09-23-2024, 07:41 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-30-2024, 09:45 AM by ProdigalSon. Edited 3 times in total.)
DISCLAIMER: I am very opinionated on what makes for a good bid and what makes for a bad bid, and that is going to leak through in this analysis, particularly near the end when I get into the qualitative analysis. I'd be lying if I said otherwise. That being said, I want to make it clear that I am not the sole arbiter of what is a good bid or bad bid. The fact we vote on these bids as a community is a testament to that; there are many times where I wouldn't have personally gone with the winners, and that's fine! If I mention your prior bid in a negative light, I want you to know it is not meant to be personal.
Thank you for your understanding.
The Ultimus has evolved a lot since it was first played in the inaugural 2016 season.
Actually, that's a good springboard for discussion in itself, even if it's a tangent: the naming system. Much like the NFL, the ISFL plays in Northern Hemisphere Fall, but the championship game is played after the new year. This leads to inconsistency in how they're even described. Do we call the first Ultimus the 2016 Ultimus, since it was for the 2016 season? Or do we call it the 2017 Ultimus, because it was played in that year? In real life, for the Super Bowl, I've seen people go both ways, and got into arguments for it. I legitimately believe this is partially why the NFL went with a numbering system for the Super Bowl, so they can just call it Super Bowl Whatever and sidestep the issue of the date entirely. Out of character, in the ISFL, we've also kind of sidestepped the issue to a degree by caring more about the number of the season than the in-universe date. S1, instead of 2016, for example. This means that the inaugural Ultimus is just referred to as the S1 Ultimus, which is extremely clear and unambiguous in what it represents. It makes sense for a dating system out of character, and for the sake of convenience and deference to tradition I'm going to use this naming system in the article outside of this tangent.
However, the roleplayer in me wants to at least acknowledge that this actually isn't the most realistic way of sidestepping the issue. It might work for the name of the Ultimus itself, since we conveniently started playing it in the first season. If that's even the case. I'm not entirely sure that is the case. Unfortunately I don't entirely remember which media piece it was in (I think it was one of baron's, if it narrows it down), but I recall reading that the ultimus and ultimini names were not initially used at the beginning of the league, but were voted on a few seasons into it. Ultimini wasn't even the original name for the DSFL championship-- it was something else entirely, and was renamed later on both to bring consistency, and because there was some issue with the first name (either it was crass, named after someone toxic, or both. I really don't remember the specifics sorry). Meaning calling the first champion the "S1 Ultimus" is, at best, retroactive. This leads to issues on what even is the first ultimus, in an in-universe sense. When the system of the Super Bowl was first made in the NFL, the league didn't backdate its championship games all the way back to 1920 as Super Bowls. It started counting when the first NFL-AFL championship game was played, where "Super Bowl" was the fan and broadcast preferred nickname that eventually became official. Now, this might be because of the nature of the NFL and AFL merging, the league felt the old NFL Champions were not equivalent to the Super Bowl, but instead were equivalent to the eventual NFC Championship games. But it is still important to note that the Super Bowl name was never used to refer to games that weren't actually played under that name, even if unofficial (The name Super Bowl didn't become official until III, for reference).
While we as users might have memory holed a good portion of the early league history, the characters in-universe certainly haven't. Indeed, given that the league was supposed to start playing in 2016, if anything, the early history of the ISFL should be more well known than the early history of the NFL and college football. The first season would still be in living memory of the older generation of people (someone who watched the first game of the ISFL at twenty years old would be only 68 now), and recording of information now is just, in general, better than in the early 20th century. Basically, people would actually know if the first season's championship game was played under the branding of ultimus, or if the name was applied retroactively. And perhaps, since we cleverly called it the S1 Ultimus, and not Ultimus I, perhaps this whole issue is sidestepped. No one disputes that the first season was played in 2016. But I can tell you that no sports fan, in any league, actually dates things by when the league is founded. Maybe on special occasions, like in 2019, the NFL liked to hype up it was the 100th season played. But bluntly, no one cares that 2024 is the NFL's S105. No one calls the 2024 World Series the S148 World Series. No one dates things like this irl! They use the calendar year, because we use the calendar in daily use, while the number of years since league formation is just trivia even to the most ardent sports fan.
This isn't even beginning to mention that the ISFL and the DSFL's season lengths aren't actually in sync with one another in an in-universe standpoint. The DSFL only started playing two seasons after the ISFL started, in 2018 (aka, S3). Yet, whenever we talk about anything related to the DSFL, ultimini or otherwise, we just pretend there were these phantom seasons in 2016 and 2017 that never actually happened. It makes sense for us, out of character, since the ISFL is the reason why we're all here, and the DSFL mechanically only exists for the benefit of the ISFL. So of course we date everything from an ISFL perspective. But from an in-universe perspective? This is fucking ludicrous. No one does this for the minor leagues of other sports. They're considered their own leagues entirely, with their own, unique history and culture. When the AHL counts its seasons, we start with the first American unified minor league hockey season in 1936 (which would then formally merge two years later in 1938). Alternatively, if you wanted, you could theoretically start counting from the first season played by the older of the two leagues that make up the AHL as its first "season", which would be the Can-Am League in 1926. That's not how its commonly done, but that's what we do with the NFL and MLB, so I wouldn't fight you on that. But what we certainly don't do is date the AHL all the way to the NHL's formation in 1917, and just pretend there was phantom seasons played between 1917 and 1926/1936. The 2024-2025 Calder Cup is the S89 (or 99) Calder Cup, not the S108 Calder Cup. The most recent ultimini, regardless of anything else, should not be the S49 ultimini, it should be regarded as the DSFL S47 ultimini.
So tl;dr, either using the calendar year (which then brings back the question of do you date it by the season's start or the year the game is played in?) or in sequential order of when the game itself was first played (which almost certainly isn't actually the first season for the ISFL, and by definition can't be the same for the DSFL due to being founded in a different year) makes a lot more sense in-universe than dating by seasons from an in-universe standpoint. In either case, both have their problems, and would probably lead to a lot of bickering over the true name of these games. Our out-of-universe ordering system is problematic for the DSFL, and would still probably not be used for the ISFL in-universe.
Whew. That was a tangent, like I said.
The Ultimus has evolved a lot since it was allegedly first played in the inaugural 2016 season. For the first 27 seasons, representing the years between 2016 and 2042, the Ultimus was played in one of the stadiums of the playing team. The wiki lists the location as being the same as the winning team every single time, which to me reeks of retcon. Like the home team wins every single game, every single time, with no pattern between the conferences for who hosts the game, for nearly 30 seasons? I actually don't believe that, and I won't be humoring that line of thought in this article. Instead, it seems like we just agreed that the Ultimus was played somewhere between the two participating teams, and leave it at that.
However, in S29-- the 2043 season-- there was a reform in the way hosts were determined for the ultimus. Instead of having Schrodinger's Arena, where two locations are in superposition until a winner is observed and the wave function collapses to pick one of the two stadiums, the league instead introduced a system where people could vote on bids for consideration of a neutral host site, mirroring how the NFL awards Super Bowls to neutral site locations. For the first two seasons this system was in place, the ultimus and the ultimini were a bundled pair. The users voted on what bid they liked the most, and the winning bid got to host both games. Ironically to the season gap between their respective founding, two seasons later, the ultimini was broken off from this package and rewarded to the runner-up bid. This system then has remained in place, largely unchanged since S30-- 2046. On years where the WFC occurs, third place is awarded it, which is kind of amusing from a roleplaying standpoint because shouldn't the equivalent of the world cup be more prestigious than the yearly championship game in terms of hosting? But that's another tangent for another time.
Recently, I explored the entire backlog of the bidding process, from last season all the way to the start of the system in S28, all because I was curious of the worldbuilding implications of what cities bid, and what cities tend to actually be picked. This has caused insurmountable psychic damage to my mind, and I come off worse for wear in this project. S28 was, in real life, played in 2021. I had to go through three years worth of media backlog to find every single bid. None of the information is stored in the same place. Recently, there is a trend to keep the shortlist archived in the point task forum, but the winner selection in the host city department announcements. S47, which had one of the larger bidding classes, didn't actually link to any of the media posts on its short list, forcing me to find all of them manually by searching the forum database. And the ISFL search bar gave me a lot of garbage data for Orlando in particular, between character names and I think assuming Orlando was a mistyping of O-Line. But then suddenly, once you hit S35, the shortlists are archived in the department announcements as well? Which, to be fair, I do prefer them being centralized in one location but it definitely threw me a loop when compiling this information. I also encountered massive discrepancies between many of the bids and how they ultimately got recorded in the wiki, and I'm not entirely sure which one is meant to be more canonical. Not only that, but some of the bids are missing! I know they exist because they were put on the shortlist, but following any link to investigate them leads to deleted threads and in one case, a deleted google doc.
During this process, I decided to map out every single location, which you can access here. Every single bid I could find a reference to, that is to say, every bid that was mentioned in a shortlist, is included. If there were any bids not present in a shortlist, then I didn't necessarily go out of my way to find them. The graded article backlog is massively long and cumbersome to navigate and I wasn't going to individually search every page manually. Located in this google map is the name of the city, the ISFL season the bid was for, and, if provided, the stadium the bid listed to be played in. In cases where the stadium is clearly defined, that is usually the end of it. No matter how stupid, how impractical a bid was, I tried to respect locations as it was originally pitched, with some exceptions that I will get into later. However, sometimes stadium names get mentioned offhandedly with no clear indication that is where they wanted the game to be hosted, or no stadium is listed at all. In these cases, if there was a clear candidate for a stadium I could reasonably infer from (either from said implication from the bid itself, or because the city has a clear marquee stadium they'd use to host the game), I'd list the stadium with the tag "presumably". If there's too many possible locations, I don't know enough about the city to comment on, or bluntly, just couldn't be assed to do research on (no, I really don't care enough about Crawfordsville or Oconomowoc to find a suitable stadium, sue me), I'd list it as "No Stadium Specified" and move on.
Fictional locations can and were submitted, so for a map based on real world locations, they were an extra headache. What I ultimately settled on was trying to find real life proxies for the fictional location, and leaving it at that. Some were easier than others. Hawkins, for example, seems to almost universally be seen as a stand-in for the real life town of Bedford, so that is where I put the Hawkins bid. Pokémon is another series that has very strong parallels to real life geography; there is a whole article on Bulbapedia that maps Pokémon locations to their real life counterparts, which I used as a reference for those bids. Others provided more of a headache. Hogwarts is canonically in Scotland, but the castle it is based after, Alnwick Castle, is in England. If I used Alnwick Castle, people will point out that it should be in Scotland. If I use a different castle, more observant HP fans might point out that blunder too. Ultimately, I decided to put it in Scotland, using Stirling Castle (the first Scottish castle I could think of) as a proxy, because I realized I didn't want to put in the brainpower to think of a better location for a work that I am increasingly antipathetic towards (obligatory fuck transphobia).
But by far the most controversial one I could see coming is where I placed Gotham City. Gotham City is known to be on the Eastern Seaboard... and that's basically about it. Where it exists roughly in relation to those states depends a lot on the writers. It's usually in the Mid-Atlantic, with New Jersey being a common answer. Indeed, if you asked me where I'd place Gotham City, I'd refer to this image, which places Gotham in southern New Jersey, and Metropolis across the bay in Maryland. This is how I always knew it, and will personally always see it. But I also understand that this is old canon, and things have shifted around since then. However, I'm not just a superhero nerd, I'm a Steelers superhero nerd, and I know that the infamous football scene from the Dark Knight Rises shows Gotham's football stadium, and its just then-Heinz Field. That's Hines Ward returning in the most explosive punt return in football history, and the rest of the players were then-members of the Steelers. So fuck you, Gotham's proxy is Heinz Field, and I'm not apologizing for that.
So, with that out of the way, here's the map of the bids, across the world.
![[Image: CpOiLsR.png]](https://i.imgur.com/CpOiLsR.png)
Thank you North Pole for causing this to be way more zoomed out than it needed to be
To explain what you're looking at, red dots are bids that won first place their respective season, and would go on to host an ultimus. Blue dots are runner ups, who would host an ultimini that year. The two purple dots represent the winners of S28 and S29, who would host both games their respective season. Grey dots represent all other bids, including bids that would host the WFC. I deliberately chose not to separately list WFC hosts, because of how rare and random the WFC was played in this period of time. It felt unfair to randomly reward a few third place finishes with higher precedence than the rest. So I modeled them as just failed ultimus bids.
Already, you can probably tell that some regions (looking at you, United States) are more popular than others for a bid. You might be also able to tell that some regions hit more often when they are proposed (looking at you, East Asia, which has a near perfect success rate for bids). But exactly how much more popular is the United States compared to the rest of the world? Exactly how much more successful East Asia is in securing bids compared to the rest of the world? For that, we are going to start with a world analysis.
BIDS, WORLDWIDE:
UNITED STATES: El Paso (S30), Los Angeles (S31), Seattle (S32), Anchorage (S33), Chicago (S33), St. Louis (S34), Moab (S34), Louisville (S35), Hawkins (S36), Philadelphia (S37), "New Jersey" (S37), Point Pleasant (S37), Detroit (S38), Las Vegas (S39), Philadelphia (S39), San Fransisco (S40), Tampa (S40), Atlanta (S40), Los Angeles (S40), San Antonio (S40), Green Bay (S41), San Diego (S41), Everglades (S42), Great Smoky Mountains (S44), Lake Tahoe (S44), Daytona Beach (S44), Nashville (S44), Memphis (S44), Boston (S46), Oconomowoc (S46), Detroit (S46), Seattle (S46), Gotham City (S47), Crawfordsville (S47), Orlando (S47), Memphis (S48), Grand Rapids (S49) (12/37=32.4% hit rate)
NORTH AMERICA, EXL. U.S.: Toronto (S29), "Riviera Maya" (S34), Tijuana (S35), Quebec City (S36), San Juan (S40), Montreal (S40), Grenada (S41), Saskatoon (S43), Panama City (S48) (2/9=22.2% hit rate)
COMBINED: 14/46=30.4%
SOUTH AMERICA: Rio de Janeiro I (S35), Rio de Janeiro II (S35), Buenos Aires (S42), Easter Island (S43), Cusco (S43), Buenos Aires (S45), Machu Picchu (S46) (2/7=28.6% hit rate)
EUROPE: Milan (S28), Rome (S28), Amsterdam (S30), Reykjavík (S30), Munich (S34), Athens (S36), Valencia (S36), Llanfairpwll (S38), Amsterdam (S38), London (S40), Paris (S40), Vienna (S40), Dublin (S41), Prague (S41), Oslo (S42), Milan (S42), Amsterdam (S43), Swansea (S44), Kraków (S46), Monaco (S47), Stuggart (S48), Hogwarts (S48), Florence (S49) (9/23=39.1% hit rate)
AFRICA: Nairobi (S31), Abidjan (S35), Cairo (S35), Marrakesh (S39), Canary Islands (S44) (2/5=40.0% hit rate)
ASIA: Hong Kong (S31), Seoul (S33), Singapore (S33), Manila (S35), Manila (S36), Tokyo (S38), Mumbai (S41), Uruk (S41) Bangkok (S41), Mount Everest (S45) Pokemon Stadium (S45), Taipei (S47), Indigo Plateau (S47) (9/13=69.2% hit rate)
OCEANIA: Jakarta (S28), Perth (S29), Gold Coast (S29), Perth (S32), Sydney (S40), Yap Islands (S47) (2/6=33.3% hit rate)
OTHER: Atlantis (S38), North Pole (S40), Pacific Ocean (S44) (1/3=33.3% hit rate)
(Underline is ultimus winning bids, italics are ultimini winning bids, both at the same time hosted both)
So yeah, firstly, the sheer amount of bids the United States gets compared to other countries basically means I need to treat it as its own continent entirely. Otherwise, it'd just dominate North America and we wouldn't be able to see anything else interesting going on there. I did combine the two together so you could get a full picture of the North American continent, but for all intents and purposes the rest of North America might as well be a ghost town compared to the United States. At 37 entries, it easily dwarfs any two other regions combined. Indeed, it is only barely smaller than the rest of the world excluding the second largest region, Europe (40 vs 37). This might be the International Simulation Football League, but the Americans are still running the show.
The other thing I want to briefly touch is a few geographic edge cases. That is to say, Jakarta, San Juan, and the Canary Islands, which I assume are probably the three people are most likely going to have issue with placement. Turns out, continents are a social construct, unless you're a geologist using plate tectonics. And no one here is using plate tectonics to define continents in common day parlance, so don't even start with me there (No, you don't actually believe Siberia is an integral part of North America, sit down). As a result, for these three edge cases, I needed to use my own judgement and vibes to figure out where to place it. For Jakarta, where Asia ends and Oceania begins is somewhat nebulous, due to the lack of a hard geographic boundary to define the border. I've seen all of Indonesia listed as being in Asia, all of Indonesia listed as Oceania, and sometimes its split down the middle like Russia. It really just depends on the vibes of whoever is making it. Given Oceania is already the murkiest continent in terms of definition, I decided to go with the maximally largest definition of it-- all of Indonesia-- since really the continent needs all the help it can get to have representation here. This is the edgiest of the three, and I wouldn't fight anyone who thinks its more appropriately placed in Asia, which is probably the more common interpretation.
The Canary Islands is another edge case; the islands are literally off the coastline of Africa, and in terms of geology and native fauna and flora have way more to do with Africa than Europe. That being said, while there was a native African population of the islands- the Guanches-- they have been unfortunately wiped out over the ensuring hundreds of years of Spanish rule, and the population living there for the most part identify as Spanish of some stripe. Not only that, but the Canaries are part of the European Union as an Outermost Region. So why did I include it with Africa? Well, Capo Verde, its independent neighbor in the Macronesia region, is instead part of the African Union rather than the European Union. Additionally, there is a Canary Island nationalist movement that is increasingly getting more and more popular, which emphasizes the Berber history of the island chain over the Spanish, and seeks greater ties with the African mainland. Point is, this is a political issue, and I went with Africa because I thought it was the philosophically consistent approach with what I did with San Juan, and if nothing else I'd hate to be a hypocrite.
San Juan I listed outside of the United States, which might get some people's eyebrows raising. It is, after all, a fact that the United States administers Puerto Rico. However, this is not the case like Hawaii and Alaska where they are states with full representation and all that entails. No, Puerto Rico is a de facto colony of the United States, where even the United Nations has been pounding at the United States to either give it self determination (aka statehood) or to leave the island entirely. I have thoughts about this issue, but this is meant to be a fun friendly discussion about a football rp, not me giving a political screed, so the only thing I will say that I can not, in good faith, list Puerto Rico as meaningfully part of the United States while the political status quo continues. This is the one I feel the most strongly out of the three.
So with the more unpleasant topics out of the way, what can we say about the data? I think it'd be the most helpful to break it down by continent, before returning at the end for more general thoughts.
![[Image: QW9p5gB.png]](https://i.imgur.com/QW9p5gB.png)
Not pictured: Anchorage, "Maya Riveria", Panama City, and the Carribean bids
North America is, in my opinion, the most interesting of the seven continents. As I said before, the United States just absolutely dominates the rest of the world by itself in terms of representation, but as a result, the rest of the continent actually has the lowest successful bid percentage of all the regions. It's funny, because if you asked me to say what is the most underrepresented continent in the world, before I did the math, I would have said South America, which just feels like a ghost town of failed bids. But North America sans the United States is actually in worse position, with only Toronto and Panama City winning bids in either level, giving them a partly 22.2% success rate. Not only that, but Toronto was the first winning bid ever, in S28, whereas Panama City was in S48. Which meant, in universe, there was a literal twenty year gap where no country in this continent was represented in hosting in either level outside of the United States. Given the diversity of North America, this feels like a travesty. But, an understandable one. The sport is called American football for a reason; it was popularized (not invented; it was actually first played in Canada interestingly enough) in the United States, and in real life is by far the country where it is the most popular. I assume most users of this site are Americans themselves, and thus want to highlight their home countries. Meanwhile, those who want to emphasize the international aspect of the ISFL most likely want to highlight truly international locations, as far away and different to the United States as possible. My hypothesis? North America, especially Canada, are simultaneously too foreign for people who'd rather focus on the United States, and not foreign enough for the people who appreciate the international side of the sim. The end result is that these non-United States bids are almost set up to fail, which, in-universe, must be infuriating to people in those countries.
Talking about the United States in particular, I think there's enough bids that we could actually do a separate list involving them, which I will do. I could base it off of indiviual states, but I think that is perhaps a little too granular. Some states, like Tennessee or California, have a lot of bids, but quite a few states in the interior have no representation whatsoever. Plus, I think there are some geographical trends, such as the strong success of the northeastern bids, which I think are trends beyond the individual state level. Instead, I propose to instead divide the United States into the census regions; Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. So that's how I am going to do it. And just for reference, I am not going to include Gotham City in a region due to the issues of having an exact placement of the city. It's unambiguously within the United States, and probably New Jersey to boot, but as long as there's some dispute (I've seen some people passionately argue Gotham is a better stand-in for Chicago than New York City, which isn't helped by the Nolanverse films using primarily Chicago and Pittsburgh for Gotham, giving it a much more Midwestern feel), I don't feel comfortable ruling one way or the other. Not that putting it in the Northeast would change my underlying point.
NORTHEAST: Philadelphia (S37), "New Jersey" (S37), Philadelphia (S39), Boston (S46) (4/4=100.0% hit rate)
SOUTH: El Paso (S30), Louisville (S35), Point Pleasant (S37), San Antonio (S40), Tampa (S40), Atlanta (S40), Everglades (S42), Great Smoky Mountains (S44), Daytona Beach (S44), Nashville (S44), Memphis (S44), Orlando (S47), Memphis (S48) (3/13=23.1% hit rate)
MIDWEST: Chicago (S33), St. Louis (S34) Hawkins (S36), Detroit (S38), Green Bay (S41), Oconomowoc (S46), Detroit (S46), Crawfordsville (S47), Grand Rapids (S49) (2/9=22.2% hit rate)
WEST: Los Angeles (S31), Seattle (S32), Moab (S34), Las Vegas (S39), San Fransisco (S40), Los Angeles (S40), San Diego (S41), Lake Tahoe (S44), Seattle (S46) (4/9=44.4% hit rate)
OTHER: Anchorage (S33), Gotham City (S47) (1/2=50.0% percent rate)
Holy Toledo, look at the Northeast! While it is, by far, the region with the least amount of bids, it is also the region that is the most successful in terms of translating bids into wins. It has a perfect conversion rate of getting at least the ultimini, and even got the ultimus twice. This is what I mean by Gotham City wouldn't really change much even if it was included here; it'd just be yet another piece in the Northeast's victory lap over the other regions. I don't know what to make of this; clearly there is a lot of support for more Northeastern representation within the ultimus selection, and if anything, it might be underrepresented to the United States as a whole as a result of this. Special shout out to Philadelphia, which is one of two cities, and the only unambiguous one, in the world that actually managed to host a season-ending game twice in the modern bidding system. Both of these bids explicitly put it in Taco Bell Stadium, which makes it the only ISFL stadium to host an ultimus since switching to the modern format. Ironically, the S37 bid focused on celebrating the Liberty's ties to the local culture and was posed as a love letter to the city, whereas the S39 bid was made in protest to their relocation to South Africa. Funny how that works.
The West Coast, on the other hand, only hit on half their bids, but also has more than twice the many bids as the Northeast. Given the fact that it shot more shots (one of them being Moab, which is one of those "dead on arrival" bids that had no real chance; I would be fine with them claiming it as a mulligan), I'd say its only somewhat less impressive than the Northeast's dominance. The other thing that is also worth mentioning is how much California is carrying the West here. Five of the nine bids from the west coast are from the Golden State. Not only that, but only Las Vegas was actually voted by users outside of the California cities. That's right, Seattle's bid in S32 was just arbitrarily created and accepted by head office due to a lack of suitable candidates that season. I still include it as a real bid for all analysis because, in-universe, there'd be no real reason not to, but I think its important to point out voters seem to really prefer California to the other western states as of now.
The South is by far the most popular region of the four for submissions to come from, which makes sense given that football was historically a southern institution. But it seems that the familiarity the south provides also works against it; it only barely etches out the Midwest by less than a percentage point for its hit rate on bids. Not only that, but two of the three winners in the south are what I'd consider to be gimmick bids. You know, bids that would never actually go anywhere in real life, but because this is a fictional roleplay, people find it amusing to play a super bowl-caliber game in the middle of a swamp, or up high in the mountains, so they sometimes sneak out a win from sheer novelty. El Paso is literally the only Southern city to win a vote, ever. Which, again, given how much bids came from this region (there are more bids from the South than any continent other than Europe), is honestly shocking. El Paso is actually one of my favorite bids, and I want to come back to it more once I reach the qualitative section of this analysis, because I have things to say about that one in more depth.
Finally, we have the Midwest, the runt of the United States. It has less total bids than the South, but somehow, has an even worse success rate than them. The Midwest truly is where American bids go to die. To be fair to the region as a whole, I also think the Midwest has the history of some of the weakest cities actually nominated out of the four regions. Oconomowoc was an intentional shitpost, Hawkins was a hyper specific reference to a tv show whose popularity was waning even at the time, and Crawfordsville... I can't tell if it was also a shitpost or someone having extreme hometown bias. In either case, I don't think any of these three had a snowball's chance in hell to actually win a vote, which almost certainly is dragging the Midwest's percentage down. Midwest still doesn't have a strong showing even if we exclude them, though. It'd then be 2/6, good for 33.3%, which still puts it far below the other two regions in the United States, and only average worldwide.
![[Image: MZgonLh.png]](https://i.imgur.com/MZgonLh.png)
The graveyard of ultimus bids
No wonder why South America loves the other kind of football so much compared to the one we play. South America is so overlooked in the voting process, that the other category-- which is filled entirely by gimmick bids-- has a higher hit rate than South America. It was also the last continient, chronologically, to be awarded an ultimus or ultimini, winning both coincidentally in the same year, S43. I can't stress this point enough, Philadelphia, alone, had two winning bids before South America, as a continent, had one. And its not from lack of trying, mind you! There were three bids that happened before South America was finally awarded their games: Rio I, Rio II, and the first Buenos Aires bid. But it was also the last continent to get a nomination, too, only getting its first one in S35. That is the tale of the two Rios.
If South America is a graveyard of bids, then Rio de Janerio is its epitaph. Rio was the subject of perhaps one of the stupidest incidents in ultimus bidding history, one in which I think would live in infamy in-universe as one of the largest fuck-ups a municipality ever did in the realm of sports. Notice for most cities that had multiple bids, I identify them by the season. There's Philadelphia S37 and S39, Los Angeles S31 and S40, etc. Not Rio. I actually have to call them Rio I and Rio II, because these two bids competed against each other! Now, Rio is one of the few cities in the world to have more than one marquee stadium. The Maracanã is the most famous one, sure, but there's also the Maracanãzinho, the São Januário, and the Engenhão. There's room for disagreement in Rio, is my point.
But no, there was no dispute over the stadium. Both bids wanted to place the ultimus in the Maracanã. Which, again, makes sense in the vacuum. Except, of course, this means now there was two bids for estensially the same concept! The only thing they disagreed with each other was essentially the graphic. The first one was carnival themed, and the other was themed around the flag. And I will admit the second proposal, in general, looked more professional on both a writing and graphics standpoint, so if the authors were already cooking their Rio idea when the first bid was posted, I could understand the annoyance and wanting to put their own work out there regardless. But... it still led to the city putting out two fucking bids for the same stadium, to compete against each other! No shit Rio didn't win a bid that year; they were cannibalizing each others' votes! The one saving grace is that the author of Rio I seemed to take it in stride, commenting on Rio II's media post that even they preferred II to I. So this is really more of a case of in-universe drama than out of universe. But still... I just feel bad for the citizens of Rio for that fuck-up. No wonder Brazil never put another bid again after that travesty.
![[Image: KWS607l.png]](https://i.imgur.com/KWS607l.png)
Not pictured: Reykjavík
Europe is the continent, besides North America, that has the most action going on. With 23 bids, it is significantly behind North America, but still significantly ahead of the rest of the world. And unlike North America, the bids in Europe are not centrally dominated by one country. There does appear to be a bias in favor of Western Europe, particularly the area that makes up the blue banana, but given that is where most of Europe's population and GDP is concentrated, its not entirely surprising either that people focus on the banana as well. In fact, I'm curious about this, whether being in the banana is actually an advantage or not. Let's run an analysis.
BLUE BANANA: Milan (S28), Amsterdam (S30), Munich (S34), Amsterdam (S38), London (S40), Milan (S42), Amsterdam (S43), Monaco (S47), Stuggart (S48), (4/9=44.4% hit rate)
OTHER: Rome (S28), Reykjavík (S30), Athens (S36), Valencia (S36), Llanfairpwll (S38), Paris (S40), Vienna (S40), Dublin (S41), Prague (S41), Oslo (S42), Swansea (S44), Kraków (S46), Hogwarts (S48), Florence (S49) (5/14=35.1% hit rate)
I will admit, Llanfairpwll is definitely one of those vibe decisions that could reasonably be included in the definition of the blue banana. Traditionally, the banana stops in England, and doesn't cross over to Wales, but a lot of maps of the concept nowadays does include northern Wales. Given the whole point of the blue banana is to be the old, industrial blue chip cities of Europe, and Llanfairpwll is uh, anything but that, I figure it'd make more sense to put it in the not-banana section, regardless of your views of Wales as a whole within the concept.
And just as I suspected, being inside the blue banana gives an improvement to a European bid being accepted, although not to the degree that I thought it would. Bids in the banana get accepted at a higher rate than those not in it, but when compared to the average of Europe as a whole, it only ends up being about 4% higher. I guess just seeing all the colored points clustered together sells the idea better in my mind. Perhaps as more European bids are made in the upcoming seasons, the pattern I'm seeing might become more pronounced? I don't know
Looking at from a country basis, it seems the most popular countries are also within the blue banana. The United Kingdom and Italy are tied with four bids, although only London and both Milan bids are actually in the banana. The Netherlands is in second place with three, Germany has two, Spain (which is not in the banana) has one bid unambiguously in Europe and then the Canary Islands as I outlined before, and then all other European countries sit at one. The Netherlands is interesting, as all its bids are in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is the only city in the world with an unambiguous three bids; Tokyo has three on my map, but two of them are proxies for Pokémon locations. Despite this, it was actually the first Amsterdam bid that succeeded, with then other people unsuccessfully trying to revive the vibes. I actually feel bad; I think the latter Amsterdam bids were better written than the first one, what with actually naming a stadium and having more of an actual write up, yet it was the first one that actually succeeded.
![[Image: 24R6CHw.png]](https://i.imgur.com/24R6CHw.png)
It's going to take a lot to drag my bid away from you~
It's hard to write a lot of interesting analysis about Africa, due to how little submissions it gets compared to other continents. I do find it interesting it both had submissions and won a bid before South America did, as I said back there, but that's not really a new insight. I guess I find it equally interesting that the continent's lone hosting of the ultimus and ultimini happened in the same year, in S35. I assume there must have been some kind of push at the time to play games in Africa. I'm not really privy to anything outside of the threads themselves, so anyone who was around in that era that remembers if there was some kind of unified ballot, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. Otherwise... Philadelphia would depart for the continent only four seasons later. I know that doesn't really mean anything out of character, but in-character, I wonder if people believe that year's end of season games were used as a testbed by the ISFL to gauge how successful a Cape Town franchise could theoretically be. I'm sure there's got to at least be some weirdos in Philly who subscribe to that theory.
Other than that, I guess the other thing that's interesting about Africa is how little submissions it gets. The Canary Islands were the last bid I linked to Africa, and that was all the way back in S44. If you disagree with me on that placement, then the last one would have been Marrakesh in S39. Despite it being listed as a failed bid, that was actually one of the rare times third place was awarded the WFC host title. So Africa has a deceptively good track record of actually winning bids, despite how little interest it gets from a submission perspective. I... really don't know why. Much like with the Northeast US, is there potentially a higher demand for African ultimuses than what the media writers are providing? Or is the unexpectedly high hit rate statistical noise from just how little proposals are made? It's hard to say.
![[Image: ldqr2vj.png]](https://i.imgur.com/ldqr2vj.png)
The GOAT continent?
It's hard to overstate how much of an anomaly Asia is compared to the rest of the world. All the other continents and subregions (with the exception of the Northeast, batting a thousand), have a hit percentage somewhere between 25 to 45%. Asia, as we previously established, is sitting at 69.2% hit rate. Not only that, the vast vast majority of them are ultimus wins, not ultimini. This means Asian cities are consistently winning every season where they are put up for votes. This implies that the community is extremely interested in having games being played in Asia. Which, as one of the community's resident east asia-boo, makes me personally happy. You'll see no complaints from me here about the community's hyperfocus on the region.
What's even more interesting is that Asia is the world's largest continent by both landmass and population, and yet most of the bids are concentrated in a specific subregion: East Asia. Again, I'm not complaining, but there is something to be said about different east asia looks on this map, with nothing but red dots, compared to the sea of greys and blues that appear elsewhere. And while East Asia is carrying this show, its not like its the only part of Asia represented on the map. Singapore had to run against Seoul for S33, so that was actually another example of a continent running the table. Manila lost a bid and then immediately came back to win it the next season, which is a remarkably fast turn around for bids. Finally, Mumbai and Mount Everest represent South Asia, and are both also batting a thousand. I think that whole subcontinent also has some untapped potential and interest.
Also, I'd be remiss to not shout out Tokyo, the other city besides Philadelphia to host a season-ending game twice in the modern system. However, I'm willing to put an asterisk on this one, because one of the two is heavily based on interpetation. There is the clear Tokyo ultimus that happens in S38, and then a few seasons later, there is an ambiguously placed "Pokémon Stadium" ultimini. That being said, the stadium used for that stage was based off of Melee, which gave the location of the Stadium as "Kanto". It's also clearly downtown in a major city. Saffron City is the largest city in Kanto in Pokémon, and semi-relatedly, was the location of the Pokémon stage in the first Smash game. The Bulbapedia page I talked about earlier lists Saffron City's equivalent to be Shinjuku, and there just so happens to be a massive stadium in that ward. The current one was built after Melee came out, but it replaced an older one that was originally built in the 1950s, so hey, I say it counts.
Of course, I was doing my research in reverse chronological order, so I encountered Pokémon Stadium before I found the actual Tokyo bid. Since the Tokyo Dome was, in my lifetime, the place you went to see American football played in Japan, I figured there shouldn't be overlap and I was safe to use the new Japanese National Stadium as the proxy. It shouldn't be confusing at all, right? Yeah, of course the actual Tokyo bid decided to go with the flashy new stadium rather than history. I was definitely not amused lol. Makes it harder to see all the dots in Tokyo since now there's two right next to each other, but it is minor in the grand scheme of things.
The last thing I want to shout out in Asia is Uruk. Like I previously mentioned, some of the proposals are deleted or otherwise inaccessible. I only know they exist because they were preserved on the shortlist itself. Uruk was one of them, and I was so sad to find that out. Uruk is honestly one of the more interesting ideas for an ultimus location I've encountered over this project; it is one of the first major settlements in human history, and is one of the most well known city states that made up Sumer. The logo was well made, and Iraq in general is just a country that is slept upon by a large portion of the RPer community. I wanted to know more. I wanted to see that proposal really badly. But, much like actual archeology, I can only see a glimpse into the past, not the whole thing. Very frustrating.
![[Image: Kkuv6tR.png]](https://i.imgur.com/Kkuv6tR.png)
WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Yeah, I'm going to be honest, there's not much to say about Oceania. It was surprisingly a very popular continent to draw on early on in the league's history. If you count Jakarta as part of Oceania, then it was represented all the way back in S28. If you don't, you only have to wait a single season before you get two separate Australian bids. Then the second Perth bid succeeded in S32, and all interest in Oceania was lost until relatively recently, and one of them was just the Weekly Mirror shitposting. Honestly, a little surprised that no one tried New Zealand even once. The rest of Oceania, I get that its a hard sell to get the average joe to care about Polynesian history and culture, but no one did an Auckland proposal? Christchurch? Or something tied to the Lord of the Rings? Honestly, of all countries to have gotten zero nominations over the twenty or so season period, New Zealand is at the top of my list. Apparently there's even been heat between Aussie and Kiwi users in the ISFL in the past from me scrounging old punishment threads; a NZ proposal could have been a great shoot for that drama.
So let's put aside the data for a second. I have two things that have been on my mind as I was pouring through the history of the ultimus bids. More specifically, I noticed two reoccurring problems as I dug through all the bids. I want to start with the more serious issue, because as someone who is approaching the ISFL mostly as the lens of a roleplayer, there is serious issue with how poorly catalogued and preserved one of the more fun elements of the league is. Championship games being on neutral sites is a unique feature of American football that sets it apart from the other big four North American sports, and I absolutely adore how we managed to capture the energy of the irl bidding process and, in my opinion, made it even more fun than the same few rotating sun belt cities that get the super bowl every couple years irl. To me, joining the league right as the championship game of S48 was being played in Panama City was magical to me, and helped give me inspiration to write what is one of my favorite media pieces I made to this day.
So why do we treat these bids as essentially disposable media? The wiki records the ultimus and ultimini host sites-- except it does an actual poor job in doing so, especially on the ultimini side; I'll get to that in a minute-- but it doesn't have any section, as far as I know, for the actual host selection process. This is in sharp contrast to how Wikipedia does articles on the Super Bowl, which very much talks about the off field politicking over host sites. It's a core part of what makes these neutral site games have so much gravitas: city governments actively want these games awarded to them for tourism benefits, and oftentimes these pitches are wonderful for combining local culture with the sport we love. I tried emulating that when I wrote my proposal for Florence last season, trying to draw upon local history of sport that I loved as an outsider and trying to show it off to the world. The bids that fail, imo, are just as important as the bids that succeed. It informs the trends that are going on in-universe, such as where the sport of football is developing across the world, and have an interest in putting themselves out there on the world stage. It can lead to narratives of certain communities being snubbed by the process, which could lead to fun in-character drama. There's just a lot of vector for interesting world building that we're leaving on the table here.
Why do we put the shortlist in the archive of point tasks recently, instead of where the winners are announced? It robs a lot of the context of what makes the winners special, since we don't know what they competed against. The winner announcement doesn't tend to link to the media posts of the winners either, so if you wanted to read up why a winner won a few seasons ago, you'll need to do a lot of unintuitive digging in another subforum. One that would have a lot of junk information for the purposes of why you're digging into it. It's just an inconvenient mess for any archiving. Honestly, if I was planning this better, I would have put the urls to each bid in the document itself, so it could serve as the depository that I was looking for. But I only thought of that like a few hours into making it, and I didn't want to have to start over from the beggining. Perhaps I'll do it after recharging from writing this media.
And on the issue of archiving, yes, now I will finally address it: the wiki is just flat out wrong on a lot of the nature of bids, particularly on the ultimini side. Now, at the very least, its not necessarily wrong about the cities. But the venues? A lot of it is just made the fuck up. I want to take an example that is near and dear to me. My girlfriend is Singaporean. She was really excited when I told her that sometime in the past there was an ultimini hosted in her country, especially as I hyped up the later ones with all the genuine research and passion that goes into making these bids. She's talked to me in the past about Singapore's marque stadium, the National Stadium, and even showed me a documentary on its construction because of how much she knows I'm into sports. So when I told her that the venue wasn't the National Stadium, but was a fictional "Singa Pura Stadium", she was pretty deflated. I was too. It felt kind of lazy, but I just chalked it up to early installment weirdness and moved on.
Except when I was trawling through the backlog of bids, I found the Singapore bid. And what do you know, what is the focus of the bid? The National Stadium. The bid explicitly name the Stadium and talks, even if briefly, about its history and centrality to the sports experience in the city state. And the wiki just pretends that didn't happen and just puts down a fictional stadium? Why? It almost feels rude to the original bid writer who put in the effort to actually research this topic and try to introduce it to the RP at large.
And this isn't the only time this happened. Los Angeles S31, talked about both the history behind the LA Memorial Coliseum and the state of the art nature of SoFi, saying that both stadiums have the gravitas to host an ultimus while somewhat annoyingly not committing to one. Instead of picking one, the wiki just makes up yet another fictional stadium, a "Rockstar Stadium", and ignores the bid entirely. This also happened for Milan, which was supposed to be in the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza but is listed as a generic City Stadium, Mumbai also lists a generic football field instead of the original Brabourne Stadium (which is actually a cricket stadium in the first place, which if you know, have even larger pitches than football stadiums. It could easily host a ultimini), and perhaps most insultingly, Llanfairpwll sidesteps its soccer pitch and just claims the ultimini was played on "some field". Whoever made the list of DSFL venues just clearly did not care about being accurate to the original bids, and just made everything up in some of the laziest ways possible. Except when the game was in the United States. Then, and only then, does the stadium magically become accurate. Except for Los Angeles.
And I get it to some degree. In universe, we're in the 2060s. If anything, we should now be thinking of our modern stadiums like SoFi, Heinz, etc, as being somewhat dated, let alone stuff actually built in the 20th century. Not every stadium we know today is going to survive to the RP's present day, nor should we assume that new stadiums aren't being built. But, at the same point, this goes all the way back to the 2040s, where current stadiums would still be in their planned lifetimes. What is the point of just contradicting these early ultimini bids for? Who gains by scrubbing out all the references to rl stadiums to have these made up localities? This isn't done on the ISFL level. With one notable exception, they're accurate to the actual pitches of the bids.
Which finally brings me to El Paso. That one exception. Ironically, its disregarding the bid in the exact opposite direction. El Paso might be my favorite bid, ever. It's very clear IceBear and co. put a lot of effort in thinking about not just why El Paso is a good venue for an ultimus, but thought about the logistics of what actually hosting an ultimus might look like. The centerpiece of the proposal, however, was the custom stadium they were designing for the game. This wasn't some kind of throwaway line, they thought about location, amneties, the works. The custom stadium was clearly important to the soul of the pitch, since it was meant to straddle the American-Mexican border at exactly the 50 yard line. Is that realistic? Bluntly, no. Especially since, y'know, the Rio Grande is right there. But you know what? The proposal still drew me in with its gravitas. It's a pitch that's unrealistic, and celebrates its unrealisticness by trying to live up the hype and spectacle of what the ultimus can be. It cares more about the verisimilitude of the affair than strict realism, and I love it for that. There's something genuinely romantic about the way they describe the stadium, and it just drew me into El Paso. I can easily see why it won this year. If only they gave this hypothetical stadium an actual name...
However, if you check the wiki for that ultimus, the custom El Paso stadium is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the location is just listed as the Sun Bowl. Now, I have no problem with the Sun Bowl as a venue; I even used it as a proxy for the custom stadium in my map. But... for someone who clearly put a lot of thought and effort to create an engaging venue, it feels rude, in the opposite direction, to bulldoze over it and just put up a real life location. The custom stadium wasn't a throwaway line, it was the heart and soul of this proposal, and whoever wrote that entry just... ignored it. And it makes me sad, as an author, because I could tell IceBear and co. put effort into designing it. I'd be deflated if a similar situation happened to me.
On the other hand, the ultimus bowl page also went with the real life Hanga Roa Stadium for the Easter Island ultimus instead of the bluntly stupid original idea of shipping SoFi down from Los Angeles by tugboat, a retcon I 2000% agree with. Kind of undermining my own point there, but I need to get that off my chest too
The other thing I want to bring up is the disturbing ignorance of Canadian geography that is on display in multiple bids. The fictional locations? The intentionally shitposty locations? Neither are my thing, if it isn't clear already, but I don't care too much. Let the people have their fun. Poorly researched bids? Oh no, that's when the gloves come off. And we just don't have one, we have two examples of Canadian ultimus bids where the stadium just flat out isn't in the city that is listed, but somehow exactly 162 miles away from the original city. Yes, I put the cities in Google Maps. They're both literally somehow 162 miles. Fucking wack-ass shit. Regardless, I am NAMING and SHAMING people right now for their FLAGRANT DISRESPECT to the Great White North.
The first one I discovered was the Saskatoon, which focused on the Mosiac Stadium. Everything the bid says about the stadium is correct. It is the home stadium for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, one of the teams in the Canadian Football League. It having an imaginative name is more down to opinion, but it certainly is spacious from what pictures I've seen from it. It's also IN FUCKING REGINA. ON THE OTHER SIDE OF SASKATCHEWAN. You know how many fucking brain cells I lost when I first tried recording this bid into my sheet and being confused it kept putting me in the wrong city? Yeah, because IT IS THE WRONG CITY. Yeah, I get it, Saskatoon is the meme city due to Noble, you want to put it there, to reference that. But you know what Saskatoon does have, after just a minute of research? It has one of the most successful college CFL teams in the country, with an ample stadium RIGHT THERE that could host it. Its called Griffiths Stadium, and its image on the Wikipedia page for the city! THIS SHOULD NOT BE THIS HARD.
However, if you think the SLANDER directed at Saskatoon is bad, then you're not ready for the other stadium mix-up. That's right, I'm talking about the infamous, disgusting Quebec City bid. Saskatoon? That is just a research error. This Quebec City bid? ACTUALLY INTENTIONALLY WRONG. The author talks so much about why they love Quebec City, they think it has an awesome name, and is beautiful, and then just drops the bomb that the game IS ACTUALLY INTENDED FOR MONTREAL. HOLY FUCK. "Yeah, I love Salt Lake City so much, the salt beds are so beautiful, we should celebrate how amazing the city is by putting an ultimus in MILE HIGH STADIUM."- br0_0ker, apparentfuckingly.
Imagine you're from Quebec City. The NHL hates your guts, and decided that your city, along with effing half of the northern part of the league, really needed to move south to play in fucking Arizona or Atlanta or whathaveyou. Your precious Nordiques, the one fucking thing Quebec City has going for them, otherwise being perpetually outshone by big brother Montreal, are told to go down to Colorado after a heartbreaking failed last ditch attempt to keep them up north. They immediately win their first Stanley Cup in Colorado IN THEIR FIRST SEASON IN AMERICA. You can only watch in pain and anguish. You're now considered just a satellite market for Montreal, which also decides they want to eat shit and die for the next few decades, because Quebec City can't have a good team ever. Maybe you start getting into baseball in this era since the Frontier League sets itself up in the city. They even occupy the historic Stade Canac, a beautiful example of 1930s architecture. You're not a hockey city, you're a baseball city now.
Maybe you laugh when the Expos finally get moved to DC. Big brother finally getting a taste of their own medicine. You see that Atlanta just can't last there and returns to Winnipeg. The Avalanche is doing well in Colorado, that ship has sailed, but Arizona is doing so badly that the league has to step in to effectively nationalize them so they don't fold completely. There's no way in hell they're staying in the fucking desert. Maybe you'll have your chance in the sun in the future. After years of lobbying, years of begging and pleading the NHL to put a team back in Quebec, you'll literally do anything so you don't have to root for those insufferable Habs, the league announces EXPANSION! INTO LAS VEGAS! MORE DESERT HOCKEY! And then a second expansion team? Is this your chance? No, Seattle! Ok can't be mad at that one it was kind of weird they didn't have an NHL team up to that point tbqh. But Arizona! The NHL has got to admit that their experiment in Phoenix failed, they got to put that team up north soon, right? right?
SALT LAKE. AND THEIR FIRST GOAL EVER WAS AN OWN GOAL IN THEIR OWN EMPTY NET. YES, THAT LITERALLY JUST HAPPENED LIKE A COUPLE OF IRL DAYS AGO, IT WAS SOME OF THE WORST HOCKEY I EVER HAD THE DISPLEASURE TO WATCH. THAT IS THE NHL EXPERIENCE FOR YOU, QUEBEC. WE'LL PUT A FUCKING TEAM IN TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES BEFORE WE LET YOU HAVE THE NORDIQUES AGAIN. YOU WILL WATCH THE HABS AND YOU WILL LIKE IT.
And now here comes this pizza the hutt looking ass coming in and saying how much they love Quebec City, how much they respect you, they think your name is cool and like how old and historic you guys are. Wouldn't it be great if the ultimus came over and grace your city? Why yes, that does sound pretty good. You quite like that. You say you're intrigued and wish to subscribe to his newsletter. He gives you the pitch.
IT IS IN MONTREAL. THE GAME IS JUST IN THE FUCKING OLYMPIC STADIUM. YOUR PERFECTLY FUNCTIONAL AND FINE BASEBALL STADIUM GETS YOU NO RESPECT. SO THEY PUT IT IN A BASEBALL STADIUM IN MONTREAL AND JUST PRETEND ITS QUEBEC CITY. YOU GET NOTHING. YOU LOSE. THAT TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES FRANCHISE ACTUALLY HAPPENS BECAUSE GOD AND THE NHL HATES QUEBEC CITY AND WANTS YOU TO SUFFER. THIRTY CUPS TO COLORADO, THEY NEVER LOSE AGAIN. THERE IS ONLY PAIN UNDER THE CANADIEN C.
...
Ok, might have gone a little overboard there. Let's just say, I have opinions on thinking you can represent Quebec City through Montreal, as someone else from a minor-major urban area mostly defined by not being their larger neighbor. I have some empathy for their plight, ok? I know they deserve better than the bid they actually got.
I think I said everything I can say on this topic at this point. I could talk about some of my opinions on some of the individual bids, but at this point, I don't think i can add anything to the conversation I didn't already just add there. If you made it this far, thank you for listening to my incoherent, rambling stream of consciousness. I really hope it was entertaining, and it inspires more people to care about one of my favorite aspects of this rp. Host City nominations for S50 should be coming up soon. I know I'm going to be submitting one again this year, and I guess I hope more than two people do it again this season.
Thank you for your understanding.
The Ultimus has evolved a lot since it was first played in the inaugural 2016 season.
Actually, that's a good springboard for discussion in itself, even if it's a tangent: the naming system. Much like the NFL, the ISFL plays in Northern Hemisphere Fall, but the championship game is played after the new year. This leads to inconsistency in how they're even described. Do we call the first Ultimus the 2016 Ultimus, since it was for the 2016 season? Or do we call it the 2017 Ultimus, because it was played in that year? In real life, for the Super Bowl, I've seen people go both ways, and got into arguments for it. I legitimately believe this is partially why the NFL went with a numbering system for the Super Bowl, so they can just call it Super Bowl Whatever and sidestep the issue of the date entirely. Out of character, in the ISFL, we've also kind of sidestepped the issue to a degree by caring more about the number of the season than the in-universe date. S1, instead of 2016, for example. This means that the inaugural Ultimus is just referred to as the S1 Ultimus, which is extremely clear and unambiguous in what it represents. It makes sense for a dating system out of character, and for the sake of convenience and deference to tradition I'm going to use this naming system in the article outside of this tangent.
However, the roleplayer in me wants to at least acknowledge that this actually isn't the most realistic way of sidestepping the issue. It might work for the name of the Ultimus itself, since we conveniently started playing it in the first season. If that's even the case. I'm not entirely sure that is the case. Unfortunately I don't entirely remember which media piece it was in (I think it was one of baron's, if it narrows it down), but I recall reading that the ultimus and ultimini names were not initially used at the beginning of the league, but were voted on a few seasons into it. Ultimini wasn't even the original name for the DSFL championship-- it was something else entirely, and was renamed later on both to bring consistency, and because there was some issue with the first name (either it was crass, named after someone toxic, or both. I really don't remember the specifics sorry). Meaning calling the first champion the "S1 Ultimus" is, at best, retroactive. This leads to issues on what even is the first ultimus, in an in-universe sense. When the system of the Super Bowl was first made in the NFL, the league didn't backdate its championship games all the way back to 1920 as Super Bowls. It started counting when the first NFL-AFL championship game was played, where "Super Bowl" was the fan and broadcast preferred nickname that eventually became official. Now, this might be because of the nature of the NFL and AFL merging, the league felt the old NFL Champions were not equivalent to the Super Bowl, but instead were equivalent to the eventual NFC Championship games. But it is still important to note that the Super Bowl name was never used to refer to games that weren't actually played under that name, even if unofficial (The name Super Bowl didn't become official until III, for reference).
While we as users might have memory holed a good portion of the early league history, the characters in-universe certainly haven't. Indeed, given that the league was supposed to start playing in 2016, if anything, the early history of the ISFL should be more well known than the early history of the NFL and college football. The first season would still be in living memory of the older generation of people (someone who watched the first game of the ISFL at twenty years old would be only 68 now), and recording of information now is just, in general, better than in the early 20th century. Basically, people would actually know if the first season's championship game was played under the branding of ultimus, or if the name was applied retroactively. And perhaps, since we cleverly called it the S1 Ultimus, and not Ultimus I, perhaps this whole issue is sidestepped. No one disputes that the first season was played in 2016. But I can tell you that no sports fan, in any league, actually dates things by when the league is founded. Maybe on special occasions, like in 2019, the NFL liked to hype up it was the 100th season played. But bluntly, no one cares that 2024 is the NFL's S105. No one calls the 2024 World Series the S148 World Series. No one dates things like this irl! They use the calendar year, because we use the calendar in daily use, while the number of years since league formation is just trivia even to the most ardent sports fan.
This isn't even beginning to mention that the ISFL and the DSFL's season lengths aren't actually in sync with one another in an in-universe standpoint. The DSFL only started playing two seasons after the ISFL started, in 2018 (aka, S3). Yet, whenever we talk about anything related to the DSFL, ultimini or otherwise, we just pretend there were these phantom seasons in 2016 and 2017 that never actually happened. It makes sense for us, out of character, since the ISFL is the reason why we're all here, and the DSFL mechanically only exists for the benefit of the ISFL. So of course we date everything from an ISFL perspective. But from an in-universe perspective? This is fucking ludicrous. No one does this for the minor leagues of other sports. They're considered their own leagues entirely, with their own, unique history and culture. When the AHL counts its seasons, we start with the first American unified minor league hockey season in 1936 (which would then formally merge two years later in 1938). Alternatively, if you wanted, you could theoretically start counting from the first season played by the older of the two leagues that make up the AHL as its first "season", which would be the Can-Am League in 1926. That's not how its commonly done, but that's what we do with the NFL and MLB, so I wouldn't fight you on that. But what we certainly don't do is date the AHL all the way to the NHL's formation in 1917, and just pretend there was phantom seasons played between 1917 and 1926/1936. The 2024-2025 Calder Cup is the S89 (or 99) Calder Cup, not the S108 Calder Cup. The most recent ultimini, regardless of anything else, should not be the S49 ultimini, it should be regarded as the DSFL S47 ultimini.
So tl;dr, either using the calendar year (which then brings back the question of do you date it by the season's start or the year the game is played in?) or in sequential order of when the game itself was first played (which almost certainly isn't actually the first season for the ISFL, and by definition can't be the same for the DSFL due to being founded in a different year) makes a lot more sense in-universe than dating by seasons from an in-universe standpoint. In either case, both have their problems, and would probably lead to a lot of bickering over the true name of these games. Our out-of-universe ordering system is problematic for the DSFL, and would still probably not be used for the ISFL in-universe.
Whew. That was a tangent, like I said.
The Ultimus has evolved a lot since it was allegedly first played in the inaugural 2016 season. For the first 27 seasons, representing the years between 2016 and 2042, the Ultimus was played in one of the stadiums of the playing team. The wiki lists the location as being the same as the winning team every single time, which to me reeks of retcon. Like the home team wins every single game, every single time, with no pattern between the conferences for who hosts the game, for nearly 30 seasons? I actually don't believe that, and I won't be humoring that line of thought in this article. Instead, it seems like we just agreed that the Ultimus was played somewhere between the two participating teams, and leave it at that.
However, in S29-- the 2043 season-- there was a reform in the way hosts were determined for the ultimus. Instead of having Schrodinger's Arena, where two locations are in superposition until a winner is observed and the wave function collapses to pick one of the two stadiums, the league instead introduced a system where people could vote on bids for consideration of a neutral host site, mirroring how the NFL awards Super Bowls to neutral site locations. For the first two seasons this system was in place, the ultimus and the ultimini were a bundled pair. The users voted on what bid they liked the most, and the winning bid got to host both games. Ironically to the season gap between their respective founding, two seasons later, the ultimini was broken off from this package and rewarded to the runner-up bid. This system then has remained in place, largely unchanged since S30-- 2046. On years where the WFC occurs, third place is awarded it, which is kind of amusing from a roleplaying standpoint because shouldn't the equivalent of the world cup be more prestigious than the yearly championship game in terms of hosting? But that's another tangent for another time.
Recently, I explored the entire backlog of the bidding process, from last season all the way to the start of the system in S28, all because I was curious of the worldbuilding implications of what cities bid, and what cities tend to actually be picked. This has caused insurmountable psychic damage to my mind, and I come off worse for wear in this project. S28 was, in real life, played in 2021. I had to go through three years worth of media backlog to find every single bid. None of the information is stored in the same place. Recently, there is a trend to keep the shortlist archived in the point task forum, but the winner selection in the host city department announcements. S47, which had one of the larger bidding classes, didn't actually link to any of the media posts on its short list, forcing me to find all of them manually by searching the forum database. And the ISFL search bar gave me a lot of garbage data for Orlando in particular, between character names and I think assuming Orlando was a mistyping of O-Line. But then suddenly, once you hit S35, the shortlists are archived in the department announcements as well? Which, to be fair, I do prefer them being centralized in one location but it definitely threw me a loop when compiling this information. I also encountered massive discrepancies between many of the bids and how they ultimately got recorded in the wiki, and I'm not entirely sure which one is meant to be more canonical. Not only that, but some of the bids are missing! I know they exist because they were put on the shortlist, but following any link to investigate them leads to deleted threads and in one case, a deleted google doc.
During this process, I decided to map out every single location, which you can access here. Every single bid I could find a reference to, that is to say, every bid that was mentioned in a shortlist, is included. If there were any bids not present in a shortlist, then I didn't necessarily go out of my way to find them. The graded article backlog is massively long and cumbersome to navigate and I wasn't going to individually search every page manually. Located in this google map is the name of the city, the ISFL season the bid was for, and, if provided, the stadium the bid listed to be played in. In cases where the stadium is clearly defined, that is usually the end of it. No matter how stupid, how impractical a bid was, I tried to respect locations as it was originally pitched, with some exceptions that I will get into later. However, sometimes stadium names get mentioned offhandedly with no clear indication that is where they wanted the game to be hosted, or no stadium is listed at all. In these cases, if there was a clear candidate for a stadium I could reasonably infer from (either from said implication from the bid itself, or because the city has a clear marquee stadium they'd use to host the game), I'd list the stadium with the tag "presumably". If there's too many possible locations, I don't know enough about the city to comment on, or bluntly, just couldn't be assed to do research on (no, I really don't care enough about Crawfordsville or Oconomowoc to find a suitable stadium, sue me), I'd list it as "No Stadium Specified" and move on.
Fictional locations can and were submitted, so for a map based on real world locations, they were an extra headache. What I ultimately settled on was trying to find real life proxies for the fictional location, and leaving it at that. Some were easier than others. Hawkins, for example, seems to almost universally be seen as a stand-in for the real life town of Bedford, so that is where I put the Hawkins bid. Pokémon is another series that has very strong parallels to real life geography; there is a whole article on Bulbapedia that maps Pokémon locations to their real life counterparts, which I used as a reference for those bids. Others provided more of a headache. Hogwarts is canonically in Scotland, but the castle it is based after, Alnwick Castle, is in England. If I used Alnwick Castle, people will point out that it should be in Scotland. If I use a different castle, more observant HP fans might point out that blunder too. Ultimately, I decided to put it in Scotland, using Stirling Castle (the first Scottish castle I could think of) as a proxy, because I realized I didn't want to put in the brainpower to think of a better location for a work that I am increasingly antipathetic towards (obligatory fuck transphobia).
But by far the most controversial one I could see coming is where I placed Gotham City. Gotham City is known to be on the Eastern Seaboard... and that's basically about it. Where it exists roughly in relation to those states depends a lot on the writers. It's usually in the Mid-Atlantic, with New Jersey being a common answer. Indeed, if you asked me where I'd place Gotham City, I'd refer to this image, which places Gotham in southern New Jersey, and Metropolis across the bay in Maryland. This is how I always knew it, and will personally always see it. But I also understand that this is old canon, and things have shifted around since then. However, I'm not just a superhero nerd, I'm a Steelers superhero nerd, and I know that the infamous football scene from the Dark Knight Rises shows Gotham's football stadium, and its just then-Heinz Field. That's Hines Ward returning in the most explosive punt return in football history, and the rest of the players were then-members of the Steelers. So fuck you, Gotham's proxy is Heinz Field, and I'm not apologizing for that.
So, with that out of the way, here's the map of the bids, across the world.
Thank you North Pole for causing this to be way more zoomed out than it needed to be
To explain what you're looking at, red dots are bids that won first place their respective season, and would go on to host an ultimus. Blue dots are runner ups, who would host an ultimini that year. The two purple dots represent the winners of S28 and S29, who would host both games their respective season. Grey dots represent all other bids, including bids that would host the WFC. I deliberately chose not to separately list WFC hosts, because of how rare and random the WFC was played in this period of time. It felt unfair to randomly reward a few third place finishes with higher precedence than the rest. So I modeled them as just failed ultimus bids.
Already, you can probably tell that some regions (looking at you, United States) are more popular than others for a bid. You might be also able to tell that some regions hit more often when they are proposed (looking at you, East Asia, which has a near perfect success rate for bids). But exactly how much more popular is the United States compared to the rest of the world? Exactly how much more successful East Asia is in securing bids compared to the rest of the world? For that, we are going to start with a world analysis.
BIDS, WORLDWIDE:
UNITED STATES: El Paso (S30), Los Angeles (S31), Seattle (S32), Anchorage (S33), Chicago (S33), St. Louis (S34), Moab (S34), Louisville (S35), Hawkins (S36), Philadelphia (S37), "New Jersey" (S37), Point Pleasant (S37), Detroit (S38), Las Vegas (S39), Philadelphia (S39), San Fransisco (S40), Tampa (S40), Atlanta (S40), Los Angeles (S40), San Antonio (S40), Green Bay (S41), San Diego (S41), Everglades (S42), Great Smoky Mountains (S44), Lake Tahoe (S44), Daytona Beach (S44), Nashville (S44), Memphis (S44), Boston (S46), Oconomowoc (S46), Detroit (S46), Seattle (S46), Gotham City (S47), Crawfordsville (S47), Orlando (S47), Memphis (S48), Grand Rapids (S49) (12/37=32.4% hit rate)
NORTH AMERICA, EXL. U.S.: Toronto (S29), "Riviera Maya" (S34), Tijuana (S35), Quebec City (S36), San Juan (S40), Montreal (S40), Grenada (S41), Saskatoon (S43), Panama City (S48) (2/9=22.2% hit rate)
COMBINED: 14/46=30.4%
SOUTH AMERICA: Rio de Janeiro I (S35), Rio de Janeiro II (S35), Buenos Aires (S42), Easter Island (S43), Cusco (S43), Buenos Aires (S45), Machu Picchu (S46) (2/7=28.6% hit rate)
EUROPE: Milan (S28), Rome (S28), Amsterdam (S30), Reykjavík (S30), Munich (S34), Athens (S36), Valencia (S36), Llanfairpwll (S38), Amsterdam (S38), London (S40), Paris (S40), Vienna (S40), Dublin (S41), Prague (S41), Oslo (S42), Milan (S42), Amsterdam (S43), Swansea (S44), Kraków (S46), Monaco (S47), Stuggart (S48), Hogwarts (S48), Florence (S49) (9/23=39.1% hit rate)
AFRICA: Nairobi (S31), Abidjan (S35), Cairo (S35), Marrakesh (S39), Canary Islands (S44) (2/5=40.0% hit rate)
ASIA: Hong Kong (S31), Seoul (S33), Singapore (S33), Manila (S35), Manila (S36), Tokyo (S38), Mumbai (S41), Uruk (S41) Bangkok (S41), Mount Everest (S45) Pokemon Stadium (S45), Taipei (S47), Indigo Plateau (S47) (9/13=69.2% hit rate)
OCEANIA: Jakarta (S28), Perth (S29), Gold Coast (S29), Perth (S32), Sydney (S40), Yap Islands (S47) (2/6=33.3% hit rate)
OTHER: Atlantis (S38), North Pole (S40), Pacific Ocean (S44) (1/3=33.3% hit rate)
(Underline is ultimus winning bids, italics are ultimini winning bids, both at the same time hosted both)
So yeah, firstly, the sheer amount of bids the United States gets compared to other countries basically means I need to treat it as its own continent entirely. Otherwise, it'd just dominate North America and we wouldn't be able to see anything else interesting going on there. I did combine the two together so you could get a full picture of the North American continent, but for all intents and purposes the rest of North America might as well be a ghost town compared to the United States. At 37 entries, it easily dwarfs any two other regions combined. Indeed, it is only barely smaller than the rest of the world excluding the second largest region, Europe (40 vs 37). This might be the International Simulation Football League, but the Americans are still running the show.
The other thing I want to briefly touch is a few geographic edge cases. That is to say, Jakarta, San Juan, and the Canary Islands, which I assume are probably the three people are most likely going to have issue with placement. Turns out, continents are a social construct, unless you're a geologist using plate tectonics. And no one here is using plate tectonics to define continents in common day parlance, so don't even start with me there (No, you don't actually believe Siberia is an integral part of North America, sit down). As a result, for these three edge cases, I needed to use my own judgement and vibes to figure out where to place it. For Jakarta, where Asia ends and Oceania begins is somewhat nebulous, due to the lack of a hard geographic boundary to define the border. I've seen all of Indonesia listed as being in Asia, all of Indonesia listed as Oceania, and sometimes its split down the middle like Russia. It really just depends on the vibes of whoever is making it. Given Oceania is already the murkiest continent in terms of definition, I decided to go with the maximally largest definition of it-- all of Indonesia-- since really the continent needs all the help it can get to have representation here. This is the edgiest of the three, and I wouldn't fight anyone who thinks its more appropriately placed in Asia, which is probably the more common interpretation.
The Canary Islands is another edge case; the islands are literally off the coastline of Africa, and in terms of geology and native fauna and flora have way more to do with Africa than Europe. That being said, while there was a native African population of the islands- the Guanches-- they have been unfortunately wiped out over the ensuring hundreds of years of Spanish rule, and the population living there for the most part identify as Spanish of some stripe. Not only that, but the Canaries are part of the European Union as an Outermost Region. So why did I include it with Africa? Well, Capo Verde, its independent neighbor in the Macronesia region, is instead part of the African Union rather than the European Union. Additionally, there is a Canary Island nationalist movement that is increasingly getting more and more popular, which emphasizes the Berber history of the island chain over the Spanish, and seeks greater ties with the African mainland. Point is, this is a political issue, and I went with Africa because I thought it was the philosophically consistent approach with what I did with San Juan, and if nothing else I'd hate to be a hypocrite.
San Juan I listed outside of the United States, which might get some people's eyebrows raising. It is, after all, a fact that the United States administers Puerto Rico. However, this is not the case like Hawaii and Alaska where they are states with full representation and all that entails. No, Puerto Rico is a de facto colony of the United States, where even the United Nations has been pounding at the United States to either give it self determination (aka statehood) or to leave the island entirely. I have thoughts about this issue, but this is meant to be a fun friendly discussion about a football rp, not me giving a political screed, so the only thing I will say that I can not, in good faith, list Puerto Rico as meaningfully part of the United States while the political status quo continues. This is the one I feel the most strongly out of the three.
So with the more unpleasant topics out of the way, what can we say about the data? I think it'd be the most helpful to break it down by continent, before returning at the end for more general thoughts.
UNITED STATES AND NORTH AMERICA
Not pictured: Anchorage, "Maya Riveria", Panama City, and the Carribean bids
North America is, in my opinion, the most interesting of the seven continents. As I said before, the United States just absolutely dominates the rest of the world by itself in terms of representation, but as a result, the rest of the continent actually has the lowest successful bid percentage of all the regions. It's funny, because if you asked me to say what is the most underrepresented continent in the world, before I did the math, I would have said South America, which just feels like a ghost town of failed bids. But North America sans the United States is actually in worse position, with only Toronto and Panama City winning bids in either level, giving them a partly 22.2% success rate. Not only that, but Toronto was the first winning bid ever, in S28, whereas Panama City was in S48. Which meant, in universe, there was a literal twenty year gap where no country in this continent was represented in hosting in either level outside of the United States. Given the diversity of North America, this feels like a travesty. But, an understandable one. The sport is called American football for a reason; it was popularized (not invented; it was actually first played in Canada interestingly enough) in the United States, and in real life is by far the country where it is the most popular. I assume most users of this site are Americans themselves, and thus want to highlight their home countries. Meanwhile, those who want to emphasize the international aspect of the ISFL most likely want to highlight truly international locations, as far away and different to the United States as possible. My hypothesis? North America, especially Canada, are simultaneously too foreign for people who'd rather focus on the United States, and not foreign enough for the people who appreciate the international side of the sim. The end result is that these non-United States bids are almost set up to fail, which, in-universe, must be infuriating to people in those countries.
Talking about the United States in particular, I think there's enough bids that we could actually do a separate list involving them, which I will do. I could base it off of indiviual states, but I think that is perhaps a little too granular. Some states, like Tennessee or California, have a lot of bids, but quite a few states in the interior have no representation whatsoever. Plus, I think there are some geographical trends, such as the strong success of the northeastern bids, which I think are trends beyond the individual state level. Instead, I propose to instead divide the United States into the census regions; Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. So that's how I am going to do it. And just for reference, I am not going to include Gotham City in a region due to the issues of having an exact placement of the city. It's unambiguously within the United States, and probably New Jersey to boot, but as long as there's some dispute (I've seen some people passionately argue Gotham is a better stand-in for Chicago than New York City, which isn't helped by the Nolanverse films using primarily Chicago and Pittsburgh for Gotham, giving it a much more Midwestern feel), I don't feel comfortable ruling one way or the other. Not that putting it in the Northeast would change my underlying point.
NORTHEAST: Philadelphia (S37), "New Jersey" (S37), Philadelphia (S39), Boston (S46) (4/4=100.0% hit rate)
SOUTH: El Paso (S30), Louisville (S35), Point Pleasant (S37), San Antonio (S40), Tampa (S40), Atlanta (S40), Everglades (S42), Great Smoky Mountains (S44), Daytona Beach (S44), Nashville (S44), Memphis (S44), Orlando (S47), Memphis (S48) (3/13=23.1% hit rate)
MIDWEST: Chicago (S33), St. Louis (S34) Hawkins (S36), Detroit (S38), Green Bay (S41), Oconomowoc (S46), Detroit (S46), Crawfordsville (S47), Grand Rapids (S49) (2/9=22.2% hit rate)
WEST: Los Angeles (S31), Seattle (S32), Moab (S34), Las Vegas (S39), San Fransisco (S40), Los Angeles (S40), San Diego (S41), Lake Tahoe (S44), Seattle (S46) (4/9=44.4% hit rate)
OTHER: Anchorage (S33), Gotham City (S47) (1/2=50.0% percent rate)
Holy Toledo, look at the Northeast! While it is, by far, the region with the least amount of bids, it is also the region that is the most successful in terms of translating bids into wins. It has a perfect conversion rate of getting at least the ultimini, and even got the ultimus twice. This is what I mean by Gotham City wouldn't really change much even if it was included here; it'd just be yet another piece in the Northeast's victory lap over the other regions. I don't know what to make of this; clearly there is a lot of support for more Northeastern representation within the ultimus selection, and if anything, it might be underrepresented to the United States as a whole as a result of this. Special shout out to Philadelphia, which is one of two cities, and the only unambiguous one, in the world that actually managed to host a season-ending game twice in the modern bidding system. Both of these bids explicitly put it in Taco Bell Stadium, which makes it the only ISFL stadium to host an ultimus since switching to the modern format. Ironically, the S37 bid focused on celebrating the Liberty's ties to the local culture and was posed as a love letter to the city, whereas the S39 bid was made in protest to their relocation to South Africa. Funny how that works.
The West Coast, on the other hand, only hit on half their bids, but also has more than twice the many bids as the Northeast. Given the fact that it shot more shots (one of them being Moab, which is one of those "dead on arrival" bids that had no real chance; I would be fine with them claiming it as a mulligan), I'd say its only somewhat less impressive than the Northeast's dominance. The other thing that is also worth mentioning is how much California is carrying the West here. Five of the nine bids from the west coast are from the Golden State. Not only that, but only Las Vegas was actually voted by users outside of the California cities. That's right, Seattle's bid in S32 was just arbitrarily created and accepted by head office due to a lack of suitable candidates that season. I still include it as a real bid for all analysis because, in-universe, there'd be no real reason not to, but I think its important to point out voters seem to really prefer California to the other western states as of now.
The South is by far the most popular region of the four for submissions to come from, which makes sense given that football was historically a southern institution. But it seems that the familiarity the south provides also works against it; it only barely etches out the Midwest by less than a percentage point for its hit rate on bids. Not only that, but two of the three winners in the south are what I'd consider to be gimmick bids. You know, bids that would never actually go anywhere in real life, but because this is a fictional roleplay, people find it amusing to play a super bowl-caliber game in the middle of a swamp, or up high in the mountains, so they sometimes sneak out a win from sheer novelty. El Paso is literally the only Southern city to win a vote, ever. Which, again, given how much bids came from this region (there are more bids from the South than any continent other than Europe), is honestly shocking. El Paso is actually one of my favorite bids, and I want to come back to it more once I reach the qualitative section of this analysis, because I have things to say about that one in more depth.
Finally, we have the Midwest, the runt of the United States. It has less total bids than the South, but somehow, has an even worse success rate than them. The Midwest truly is where American bids go to die. To be fair to the region as a whole, I also think the Midwest has the history of some of the weakest cities actually nominated out of the four regions. Oconomowoc was an intentional shitpost, Hawkins was a hyper specific reference to a tv show whose popularity was waning even at the time, and Crawfordsville... I can't tell if it was also a shitpost or someone having extreme hometown bias. In either case, I don't think any of these three had a snowball's chance in hell to actually win a vote, which almost certainly is dragging the Midwest's percentage down. Midwest still doesn't have a strong showing even if we exclude them, though. It'd then be 2/6, good for 33.3%, which still puts it far below the other two regions in the United States, and only average worldwide.
SOUTH AMERICA
The graveyard of ultimus bids
No wonder why South America loves the other kind of football so much compared to the one we play. South America is so overlooked in the voting process, that the other category-- which is filled entirely by gimmick bids-- has a higher hit rate than South America. It was also the last continient, chronologically, to be awarded an ultimus or ultimini, winning both coincidentally in the same year, S43. I can't stress this point enough, Philadelphia, alone, had two winning bids before South America, as a continent, had one. And its not from lack of trying, mind you! There were three bids that happened before South America was finally awarded their games: Rio I, Rio II, and the first Buenos Aires bid. But it was also the last continent to get a nomination, too, only getting its first one in S35. That is the tale of the two Rios.
If South America is a graveyard of bids, then Rio de Janerio is its epitaph. Rio was the subject of perhaps one of the stupidest incidents in ultimus bidding history, one in which I think would live in infamy in-universe as one of the largest fuck-ups a municipality ever did in the realm of sports. Notice for most cities that had multiple bids, I identify them by the season. There's Philadelphia S37 and S39, Los Angeles S31 and S40, etc. Not Rio. I actually have to call them Rio I and Rio II, because these two bids competed against each other! Now, Rio is one of the few cities in the world to have more than one marquee stadium. The Maracanã is the most famous one, sure, but there's also the Maracanãzinho, the São Januário, and the Engenhão. There's room for disagreement in Rio, is my point.
But no, there was no dispute over the stadium. Both bids wanted to place the ultimus in the Maracanã. Which, again, makes sense in the vacuum. Except, of course, this means now there was two bids for estensially the same concept! The only thing they disagreed with each other was essentially the graphic. The first one was carnival themed, and the other was themed around the flag. And I will admit the second proposal, in general, looked more professional on both a writing and graphics standpoint, so if the authors were already cooking their Rio idea when the first bid was posted, I could understand the annoyance and wanting to put their own work out there regardless. But... it still led to the city putting out two fucking bids for the same stadium, to compete against each other! No shit Rio didn't win a bid that year; they were cannibalizing each others' votes! The one saving grace is that the author of Rio I seemed to take it in stride, commenting on Rio II's media post that even they preferred II to I. So this is really more of a case of in-universe drama than out of universe. But still... I just feel bad for the citizens of Rio for that fuck-up. No wonder Brazil never put another bid again after that travesty.
EUROPE
Not pictured: Reykjavík
Europe is the continent, besides North America, that has the most action going on. With 23 bids, it is significantly behind North America, but still significantly ahead of the rest of the world. And unlike North America, the bids in Europe are not centrally dominated by one country. There does appear to be a bias in favor of Western Europe, particularly the area that makes up the blue banana, but given that is where most of Europe's population and GDP is concentrated, its not entirely surprising either that people focus on the banana as well. In fact, I'm curious about this, whether being in the banana is actually an advantage or not. Let's run an analysis.
BLUE BANANA: Milan (S28), Amsterdam (S30), Munich (S34), Amsterdam (S38), London (S40), Milan (S42), Amsterdam (S43), Monaco (S47), Stuggart (S48), (4/9=44.4% hit rate)
OTHER: Rome (S28), Reykjavík (S30), Athens (S36), Valencia (S36), Llanfairpwll (S38), Paris (S40), Vienna (S40), Dublin (S41), Prague (S41), Oslo (S42), Swansea (S44), Kraków (S46), Hogwarts (S48), Florence (S49) (5/14=35.1% hit rate)
I will admit, Llanfairpwll is definitely one of those vibe decisions that could reasonably be included in the definition of the blue banana. Traditionally, the banana stops in England, and doesn't cross over to Wales, but a lot of maps of the concept nowadays does include northern Wales. Given the whole point of the blue banana is to be the old, industrial blue chip cities of Europe, and Llanfairpwll is uh, anything but that, I figure it'd make more sense to put it in the not-banana section, regardless of your views of Wales as a whole within the concept.
And just as I suspected, being inside the blue banana gives an improvement to a European bid being accepted, although not to the degree that I thought it would. Bids in the banana get accepted at a higher rate than those not in it, but when compared to the average of Europe as a whole, it only ends up being about 4% higher. I guess just seeing all the colored points clustered together sells the idea better in my mind. Perhaps as more European bids are made in the upcoming seasons, the pattern I'm seeing might become more pronounced? I don't know
Looking at from a country basis, it seems the most popular countries are also within the blue banana. The United Kingdom and Italy are tied with four bids, although only London and both Milan bids are actually in the banana. The Netherlands is in second place with three, Germany has two, Spain (which is not in the banana) has one bid unambiguously in Europe and then the Canary Islands as I outlined before, and then all other European countries sit at one. The Netherlands is interesting, as all its bids are in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is the only city in the world with an unambiguous three bids; Tokyo has three on my map, but two of them are proxies for Pokémon locations. Despite this, it was actually the first Amsterdam bid that succeeded, with then other people unsuccessfully trying to revive the vibes. I actually feel bad; I think the latter Amsterdam bids were better written than the first one, what with actually naming a stadium and having more of an actual write up, yet it was the first one that actually succeeded.
AFRICA
It's going to take a lot to drag my bid away from you~
It's hard to write a lot of interesting analysis about Africa, due to how little submissions it gets compared to other continents. I do find it interesting it both had submissions and won a bid before South America did, as I said back there, but that's not really a new insight. I guess I find it equally interesting that the continent's lone hosting of the ultimus and ultimini happened in the same year, in S35. I assume there must have been some kind of push at the time to play games in Africa. I'm not really privy to anything outside of the threads themselves, so anyone who was around in that era that remembers if there was some kind of unified ballot, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. Otherwise... Philadelphia would depart for the continent only four seasons later. I know that doesn't really mean anything out of character, but in-character, I wonder if people believe that year's end of season games were used as a testbed by the ISFL to gauge how successful a Cape Town franchise could theoretically be. I'm sure there's got to at least be some weirdos in Philly who subscribe to that theory.
Other than that, I guess the other thing that's interesting about Africa is how little submissions it gets. The Canary Islands were the last bid I linked to Africa, and that was all the way back in S44. If you disagree with me on that placement, then the last one would have been Marrakesh in S39. Despite it being listed as a failed bid, that was actually one of the rare times third place was awarded the WFC host title. So Africa has a deceptively good track record of actually winning bids, despite how little interest it gets from a submission perspective. I... really don't know why. Much like with the Northeast US, is there potentially a higher demand for African ultimuses than what the media writers are providing? Or is the unexpectedly high hit rate statistical noise from just how little proposals are made? It's hard to say.
ASIA
The GOAT continent?
It's hard to overstate how much of an anomaly Asia is compared to the rest of the world. All the other continents and subregions (with the exception of the Northeast, batting a thousand), have a hit percentage somewhere between 25 to 45%. Asia, as we previously established, is sitting at 69.2% hit rate. Not only that, the vast vast majority of them are ultimus wins, not ultimini. This means Asian cities are consistently winning every season where they are put up for votes. This implies that the community is extremely interested in having games being played in Asia. Which, as one of the community's resident east asia-boo, makes me personally happy. You'll see no complaints from me here about the community's hyperfocus on the region.
What's even more interesting is that Asia is the world's largest continent by both landmass and population, and yet most of the bids are concentrated in a specific subregion: East Asia. Again, I'm not complaining, but there is something to be said about different east asia looks on this map, with nothing but red dots, compared to the sea of greys and blues that appear elsewhere. And while East Asia is carrying this show, its not like its the only part of Asia represented on the map. Singapore had to run against Seoul for S33, so that was actually another example of a continent running the table. Manila lost a bid and then immediately came back to win it the next season, which is a remarkably fast turn around for bids. Finally, Mumbai and Mount Everest represent South Asia, and are both also batting a thousand. I think that whole subcontinent also has some untapped potential and interest.
Also, I'd be remiss to not shout out Tokyo, the other city besides Philadelphia to host a season-ending game twice in the modern system. However, I'm willing to put an asterisk on this one, because one of the two is heavily based on interpetation. There is the clear Tokyo ultimus that happens in S38, and then a few seasons later, there is an ambiguously placed "Pokémon Stadium" ultimini. That being said, the stadium used for that stage was based off of Melee, which gave the location of the Stadium as "Kanto". It's also clearly downtown in a major city. Saffron City is the largest city in Kanto in Pokémon, and semi-relatedly, was the location of the Pokémon stage in the first Smash game. The Bulbapedia page I talked about earlier lists Saffron City's equivalent to be Shinjuku, and there just so happens to be a massive stadium in that ward. The current one was built after Melee came out, but it replaced an older one that was originally built in the 1950s, so hey, I say it counts.
Of course, I was doing my research in reverse chronological order, so I encountered Pokémon Stadium before I found the actual Tokyo bid. Since the Tokyo Dome was, in my lifetime, the place you went to see American football played in Japan, I figured there shouldn't be overlap and I was safe to use the new Japanese National Stadium as the proxy. It shouldn't be confusing at all, right? Yeah, of course the actual Tokyo bid decided to go with the flashy new stadium rather than history. I was definitely not amused lol. Makes it harder to see all the dots in Tokyo since now there's two right next to each other, but it is minor in the grand scheme of things.
The last thing I want to shout out in Asia is Uruk. Like I previously mentioned, some of the proposals are deleted or otherwise inaccessible. I only know they exist because they were preserved on the shortlist itself. Uruk was one of them, and I was so sad to find that out. Uruk is honestly one of the more interesting ideas for an ultimus location I've encountered over this project; it is one of the first major settlements in human history, and is one of the most well known city states that made up Sumer. The logo was well made, and Iraq in general is just a country that is slept upon by a large portion of the RPer community. I wanted to know more. I wanted to see that proposal really badly. But, much like actual archeology, I can only see a glimpse into the past, not the whole thing. Very frustrating.
OCEANIA
WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Yeah, I'm going to be honest, there's not much to say about Oceania. It was surprisingly a very popular continent to draw on early on in the league's history. If you count Jakarta as part of Oceania, then it was represented all the way back in S28. If you don't, you only have to wait a single season before you get two separate Australian bids. Then the second Perth bid succeeded in S32, and all interest in Oceania was lost until relatively recently, and one of them was just the Weekly Mirror shitposting. Honestly, a little surprised that no one tried New Zealand even once. The rest of Oceania, I get that its a hard sell to get the average joe to care about Polynesian history and culture, but no one did an Auckland proposal? Christchurch? Or something tied to the Lord of the Rings? Honestly, of all countries to have gotten zero nominations over the twenty or so season period, New Zealand is at the top of my list. Apparently there's even been heat between Aussie and Kiwi users in the ISFL in the past from me scrounging old punishment threads; a NZ proposal could have been a great shoot for that drama.
QUALITATIVE THOUGHTS
So let's put aside the data for a second. I have two things that have been on my mind as I was pouring through the history of the ultimus bids. More specifically, I noticed two reoccurring problems as I dug through all the bids. I want to start with the more serious issue, because as someone who is approaching the ISFL mostly as the lens of a roleplayer, there is serious issue with how poorly catalogued and preserved one of the more fun elements of the league is. Championship games being on neutral sites is a unique feature of American football that sets it apart from the other big four North American sports, and I absolutely adore how we managed to capture the energy of the irl bidding process and, in my opinion, made it even more fun than the same few rotating sun belt cities that get the super bowl every couple years irl. To me, joining the league right as the championship game of S48 was being played in Panama City was magical to me, and helped give me inspiration to write what is one of my favorite media pieces I made to this day.
So why do we treat these bids as essentially disposable media? The wiki records the ultimus and ultimini host sites-- except it does an actual poor job in doing so, especially on the ultimini side; I'll get to that in a minute-- but it doesn't have any section, as far as I know, for the actual host selection process. This is in sharp contrast to how Wikipedia does articles on the Super Bowl, which very much talks about the off field politicking over host sites. It's a core part of what makes these neutral site games have so much gravitas: city governments actively want these games awarded to them for tourism benefits, and oftentimes these pitches are wonderful for combining local culture with the sport we love. I tried emulating that when I wrote my proposal for Florence last season, trying to draw upon local history of sport that I loved as an outsider and trying to show it off to the world. The bids that fail, imo, are just as important as the bids that succeed. It informs the trends that are going on in-universe, such as where the sport of football is developing across the world, and have an interest in putting themselves out there on the world stage. It can lead to narratives of certain communities being snubbed by the process, which could lead to fun in-character drama. There's just a lot of vector for interesting world building that we're leaving on the table here.
Why do we put the shortlist in the archive of point tasks recently, instead of where the winners are announced? It robs a lot of the context of what makes the winners special, since we don't know what they competed against. The winner announcement doesn't tend to link to the media posts of the winners either, so if you wanted to read up why a winner won a few seasons ago, you'll need to do a lot of unintuitive digging in another subforum. One that would have a lot of junk information for the purposes of why you're digging into it. It's just an inconvenient mess for any archiving. Honestly, if I was planning this better, I would have put the urls to each bid in the document itself, so it could serve as the depository that I was looking for. But I only thought of that like a few hours into making it, and I didn't want to have to start over from the beggining. Perhaps I'll do it after recharging from writing this media.
And on the issue of archiving, yes, now I will finally address it: the wiki is just flat out wrong on a lot of the nature of bids, particularly on the ultimini side. Now, at the very least, its not necessarily wrong about the cities. But the venues? A lot of it is just made the fuck up. I want to take an example that is near and dear to me. My girlfriend is Singaporean. She was really excited when I told her that sometime in the past there was an ultimini hosted in her country, especially as I hyped up the later ones with all the genuine research and passion that goes into making these bids. She's talked to me in the past about Singapore's marque stadium, the National Stadium, and even showed me a documentary on its construction because of how much she knows I'm into sports. So when I told her that the venue wasn't the National Stadium, but was a fictional "Singa Pura Stadium", she was pretty deflated. I was too. It felt kind of lazy, but I just chalked it up to early installment weirdness and moved on.
Except when I was trawling through the backlog of bids, I found the Singapore bid. And what do you know, what is the focus of the bid? The National Stadium. The bid explicitly name the Stadium and talks, even if briefly, about its history and centrality to the sports experience in the city state. And the wiki just pretends that didn't happen and just puts down a fictional stadium? Why? It almost feels rude to the original bid writer who put in the effort to actually research this topic and try to introduce it to the RP at large.
And this isn't the only time this happened. Los Angeles S31, talked about both the history behind the LA Memorial Coliseum and the state of the art nature of SoFi, saying that both stadiums have the gravitas to host an ultimus while somewhat annoyingly not committing to one. Instead of picking one, the wiki just makes up yet another fictional stadium, a "Rockstar Stadium", and ignores the bid entirely. This also happened for Milan, which was supposed to be in the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza but is listed as a generic City Stadium, Mumbai also lists a generic football field instead of the original Brabourne Stadium (which is actually a cricket stadium in the first place, which if you know, have even larger pitches than football stadiums. It could easily host a ultimini), and perhaps most insultingly, Llanfairpwll sidesteps its soccer pitch and just claims the ultimini was played on "some field". Whoever made the list of DSFL venues just clearly did not care about being accurate to the original bids, and just made everything up in some of the laziest ways possible. Except when the game was in the United States. Then, and only then, does the stadium magically become accurate. Except for Los Angeles.
And I get it to some degree. In universe, we're in the 2060s. If anything, we should now be thinking of our modern stadiums like SoFi, Heinz, etc, as being somewhat dated, let alone stuff actually built in the 20th century. Not every stadium we know today is going to survive to the RP's present day, nor should we assume that new stadiums aren't being built. But, at the same point, this goes all the way back to the 2040s, where current stadiums would still be in their planned lifetimes. What is the point of just contradicting these early ultimini bids for? Who gains by scrubbing out all the references to rl stadiums to have these made up localities? This isn't done on the ISFL level. With one notable exception, they're accurate to the actual pitches of the bids.
Which finally brings me to El Paso. That one exception. Ironically, its disregarding the bid in the exact opposite direction. El Paso might be my favorite bid, ever. It's very clear IceBear and co. put a lot of effort in thinking about not just why El Paso is a good venue for an ultimus, but thought about the logistics of what actually hosting an ultimus might look like. The centerpiece of the proposal, however, was the custom stadium they were designing for the game. This wasn't some kind of throwaway line, they thought about location, amneties, the works. The custom stadium was clearly important to the soul of the pitch, since it was meant to straddle the American-Mexican border at exactly the 50 yard line. Is that realistic? Bluntly, no. Especially since, y'know, the Rio Grande is right there. But you know what? The proposal still drew me in with its gravitas. It's a pitch that's unrealistic, and celebrates its unrealisticness by trying to live up the hype and spectacle of what the ultimus can be. It cares more about the verisimilitude of the affair than strict realism, and I love it for that. There's something genuinely romantic about the way they describe the stadium, and it just drew me into El Paso. I can easily see why it won this year. If only they gave this hypothetical stadium an actual name...
However, if you check the wiki for that ultimus, the custom El Paso stadium is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the location is just listed as the Sun Bowl. Now, I have no problem with the Sun Bowl as a venue; I even used it as a proxy for the custom stadium in my map. But... for someone who clearly put a lot of thought and effort to create an engaging venue, it feels rude, in the opposite direction, to bulldoze over it and just put up a real life location. The custom stadium wasn't a throwaway line, it was the heart and soul of this proposal, and whoever wrote that entry just... ignored it. And it makes me sad, as an author, because I could tell IceBear and co. put effort into designing it. I'd be deflated if a similar situation happened to me.
On the other hand, the ultimus bowl page also went with the real life Hanga Roa Stadium for the Easter Island ultimus instead of the bluntly stupid original idea of shipping SoFi down from Los Angeles by tugboat, a retcon I 2000% agree with. Kind of undermining my own point there, but I need to get that off my chest too
The other thing I want to bring up is the disturbing ignorance of Canadian geography that is on display in multiple bids. The fictional locations? The intentionally shitposty locations? Neither are my thing, if it isn't clear already, but I don't care too much. Let the people have their fun. Poorly researched bids? Oh no, that's when the gloves come off. And we just don't have one, we have two examples of Canadian ultimus bids where the stadium just flat out isn't in the city that is listed, but somehow exactly 162 miles away from the original city. Yes, I put the cities in Google Maps. They're both literally somehow 162 miles. Fucking wack-ass shit. Regardless, I am NAMING and SHAMING people right now for their FLAGRANT DISRESPECT to the Great White North.
The first one I discovered was the Saskatoon, which focused on the Mosiac Stadium. Everything the bid says about the stadium is correct. It is the home stadium for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, one of the teams in the Canadian Football League. It having an imaginative name is more down to opinion, but it certainly is spacious from what pictures I've seen from it. It's also IN FUCKING REGINA. ON THE OTHER SIDE OF SASKATCHEWAN. You know how many fucking brain cells I lost when I first tried recording this bid into my sheet and being confused it kept putting me in the wrong city? Yeah, because IT IS THE WRONG CITY. Yeah, I get it, Saskatoon is the meme city due to Noble, you want to put it there, to reference that. But you know what Saskatoon does have, after just a minute of research? It has one of the most successful college CFL teams in the country, with an ample stadium RIGHT THERE that could host it. Its called Griffiths Stadium, and its image on the Wikipedia page for the city! THIS SHOULD NOT BE THIS HARD.
However, if you think the SLANDER directed at Saskatoon is bad, then you're not ready for the other stadium mix-up. That's right, I'm talking about the infamous, disgusting Quebec City bid. Saskatoon? That is just a research error. This Quebec City bid? ACTUALLY INTENTIONALLY WRONG. The author talks so much about why they love Quebec City, they think it has an awesome name, and is beautiful, and then just drops the bomb that the game IS ACTUALLY INTENDED FOR MONTREAL. HOLY FUCK. "Yeah, I love Salt Lake City so much, the salt beds are so beautiful, we should celebrate how amazing the city is by putting an ultimus in MILE HIGH STADIUM."- br0_0ker, apparentfuckingly.
Imagine you're from Quebec City. The NHL hates your guts, and decided that your city, along with effing half of the northern part of the league, really needed to move south to play in fucking Arizona or Atlanta or whathaveyou. Your precious Nordiques, the one fucking thing Quebec City has going for them, otherwise being perpetually outshone by big brother Montreal, are told to go down to Colorado after a heartbreaking failed last ditch attempt to keep them up north. They immediately win their first Stanley Cup in Colorado IN THEIR FIRST SEASON IN AMERICA. You can only watch in pain and anguish. You're now considered just a satellite market for Montreal, which also decides they want to eat shit and die for the next few decades, because Quebec City can't have a good team ever. Maybe you start getting into baseball in this era since the Frontier League sets itself up in the city. They even occupy the historic Stade Canac, a beautiful example of 1930s architecture. You're not a hockey city, you're a baseball city now.
Maybe you laugh when the Expos finally get moved to DC. Big brother finally getting a taste of their own medicine. You see that Atlanta just can't last there and returns to Winnipeg. The Avalanche is doing well in Colorado, that ship has sailed, but Arizona is doing so badly that the league has to step in to effectively nationalize them so they don't fold completely. There's no way in hell they're staying in the fucking desert. Maybe you'll have your chance in the sun in the future. After years of lobbying, years of begging and pleading the NHL to put a team back in Quebec, you'll literally do anything so you don't have to root for those insufferable Habs, the league announces EXPANSION! INTO LAS VEGAS! MORE DESERT HOCKEY! And then a second expansion team? Is this your chance? No, Seattle! Ok can't be mad at that one it was kind of weird they didn't have an NHL team up to that point tbqh. But Arizona! The NHL has got to admit that their experiment in Phoenix failed, they got to put that team up north soon, right? right?
SALT LAKE. AND THEIR FIRST GOAL EVER WAS AN OWN GOAL IN THEIR OWN EMPTY NET. YES, THAT LITERALLY JUST HAPPENED LIKE A COUPLE OF IRL DAYS AGO, IT WAS SOME OF THE WORST HOCKEY I EVER HAD THE DISPLEASURE TO WATCH. THAT IS THE NHL EXPERIENCE FOR YOU, QUEBEC. WE'LL PUT A FUCKING TEAM IN TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES BEFORE WE LET YOU HAVE THE NORDIQUES AGAIN. YOU WILL WATCH THE HABS AND YOU WILL LIKE IT.
And now here comes this pizza the hutt looking ass coming in and saying how much they love Quebec City, how much they respect you, they think your name is cool and like how old and historic you guys are. Wouldn't it be great if the ultimus came over and grace your city? Why yes, that does sound pretty good. You quite like that. You say you're intrigued and wish to subscribe to his newsletter. He gives you the pitch.
IT IS IN MONTREAL. THE GAME IS JUST IN THE FUCKING OLYMPIC STADIUM. YOUR PERFECTLY FUNCTIONAL AND FINE BASEBALL STADIUM GETS YOU NO RESPECT. SO THEY PUT IT IN A BASEBALL STADIUM IN MONTREAL AND JUST PRETEND ITS QUEBEC CITY. YOU GET NOTHING. YOU LOSE. THAT TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES FRANCHISE ACTUALLY HAPPENS BECAUSE GOD AND THE NHL HATES QUEBEC CITY AND WANTS YOU TO SUFFER. THIRTY CUPS TO COLORADO, THEY NEVER LOSE AGAIN. THERE IS ONLY PAIN UNDER THE CANADIEN C.
...
Ok, might have gone a little overboard there. Let's just say, I have opinions on thinking you can represent Quebec City through Montreal, as someone else from a minor-major urban area mostly defined by not being their larger neighbor. I have some empathy for their plight, ok? I know they deserve better than the bid they actually got.
I think I said everything I can say on this topic at this point. I could talk about some of my opinions on some of the individual bids, but at this point, I don't think i can add anything to the conversation I didn't already just add there. If you made it this far, thank you for listening to my incoherent, rambling stream of consciousness. I really hope it was entertaining, and it inspires more people to care about one of my favorite aspects of this rp. Host City nominations for S50 should be coming up soon. I know I'm going to be submitting one again this year, and I guess I hope more than two people do it again this season.
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