Professional Sports Has Become a Predatory Nightmare
With the Clippers being sold for $2 billion dollars, professional sports in this country has become as big an example of American capitalism out of control as the Corpocracy created by the Supreme Court.
Even more amazing is that the general public, for the most part, actually supports this demise of their own financial circumstances. To top all this off, the states which suffer the most from this accumulation of our national wealth in the hands of 1-5% of our population are all Red States—the very states which provide the political pillar to support the situation. Recently, a list was published regarding the ten dumbest states in the United States. The list was arranged based on three factors: the % of populations with a Bachelor’s Degree; the median family income; and the average SAT score. Everyone of them was a red state. These are the states which endorse getting the government out of the picture, to let the wealthy police themselves, whose supporters let their own financial status be basically determined by handouts from trickle down economics. It hasn’t worked for a good 50 years, but they insist, in the name of freedom, that the wealthy should suffer no regulations, and no limit to the accumulation of our national wealth into the ever greedy hands of the wealthy.
If huge corporations, which have competition, fare so well without regulations or limits, imagine how professional sport leagues, with no competition, wallow in the insanity of it all. Just about everyone complains about these corporate excesses and predatory advantages over the middle class and the poor, as just about everyone complains about ticket prices, salaries, and abuses by the wealthy owners of our professional sport teams—BUT, with logic that belies understanding, society looks upon their own predators with revered envy.
Let’s start by understanding that the the $2 billion dollars to purchase the Clippers came from the rest of us, as does all the corporate amassment of huge wealth in the hands of the owners. And the amount of wealth amassed by the wealthy is growing in exponential fashion with no end in sight. For the wealthy to amass even more wealth, it cannot come from the poor—they don’t have it to give, and for it to come from the middle class it has to push more of the middle class into poverty. There is no other population for the greed of the wealthy to target.
If the structure of professional sports in this country (at least in football, baseball, and basketball) is half as bad as I portray it, then how should it be revised? Congress has the power to revise it just as Congress gave these sports exemptions from the anti-trust laws, and almost all the tax laws. It may have made sense way back when but it no longer does now. So below is a starter for how professional sports in this country should be structured.
It starts with the premise that Professional Sports should be set up as a public service to our citizens. The Super rich have enough play-toys for their own amusement and status symbols without forcing the public to pay for billion dollar team play-toys and hundreds of millions income per year. Sterling will now receive a 16,000 % increase in profit when the team is sold for 2 billion dollars. That’s a nice investment, an investment opportunity fairly available to anyone with 2 billion dollars to spare, as fair as laws which prohibit anyone from sleeping under bridges. The wealthy can't sleep under bridges either. Perfectly fair.
The Government needs to step in and create leagues which are regulated—with limits on profits—and the profits returned to the public sector, including the cities in which the teams play—or at least cities in general. There would still be a bargaining table—-with the government, the player's union, the cities in which the teams play, and the fans, represented at the table. For a start the best players should be paid well, very well, and all players put into 3 or 4 categories based on their stats from the year before. It just helps team solidarity if players are being roughly paid equivalent to their current performance stats. There is no good reason why Aaron Rodgers makes 40 times as much as those in the bottom tier. Let’s say, simply for example, that $10 million dollars/yr is a good figure for the best players, however we decide is the best way to designate the best players. And maybe the lowest players should be paid $800 thousand. Again, these are just examples not any attempt here to claim what the two salaries should be. After we have established fair and generous salaries at different levels, then the salaries should rise or fall with inflation. That would take care of all the endless bickering over salaries and bring some fairness and sanity to player salaries.
And of course the contracts would be binding by both sides and be year by year. There would be no more taking young players and literally forcing them to sign a multiyear contract at low salary, a contract binding only to the player. Currently, during bargaining sessions, the only real debate is just how much of the income goes to the owners and how much to the players. Greed will always drive the financial benefits to the owners and players upward and the public then pay for the greed—-paying more and more public money for players and owners, already some of the wealthiest citizens in our country. This concept of letting the wealthy continue to accumulate more and more of the country’s wealth in their own hands is a long term disaster, and always has been in history. That is one of the reasons empires always collapse. The other is the financial burden of supporting an empire, of some sort, abroad.
With salaries in hand, the players being rewarded handsomely and fairly based on last year’s stats, then all the profits currently soaked up by the owners would be available to help our our cities, or any other agreed upon needs of our society. Just the 2 billion dollars to buy the Clippers would certainly help a lot of cities with education, infrastructure, whatever. Just in football, with 32 teams, that is $64 billion dollars. Now add baseball, basketball, I guess hockey etc. and the amount becomes huge.
If fans were included at the bargaining table what might they push? Probably a fairer distribution of tickets. There would still be skyboxes for the wealthy, but a certain percentage of the tickets would likely be available to the general public, maybe by lottery, to ensure an average family could afford to go to a game once in a while. And season tickets, the kind corporations hand out to clients, would be a thing of the past. I will hedge a bit here, since I suppose, if the stands were filled with too many die-hard working class fans, maybe the emotions would soar too high and we have riots like in Europe during soccer games. Those there to a game simply because some corporation gave them a ticket are less likely to get over emotional. There are fans like me who prefer to watch the games on TV in the comfort of my recliner, but those who enjoy going to a game should have a possibility of doing so. Professional sports should be for all the people, not just the affluent.
What about free agency? How would that work if there are salary schedules? Clearly switching teams would not change a player’s salary. I suppose if one team needs a kicker and another team needs a pass rusher then a trade could be made on that basis. And there would still be the national draft every year for players. I am not convinced a player needs the right to go anywhere he wants after X years. They could, of course, asked to be traded for any number of preferential reasons. But in the absence of it affecting their salary it is not clear it becomes any kind of right.
The system being presented here puts a lot more emphasis on the draft. A team that had the good sense to draft a quarter back like Wilson, which Seattle did, would be rewarded for their brilliance by not having to play contract games with the player year after year. The player would instead be paid fairly year after year based on his previous year’s stats. Fair is fair. Of course the teams with the worst records would still draft first. That helps equalize team quality throughout the league.
So far here we have a system which is fair to all the players, and the fans, and the cities in which the teams play, and the taxpayers. Currently the owners grab roughly half the pie and the players the other half. Under this new system that half of the pie now goes to the public where it best can be used. I will not get into the particulars of where all of this would go. Maybe it goes to education in major cities where education is the least financially supported (because of property taxes as the source of revenue) or to infrastructure, or the environment, or health care etc.
The most common reason people give for letting wealthy people own teams, and all the money which can be generated by such ownership, is that they hate letting government govern anything, because government is inefficient. That, unfortunately, is an inherent problem with governments, no doubt. However, do we really want the wealthy owners to get all these billions of dollars to spend at their discretion or do we want our government to get all these billions of dollars to spend on the public areas mentioned above? Hell, if they wasted billions, there would still be billions being spent on the public good. It sure seems like a no brainer to me.
What has not been mentioned is just who decides who the Head Coach is, or the general Manager for the team? Maybe each team would have a Board of Directors comprised of former stars of the team. Maybe the Mayor of the City would select the stars to be on the board. We certainly don’t want the Mayor to pick the Head Coach or General Manager since we might end up with Mayors chosen on the basis of how well the city pro football team is doing. God forbid that. And the Mayors would probably choose the board members carefully because they want the team to do well. Remember, the Board members do not decide where the profits go, they just choose the Head Coach and the General Manager. This would certainly be better than having wealthy owners, half of them senile or ignorant about football, picking the Coach or General Manager. In many cases the owner simply inherited the team. How qualified are they likely to be? I am still bitter because my parents never left me a professional sport team to own. If I had only chosen different parents.
Of course all of the above needs to be tweaked here and there, and perhaps most everywhere, but the benefits to the players, fans, and society seem clear enough.
