For me, it's as much about Exposure as anything else.
The top European teams are getting hardly any exposure on the World stage. They used to, and teams like the TonTon, Nexus, Joy, Shock etc would travel to the states, and appear in all the magazines (especially PGI, who always championed the Euro-teams)
With, like, 2 magazines left, and no euro's making a serious stab at the US scene, the exposure has almost completely died off, except for a few pages per month in Facefull.
No-one is talking about Euro teams, and so people are generally losing interest in my opinion.
?
Missy's post was once again, bang on the money.
When I started Nexus, I knew damned well, the team had to be branded and promoted to hell, and being one of the editors of PGi, I made sure the team got as much exposure as it needed, and then some, too much in fact.
Luckily for us, in our launch year we did fantastic both sides of the Atlantic for a team that had mainly amateur and novice players.
I knew full well, a team's image was absolutely paramount to its success with that success not always being measured with how well it down, basically, the team was a cool team, and everybody respected that, and that was both sides of the Atlantic;
Ledzy also did a fantastic job in promoting the team thru his company, Planet's advertising as did Dave Youngblood with Dye and so you couldn't pick up a magazine without seeing our ugly faces everywhere.
I'm afraid the vast majority Stateside don't even know of Nexus now, or if they do, it's a faint memory from yesteryear.
But this demise in the European's media exposure isn't all our fault, a lot of the fault lies with the American economy taking a dive and throttling the life out of the paintball industry and consequently staunching the flow of dollars into advertising in the magazines.
It was exactly this downturn in dollar revenue that saw PGi escorting itself into the dead box along with virtually all of the other magazines but the irony was, PGi continued long after I sold Nexus to Youngblood and my departure co-incided with the demise in exposure of Nexus, but that's another story altogether.
...Because PGi was a truly international magazine (the vast majority of the copies however were sold in the US) European teams got a healthy coverage and therefore were internationally known with I suppose, Nexus, Joy Division and Russian Legion dominating that exposure.
It's a crying shame things ain't like they used to be but I suppose nothing ever is, we just have to wait and hope.
But I don't think it's all doom and gloom because if the respective economies begin to turn around, paintball will also, let's hope our teams are ready to do their bit accordingly
