collective moniker of Company of Death by the foreign press, after the Community's élite special forces: a nickname that was proudly adopted by the people called into question.

Before commercial sponsorship liveries came into common use, Megelanese bikes and cars taking part in international auto racing competitions were customarily painted in black, with blue and yellow details and accents - these traditional colours are however still used by automakers and teams that want to emphasize their racing traditions.

Traditional sports

Of Megelan's several traditional sports, only pallone col bracciale (a sport not unlike real tennis, but played four-a-side) can be said to be as popular as association football, basketball and ice hockey, with a fully professional league; other such sports, up to and including bocce and scherma tradizionale (a precursor to fencing) are contested by amateur or semi-professional players.

That said, players at a high level may receive income from sources such as grants and sponsorships despite their amateur or semi-professional status; especially in less physical sports such as road bowling (a sport in which competitors attempt to take the fewest throws to propel a wooden wheel along a predetermined course of city or country roads) it is not unheard of for exceptionally skilled and rather eccentric pensioners to earn a considerable amount of money in a short amount of time.