The Internet Reacts To The WSL’s Facebook Deal

Today, the World Surf League, our World Surf League, your World Surf League, Wilian Cardoso’s World Surf League, announced a big-time deal with Facebook. That’s right, Facebook. Our Facebook. Your Facebook. Stuart Kennedy and 1.3 billion other people’s Facebook.

Can you believe it? Is our little ol’ doobie smoking subculture getting in bed with one of the top dogs in Silicon Valley? Just strutting into their Menlo Park office, gifting Mark Zuckerburg a 6’8” Hypto Krypto, expecting him to somehow put his leash on the wrong way and inking the deal? Have we officially made it to the big time?

Well, according to the internet — the very beacon of kind and rational thought — this is actually a giant fiery meteor that kill us all. 

When the League broke the news on Instagram earlier today, it was met with quite the reaction. At press time, the post has more than 500 comments and they are overwhelmingly negative. People are saying they HATE the WSL, they’ll never watch a comp again, that the WSL loathes their fans. I even saw one fella say he was going to delete his Facebook account just because of this.

Now that is fucking core!

According to an article on the WSL site, Facebook will be the exclusive digital home for the top live events in surfing in 2018 and 2019. It was accompanied by this quote.

“Facebook fosters a global community and, as surfing is a sport that celebrates and centers around community, we are proud to announce our media rights partnership with the platform,” Zoltan Torkos, WSL CEO, said. “This is game-changing for the sport in many ways and, with current and new fans front of mind, we can retain the free offering to fans, and it allows us to deliver the world’s best surfing to even more people on Facebook’s platform.”

Now, it’s hard to imagine this affecting you severely. If you want to watch a comp, you’ll still be able to watch a comp and it sounds like it’ll still be free for the foreseeable future. The deal puts our League in a position to finally tap into that hard-to-reach Nigerian Prince market that we’ve been hearing about through friend requests over the years. Just send ’em your bank details and you should be sweet, WSL.

In reality, the Facebook stream has always seemed like a step-down from the normal stream for me. You don’t get to see the tab with all the results and scores, and the comments on there make it seem like surf brands really should be in Midwestern malls after all. But the quality is still super high and I’m sure they’ll have an answer to the first of those two problems.

If not, just grab a pitchfork, a username and have some fun!

However, we are large fans of the WSL’s dolphin defense posted four hours after the hate: