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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

Given how traumatic the sport and related CTEs are, I wonder if falling salaries will spell the end of football

I do not believe so as I believe the issues are orthogonal. The livelihood of the sport is primarily driven by consumption not production IMO. You lose eyeballs, you lose everything. You lose players, more will fill their place and while the quality may decline, it will not be noticeable since it applies evenly.

Everyone knows the NFL could reduce injuries even more, but not at the cost of eyeballs. In a purely capitalistic view, players are much more expendable/replaceable than viewers. As a side effect, players will have to accept the risk of being injured for less money than they are now. While a couple of high profile NFL players have retired due to CTE concerns, in general there are many humans willing to make that sacrifice for even a fraction of what players are paid today.

Let's say you take the NFL's revenue and it drops by 90% (as I think it will relatively quickly once "TV" ad rates start to come in line with online video -- oh yes, all these issues are related). So the salary range would have to shift to say, $2-3M a year for the top stars and about $200,000 for vets; with rookies making $50k-ish. Sure there would be endorsements, but it wouldn't be the ubiquitous stardom. You're just another Instagram influencer.

You do that, and you take the wind out of the sails of a sport quickly. You probably have a better chance of success playing fantasy football (you know, gambling) than you would getting rich as a football player.

The adpocalypse is happening right now. We've been warning of it for years. Brands are figuring out their campaigns on "traditional TV" don't return nearly as much as targeted campaigns on online video on a per-dollar basis. The bloodbath is just beginning.

I don't disagree with your assessment on the impact of a reduction in ad spend. Yet I don't agree that how much a player makes impacts the popularity of football. All you have to do is look at college football where the overwhelming majority of athletes are just getting a scholarship. Most fans support a jersey not the person in it.

I think interest in football is waning because the sport is a lot less fun to watch now that we know those bone-crushing hits actually leave guys debilitated for life. And not just in the long-term; Aaron Hernandez should be a wake-up call for the risks of CTE among active players. A broken leg from a sport is one thing, but widespread (something like 95% of former players show signs of CTE) traumatic brain injury is another.

It's just not right to encourage people to do that, and I think a lot of fans are choosing to watch something else.

Edit: Also, basketball has better economics and a more international fan base, so it's probably safe. Baseball is probably fucked too, at least in the current incarnation of MLB. But the NFL is definitely fucked.

> but widespread (something like 95% of former players show signs of CTE) traumatic brain injury is another.

Has the popularity of boxing been impacted by this issue?

Boxing went from the most popular sport in the country to being a niche sport. A large part of that was a shrinking talent pool; parents who, in earlier times would have let their kids box prohibited them from doing so. Muhammad Ali's Parkinson's diagnosis was an eye-opener for a lot of people.

I'd argue that the largest factor in the decline of boxing has been the runaway success of MMA and companies like the UFC, Pride, etc...

Not to argue that point necessarily, but there's been only the one success of significance, the UFC. Pride went out of business 10 years ago and the organization founded to replace it, Dream, went out of business only a few years later. (Pride ended up as a UFC acquisition, as did the WEC, but both of them were foundering and were picked up for their rights - access to fighters and video libraries).

That's very true. I mentioned Pride because it is still easily brand-recognizable to folks who are only vaguely familiar with the sport and because it came from the early days of MMA where it helped propel the sport to the mainstream.

How much players make influence whether people aspire to be players at all; a tangible decline in quality of play will hurt the sport.

Also, if the funnel of advertising (and thus TV) money goes away, the visibility of the sport will drop, and visibility reinforces popularity.

The highest levels of popularity and fan support in college football are mostly focused on high-level play - i.e. the schools in P5 conferences. Are there rabid fans at lower levels of play? Sure, but it decreases. Far fewer people are lining up to watch North Dakota State play than to watch even lower tier P5 schools like Iowa or Ole Miss, despite NDSU winning five championships in the last six years at the FCS level.

If the salary at the highest levels crashed dramatically, the pool of players at every level would shrink accordingly. We would probably see an effect similar to what happened to boxing: the best of the best would still be very good, but the rank-and-file that make up the rest of the sport would be so terrible that most people would lose interest and stop watching. I suspect that fan interest would hold through some level of decrease in overall skill level, but that there is some point where people will just stop watching because the quality of play is so bad (and because of the constantly growing evidence regarding the long-term health implications, which, going back to the boxing example, was another piece of what knocked boxing off its cultural pedestal).

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