I feel like this would make a pretty cool setting for a D&D campaign lol. Are you making a distinction here between warlocks, wizards and (potentially) sorcerers, or are those just different ways of saying "magic users?"
One might think it would be, but it's not easy finding Nordic colonies. I don't think tropical ones work really. NJ might be an alt Swedish colony, and Sverdrup a Norwegian one, but there's virtually no way to find colonies for Iceland, Finland or Sapmi...
Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. (May 27, 1911 – January 13, 1978) was an American pharmacist and politician who served as the 38th vice president of the United States from 1965 to 1969. He twice served in the United States Senate, representing Minnesota from 1949 to 1964 and 1971 to 1978. As a senator he was a major leader of modern liberalism in the United States. As President Lyndon B. Johnson's vice president, he supported the controversial Vietnam War. An intensely divided Democratic Party nominated him in the 1968 presidential election, which he lost to Republican nominee Richard Nixon.
Born in Wallace, South Dakota, Humphrey attended the University of Minnesota. In 1943, he became a professor of political science at Macalester College and ran a failed campaign for mayor of Minneapolis. He helped found the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) in 1944; the next year he was elected mayor of Minneapolis, serving until 1948 and co-founding the liberal anti-communist group Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. In 1948, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and successfully advocated for the inclusion of a proposal to end racial segregation in the 1948 Democratic National Convention's party platform.
Humphrey served three terms in the Senate from 1949 to 1964, and was the Senate Majority Whip for the last four years of his tenure. During this time, he was the lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, introduced the first initiative to create the Peace Corps, and chaired the Select Committee on Disarmament. He unsuccessfully sought his party's presidential nomination in 1952 and 1960. After Lyndon B. Johnson acceded to the presidency, he chose Humphrey as his running mate, and the Democratic ticket won a landslide victory in the 1964 election.
In March 1968, Johnson made his surprise announcement that he would not seek reelection, and Humphrey launched his campaign for the presidency. Loyal to the Johnson administration's policies on the Vietnam War, he received opposition from many within his own party and avoided the primaries to focus on winning the delegates of non-primary states at the Democratic National Convention. His delegate strategy succeeded in clinching the nomination, and he chose Senator Edmund Muskie as his running mate. In the general election, he nearly matched Nixon's tally in the popular vote but lost the electoral vote by a wide margin. After the defeat, he returned to the Senate and served from 1971 until his death in 1978. He ran again in the primaries but lost to George McGovern and declined to be McGovern's running mate. From 1977 to 1978, he served as Deputy President pro tempore of the United States Senate.
Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. (May 27, 1911 – January 13, 1978) was an American pharmacist and politician who served in the United States Senate, representing Minnesota from 1949 to 1961. As a senator he was a major leader of modern liberalism in the United States, supporting Civil Rights and increased welfare. A divided Democratic Party nominated him in the 1960 presidential election, which he lost to Republican nominee Richard Nixon.
Born in Wallace, South Dakota, Humphrey attended the University of Minnesota. In 1943, he became a professor of political science at Macalester College and ran a failed campaign for mayor of Minneapolis. He helped found the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) in 1944; the next year he was elected mayor of Minneapolis, serving until 1948 and co-founding the liberal anti-communist group Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. In 1948, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and successfully advocated for the inclusion of a proposal to end racial segregation in the 1948 Democratic National Convention's party platform.
Humphrey served three terms in the Senate from 1949 to 1960, and was the Senate Majority Whip for the last four years of his tenure. During this time, he was a lead supporter of civil rights, introduced the first initiative to create the Peace Corps, and chaired the Select Committee on Disarmament. He unsuccessfully sought his party's presidential nomination in 1952.
In 1960 Humphrey launched his campaign for the presidency. Strident in his support of Civil Rights, he received opposition from Southerners within his own party. His focus on primaries and media appearances was novel and helped propel him ahead of rivals such as Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy.
His strategy succeeded in clinching the nomination, and he chose Senator George Smathers as his running mate. However he faced a walkout led by Orval Fabus. In the general election, he narrowly trailed Nixon's tally in the popular vote but lost the electoral vote by a wide margin. After the defeat, he retired from politics and returned to Minnesota. He would teach at Macalester College in St. Paul until his death in 1978.
(all text recognizable is from Humphrey's OTL Wikipage)
Belated megacrossover Halloween update:
This began as a Halloween update but I got busy and also writer’s block, but better late than never! Miskatonic University
Miskatonic University is a private university based in Arkham, Massachusetts. Miskatonic University was established in 1690 by Ward Phillips. The University originally was heavily modeled on neighboring schools like Harvard, but would begin to move in a different direction early on when, in 1693, Philips gained custody of a number of rare occult books from the collection of the Sanderson sisters in the aftermath of the Salem witch trials. Thus, from an early era, Miskatonic University was heavily colored by an interest in paranormal and occult phenomena. This would in early history largely remain underground–especially in the late 1600’s still dominated by a Puritan ethos. However, the university would gain a reputation for addressing unusual incidents. It was Miskatonic University scholars who were tasked with figuring out what caused the events around Rip Van Winkle’s anomalously long sleep, investigating rumors of a so-called ‘headless horseman’ in the backwoods of New York and carrying out research into reversing the effects of ‘the Alteration’ rendering the ocean treacherous to navigate. Much of this research was carried out in secret by professors ostensibly dedicated to other subjects. In the mid-19th century, the growth of Spiritualism and interest in the occult led to the founding of the Hermetic Order of the Blue Rose at the school, which quickly became a much larger esoteric order. A large archive of occult tomes and supernatural artifacts were accumulated at the school and in 1871, the American Secure Containment Initiative was founded by Artemus Gordon, Brisco County, Sr., and Jonah Hex, who set up the ASCI’s headquarters underneath the campus library.
These elements largely remained underground into the early 20th century, though plenty of cracks were present. Miskatonic University professors helped analyze the origins of the so-called ‘boomfood’ that triggered a wave of gigantism in the 1900’s, recognizing that radioactive particles played a key role. Research into weapons development sponsored by the U.S. government made it a major target during the War in the Air, with German air raids heavily damaging the campus. It has been suggested that Dr. Herbert West’s later experiments occurred because of trauma experienced when West survived a bombing raid that killed an entire class of students in the room with him. A number of Miskatonic University faculty became involved in incidents involving the supernatural or paranormal-Henry Armitage, Randolph Carter, and Seneca Lapham among others-but overall most students were more focused on traditional prestige in this era. While the occasional figure in the vein of William Fitzgerald or Trevor Bruttenholm was attracted to attend by the university’s occult underground, this was the exception rather than the rule well into the 20th century.
However, the mid-20th century saw the paranormal and occult elements of Miskatonic University creep into the open. As part of the Cold War, the US government had developed a keen interest in supernatural phenomenon and developed many agencies–Delta Green, the Unusual Incidents Unit, the Federal Bureau of Control and the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense–aimed at researching the supernatural, combating threats it posed and even perhaps weaponizing it. Miskatonic University’s familiarity with these anomalies was seen as a positive by the government. Furthermore, the prestige associated with paranormal and anomalous research was expanding. Columbia University Professor John Montague had helped make parapsychology a much more respectable field. These factors combined to allow for Miskatonic University to become the first university in the world to open up a Department of Paranormal Studies, containing such majors as Parapsychology, Occult Studies and Esoteric Archaeology. The existence of these departments would require unconventional hiring choices and so the likes of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, MACUSA member Gomez Addams, self-proclaimed ‘psychic doctor’ Miles Pennoyer and former news anchor Carl Kolchak would end up among the faculty of the school by 1980. Members of the Department would play a key role in providing information to the White Committee, which sought to determine the implications of the Black Prom incident in Chamberlain, Maine (though much of the opinions of Miskatonic faculty were discarded by the committee).
The establishment of the Department helped the school draw an unorthodox array of students in the years that followed. Alongside the old-money crowd of future lawyers and businessmen came the likes of Lydia Deetz, Jack and Maddie Fenton, Tommy Jarvis, Nathan Dawkins and Nancy Thompson-all figures drawn to the school by its expertise regarding supernatural and paranormal phenomenon. However, this also drew less savory individuals to the school. The likes of Nikolai Wolf (who would resort to human sacrifice to gain fame for his band Low Shoulder), Cole Turner (a half-demon lawyer who briefly became the Source of All Evil) Edgar Zambus (the creator of a strain of zombism that combines supernatural and viral methods of reanimation that he deliberately infected himself with), Roman Armitage (inventor of the infamous Coagula procedure which hijacked the bodies of numerous African-Americans) and Amy Hughe (a serial killer and worshiper of the demon Malphas) all attended or were planning to attend the school only to make use of its occult secrets for not-so-noble ends. The near-miss awakening of Cthulhu in 1983 during World War III only further caused the school to develop a sinister reputation. Senator Bob Roberts launched a quixotic bid to bar students attending the school from receiving federal financial aid in the 1990’s over these ties to black magic, though his proposal never made it in front of the President before Roberts resigned due to being implicated in the Mattiece scandal of 1993.
The more sinister reputation enjoyed by the school was particularly ironic knowing the role of faculty, alumni and current students in preventing a number of prophesied calamities surrounding Y2K. Miskatonic University Professor Iain Gladstone was the first to take notice of multiple prophecies related to the Apocalypse being fulfilled in the lead-up to the turn of the millennium. Working with his colleagues Rayna Kazuki, Leroy Brown and Dirk Pitt, Gladstone worked to recruit a team that could identify potential Antichrists and, if possible, eliminate them. Most of the team were current students at the school-Sarah Bailey, Steve Urkel, Charlie McGee, Casey Connor and Kate Libby were selected based on a combination of desired research capabilities and known or implied paranormal prowess. Beyond the current students, the quartet of professors brought in a few university alumni-the previously mentioned Lydia Deetz, ex-football star Scott Howard and on-and-off X-Men team member Katherine ‘Kitty’ Pryde. Aside from Deetz, the alumni were brought in as additional muscle. Through diligent investigation, this team was able to identify Angel Caine-the son of businessman Robert Caine-as a potential Antichrist working through his father’s business empire to bring about the End Times. Caine had additionally formed an alliance with Adrian Woodhouse, another potential Antichrist who sought to co-opt remnants of older Great Old One cults for his ends. The team brought these two to the attention of the BPRD and, alongside a military forced headed by one Colonel John McNamara, were able to prevent Armageddon.
The modern Miskatonic University has enjoyed an enormous boost to prestige following the Awakening of Magic and the widespread embrace of occult and supernatural research. The school was able to greatly expand operations as a result, pursuing ideas that were fringe even amidst the ‘new normal’ of anomalies. After the Amphibian invasion of 2020, the school became a locus of research into extradimensional phenomenon, discovering the realms of Mewni, World A, Oz, and Throne among many others. Researchers from the school helped create the EVA units used to fight the so-called ‘angel’ incursions of the 2010’s and chronicling the spread of ‘quirks’ across 90% of the human population post-Awakening of Magic. Miskatonic University has also begun tracking temporal anomalies after the Warren & Warren incident of 2021, partnering with Britain’s Anomaly Research Center in the process (the ARC has indicated interest in a ‘temporal storm’ appearing to connect 2023, 1890, 1941 and 2053 in some way). Beyond this renown, however, the highs and lows of a normal prestigious school remain. Students briefly seized control of Armitage Hall in protest of the school accepting a $30 million grant from Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, right-wing pundit Lindsey Bluth-Funke has condemned the school for pushing ‘wokeness’ and allegations that rich alumni bribe there way into the school continue to dog its reputation alongside its more fantastical dimension.
References
Cthulhu Mythos, The Lurker at the Threshold, Hocus Pocus, Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, The Order, SCP Foundation, The Wild Wild West, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., Jonah Hex, The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, The War in the Air, Herbert West: Re-Animator, The Lurker at the Threshold, The Diviners (Bray novel), Delta Green, Control, Hellboy, The Haunting of Hill House, The Conjuring, The Addams Family, Miles Pennoyer, Kolchak the Night Stalker, Carrie, Beetlejuice, Danny Phantom, Friday the 13th, Beyond: Two Souls, Nightmare on Elm Street, Jennifer’s Body, Charmed, Plants vs. Zombies, Get Out, Dead of Summer, A Colder War, Bob Roberts, The Pelican Brief, The Secret World, Explorer Woman Ray, Encyclopedia Brown, Dirk Pitt, The Craft, Family Matters, Firestarter, The Faculty, Hackers, Teen Wolf, X-Men, Holocaust 2000, Rosemary’s Baby, Hatchetfield Universe,
Shadowrun, Amphibia, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Final Fantasy, The Land of Oz, Kill Six Billion Demons, Neon Genesis Evangelion, My Hero Academia, Old (film), Primeval, Bodies (Netflix series), The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), Arrested Development
Continuing the state soccer leagues, next up is Wisconsin.
Some notes
A few more mining-based teams in Wisconsin. Like with Galena Desloge in Missouri, Galena Platteville comes from the lead mining in this region, in the Driftless Area. This is also where the Badgers name comes from for La Crosse, as miners were compared to badgers for their digging tunnels. This is also where the general association of badgers with Wisconsin comes from.
Avante Madison is basically me turning Forward Madison into a real club with some history, making it Italian-American. I did consider leaving the stadium as Breese Stevens Field but I decided moving it further south to Brittingham Park made the rivalry with Monona fit better as a south-north city rivalry.
Green Bay Packers SC are indeed owned by Packers Inc. I've generally been avoiding just having teams owned by or directly associated with other major league sports teams, but for Green Bay it seemed fitting enough.
Yes, FC Bayern is a thing. Bavarian United SC, which still exists in OTL, was originally founded in 1929 as "Fussball Club Bayern" and only changed its name to Milwaukee Bavarian SC in 1956. (They actually only renamed from the Bavarians to Bavarian United SC in 2021, but I only saw that line on the wiki page just now so eh history's different after the founding here anyway). All three German teams actually stem from the OTL Bavarian United team. Bayern with their original name, Eintracht meaning "united" in German, and Leinenkugel being a sponsor for the team for one year in which they competed as "Bavarian Leinenkugel" in 1994.
I decided the Superior North End's stadium is next to the Fraser Shipyards, which is why it's known as The Dry Dock.
Also one thing that I possibly could have used before but only realized would work well now, is using the County name for, well, county teams, that might be from smaller towns but drawing a fanbase from the entire county.
To won a war, we need to loose a Comandarm.
Mikhail Tukhachevsky was killed by a White partisans. Without Tukhachevsky enthusiasm, Revolution Military Counsil abadoned the March o Warsaw plan. Red Army stoped on Curzon Line. Suddenly, it was the correct decision, lead to Soviets wan the war against "Pan's Poland". (Poland itself was not sovietized, but Western Belarus and Western Ukraine (without Lviv) goes to Byelorussian SSR and Ukrainian SSR).
After consulting with family and friends, Walter Mondale accepts McGovern’s offer to round out the ticket. This has the added benefit of smoothing over some tensions within the party, leading to a less chaotic convention.
This does not save the ticket from defeat, the prevailing winds are too strong. But Mondale, although he doesn’t balance the ticket, is easily the most popular part. The establishment likes HHH’s protege, while the activists feel he was the one mainline Dem who didn’t jump ship.
Democrats still go down hard. But they do find a rising star who has credibility with the unions, minorities (Fair Housing), establishment, and activists.
McGovern remains damaged goods. But as Watergate brings down Nixon there is another who could run on “told you so”…
Hubert Humphrey wanted to be President. He wanted it desperately. He had wanted it for years. But he was also dying of cancer. Swallowing his dreams, he sat down with his protégé and allies in the Unions and planned their attack.
But nomination was now a matter for the voters, not smoked filled rooms. Superior organization and establishment support helped Mondale win early primaries, but Mo Udall and, especially, Jimmy Carter provided tougher than expected challenges.
Scoop Jackson’s campaign never really developed. But Carter took the South from George Wallace. This was a problem for Mondale, since Carter had appeal outside the South. Udall faded outside of the west, but still gobbled up delegates there.
However when the race moved North, Mondale quashed his opposition like so many bugs. Every Union Hall from to Buffalo came out for Fritz, and he enjoyed a significant fundraising advantage. Key endorsements like Frank Church helped as well.
A key victory in California both proved his viability in the west, and secured enough delegates to ensure his nomination. It had not been the smoothest road, but he had never fallen behind either.
Mondale accepted the nomination before a raucous NYC crowd.
He had already announced his running mate: Jimmy Carter. Carter was ideal. Mondale’s strongest rival, he added outsider appeal after Watergate, and he could help balance out Mondale’s admitted “Sun Belt Problem.”
The ticket opened with a wide lead over President Ford.
For want of a racist: what if Jackson died in 1830 (and William Wirt lived like 18 years longer, but thats unrelated) (also ignore the PV numbers, all you need to know is Wirt won both the electoral and popular votes)
The 1840 United States Presidential Election was the 14th quadrennial presidential election, held from Friday, October 30 to Wednesday, December 2, 1840. The election was characterized by the legacy of President Henry Clay, with 3 out of the 4 Presidential Candidates having a position in his government, Wirt as Attorney General, Sergeant as Vice President, and Polk as Speaker of the House, respectively. This was the first election in which a candidate won without carrying a Southern state, and it was the last election [until 1xxx?] that a democrat candidate carried Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. This is also the first election featuring the Liberty Party, who would later become one of the 3 largest parties, winning the Presidency in 1860, which led to the American Civil War.
American Candidate William Wirt defeated Democrat James Polk, National Republican John Sergeant, and Liberty James Birney. His victory was seen as an upset at the time, with many seeing the Democrat or National Republicans to win. His victory is attributed to the unpopularity of National Republican Candidate John Sergeant, with many National Republicans (and Northern Democrats) voting for Wirt, with him winning Pennsylvania by less than 2,000 votes.
It's a controversial election. If you're a Progressive partisan you're probably rolling your eyes now; if not, you think that is an understatement. But it was. Many wartime measures that had been controversial and accused of unconstitutionality had failed to be revoked in the three intervening years, and the lawsuits against them had always ultimately failed when put before a court still composed of a seven-Roosevelt-judges majority. Many people came out against these, especially the small-government Republican candidate Frank Orren Lowden, a darling of conservative Republicans who won the 1920 nomination practically unopposed because there were no progressives to push back. Roosevelt's DoJ frequently harassed the party, possibly out of spite or perhaps because he knew they'd siphon more votes from him. The Socialist vote was similarly intimidated, and caught up in the Red Scare instigated by the German Revolution. Debs ran his final presidential campaign from a jail cell. Both the Socialists and Prohibitionists fell somewhat short of 5%, but were far from non-factors.
Carter Glass, meanwhile, was nominated because of the ascendancy of Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party. They pointed to Underwood and said he had nearly won because he was a conservative-ish southerner, and only narrowly lost because he had been too wishy-washy. Glass, the Governor of Virginia, was the pure version of what Underwood had tried to be. It helped that Glass was quite distinct from Roosevelt, while many progressive Democrats were either too close to Roosevelt's rhetoric or, like Theodore's fifth cousin (and recent Assistant Secretary of the Navy) Franklin Roosevelt, in the process of bolting the party for the Progressives. Which was how he was paired with the equally conservative Atlee Pomerene of Ohio. Yet despite hardening resolve in the South, the nomination of Glass just made those Yankee conservatives the party seemed to want to woo stay away. They wanted a conservative, but a southern conservative? Who was known as "the architect of disenfranchisement in the Old Dominion"? That was too much. They were no paragons of racial tolerance, but they had their lines, and Glass's ilk was one of those lines.
And then there was Roosevelt. Why was he running, anyway? In 1908 he'd argued that he was technically not violating the two-term precedent. In 1912 there was "international instability that required a steady hand" (sources claim it was a conversation with Franklin Roosevelt Sr. in 1912 that convinced him of such a thing, and that he otherwise had very nearly retired that year). In 1916 he had a war to see through to the end. Why was he running again in 1920? No one is sure. There was no simple tagline that year. Something about the internal threats posed vaguely by the reds and rather more materially by the Ku Klux Klan's increasingly common acts of domestic terrorism, probably. Maybe somewhere along the line Roosevelt had forgotten his old ideals. For whatever reason, he was running for that earth-shattering sixth term. And his Progressive Party that so loved him were not about to be the ones who denied it to him.
There's never been any accusations of fraud. Probably because there wasn't any. But the 1920 election is considered fair by hardly anyone. Perhaps Roosevelt's win wasn't "illegitimate"; certainly the victory of four years prior was far more questionable. But it didn't feel legitimate. Everyone saw the thumb on the scale. Maybe Lowden and Glass knew they were arrayed against unstoppable forces. They were flawed candidates; there were tangible reasons why their parties maybe wouldn't nominate them in years where a semi-authoritarian incumbent wasn't out to crush all challenges to him like bugs. Bare the majority was. But it was won. Only the South, and Mormon-heavy Utah, defied the president in favor of Glass. Connecticut was Lowden's strongest state in the three-way race. Indiana was a joint ticket, where the parties agreed to a state-level alliance to stop the Progressives (an affair that, suffice to say, was a massive part of the scandal that took down McAdoo when the involvement of the Klan in the arrangement, which informally continued after the election and mostly existed in order to cement the dominance of the Klan in Indiana, was revealed), and when defeat was proven the Democrats, as a gesture of goodwill, let Lowden have the electoral votes to make his loss slightly less pathetic. Everywhere else, divisions between Democrat and Republican, Socialist and Prohibitionist, had been defeated by united Progressives. Even the isolationists in the West and Midwest had little other choice.
They'd soon spend many decades getting used to it.
Nixon's resignation, the caretaker presidencies of Bankhead and Randolph, the election of Hoover, recession, the Marxist-Lincolnists were a long way from the heady days of the Robeson administration. The factional establishment were torn between reform and keeping the course. Taking up the reformist mantle was Pennsylvania governor Bayard Rustin. Rustin, the first open Uranian to run for the presidency, argued that the Second Republic needed to take a 'strategic retreat', maintaining the nationalisation of key industries as instituted under President Robeson, but allow for further market reforms across other sectors, that American socialism would be guided by the 'soft touch' of the state. Rustin would garner support from much of the Marxist-Lincolnist faction, most notably from President Randolph, and would also gain support as the 'lesser evil' by many opponents of Marxism-Lincolnism. But Rustin's support would not be universal. The stalwart's choice would be a solid party functionary in Robert McNamara, who would make the argument to stay the course, and would prevail, albeit in the most narrow election in the history of the Second Republic.
But McNamara, the candidate of the status quo, would shock the world by driving significant reform. McNamara, obsessed with numbers and modernisation found himself obsessed with what was a fringe government project, that was until then the bete noire of much of the ossified bureaucracy. Before Congress, McNamara would reveal to the American public his bold reform agenda - proposing like Rustin before him that many of the Republic's state industry would be disrupted, not by privatisation but by true socialisation, much of American industry would see it returned to the working class in the form of mass worker co-operatives. In a most memorable moment, McNamara would hold up the keyboard of a telex machine, shouting that the computer will bring socialism, for these worker co-operatives would in unison form the 'Socialist Machine' comprising of ‘a set of operations rooms… receiving real-time data from the systems which they monitor’, economic planners in these rooms would use this data to drive models and control the economy through ‘the linkage of these rooms across the sub-systems – using colour television, and a network of fast-acting computer terminals’.
In the eyes of Marxist-Lincolnists, McNamara would stand alongside Robeson and Lincoln as the greatest presidents in the history of the Second Republic. To this day, McNamara possesses a loyal cadre who argue that while Lincoln brought America's bourgeois revolution, and Robeson started its socialist revolution, that it was one Robert Strange McNamara who completed it.
Note: McNamara's quote on the 'Socialist Machine' is largely borrowed from Stafford Beer's article on the Liberty Machine.
Wonder how that would change EU and NATO expansion.
Would most probably worsen Poland's relation with the West (Especially Germany) and bring the old idea of it being the "Hyena of Europe" back up again in some minds.
I mean - most of Europe have at least one tier of professional football. I think even most of South America and a lot of nations in Africa and Asia. And if you compare in terms of population, most of these states @wilcoxchar has made a post for are not that different from mid-to-small European nations. Wisconsin, Colorado and Missouri have more or less the same population as Denmark. Florida is just a little more populated than the Netherlands. Connecticut is as populated as Albania. Alaska is a bit more populated than Luxembourg. Most of these nations have professional leagues, some of which of relative relevancy. If you consider that America is quite rich, it make sense that most states could financially sustain a professional league.
The two doubts I had are:
How is the attendance so big? Taking the example of Wisconsin, like I said the population in the state is more or less the size of Denmark. But the stadium sizes are generally bigger than Denmark! The biggest stadium is around 38k seats, while that would be a middle one in Wisconsin. I may assume that football becomes the national sport like in most European countries, and that the development of players is similar to Europe so no college tournaments, and the crowds can all converge to the local football professional league. But still, the situation is more or less the same in Denmark, and still the attendance is lower.
How do the federal tournament work? And, more complex question, how financialized is football here? By financialization I mean the rise in money earned and spent in the sport, and the consequent enter in the sport of hedge funds, sovereign funds and international capital (in the strict sense, not the antisemitic one). On the sports side financialization had two recognizable effects in Europe: the first is the domination of the international tournaments by teams from the Big 5. The last Champions League won by a team outside the Big 5 was Mourinho's Porto in 2003-2004. And since then I should check, but on two feet I'd say the only time a club from outside the Big 5 reached the semifinals was 2018-2019 Ajax. In Europa League things get a bit better, but still dominated by the Big 5. This happens because these leagues were already more successful in European competitions, more followed and richer, which led to a self-sustaining cycle which made European competitions the prerogative of Big 5 teams, and relegated minor leagues' teams to intriguing sides which are celebrated if they can reach the quarter-finals. I'm gonna defeat my own point, but I don't think this problem would happen in this timeline. Let's see why. The Big 5 nations of UEFA have the following population:
Germany: 83 millions
France: 67 millions
Italy: 59 millions
England: 56 millions
Spain: 47 millions
And the biggest US states have the following population:
California: 39 millions
Texas: 32 millions
Florida: 21 millions
New York: 20 millions
Pennsylvania: 13 millions
Ignoring the outliers of Turkey and Russia and considering the economic differences between Western and Eastern Europe, there's a much bigger and steeper difference between the Big 5 and the rest of Europe than between the biggest US states and the smaller. So IMO the same pattern of domination by the teams of the most important league wouldn't happen here. But I'm worried about the second effect of financialization: it has happened multiple times that the teams from the smaller leagues that qualify for European competitions earn more money from those competitions than from the national league, and so they use that money to reinforce themselves and end up successfully dominating their national leagues. I didn't have the vibe that this happened in the states we've seen to this point: how was this avoided?
To won a war, we need to loose a Comandarm.
Mikhail Tukhachevsky was killed by a White partisans. Without Tukhachevsky enthusiasm, Revolution Military Counsil abadoned the March o Warsaw plan. Red Army stoped on Curzon Line. Suddenly, it was the correct decision, lead to Soviets wan the war against "Pan's Poland". (Poland itself was not sovietized, but Western Belarus and Western Ukraine (without Lviv) goes to Byelorussian SSR and Ukrainian SSR).
Very nice concept — though the Soviet Union very nearly ending the Polish Republic would almost certainly guarantee a far more strained relationship between USSR and Western powers ITTL.
Wonder how'd the Tatar and Bashkir SSRs come about. One guess is that Sverdlov takes over by 1937, but he would absolutely have been in the top echelons of Soviet government (and thus the Commanders section of the infobox) had he lived.