The American sports plutocracy
derekthompson.org
derekthompson.org
It boggles the mind how much time and money people spend on this industry.
That said, this is an area where antitrust enforcement would be applicable, if we ever get an admin who’s willing to engage in active trust-busting.
As a bottom up communal activity yes, American sports is Roman bread & circuses now with their own Temu version of an emperor and his clan at the top. This is sports in the way Barron Harkonnen is throwing sports events for his nephew
As an avid sports fan, I've always thought this. All the emotion and anguish I feel during the seasons for the teams I support is sort of cathartic. But I can't help wonder what the effect legal online gambling will have. Yes, I know gambling and sports has been around since Methuselah, but now regular "Joe's" are in the act, who would have never gambled in the past because of the legal aspect. The heated like war will most likely become heated like costly regret.
People don’t have to feel any certain way, but I find many of the comments seem detached from the fact there’s millennia of history about sports, gambling, etc; with many of the same concerns articulated by contemporary authors preceding you by that vast time.
I’m just glad sports mobs don’t burn cities as often as they did in Rome — but I don’t have nearly the panic that more of the same will be the downfall of humanity or civilization.
Build public swimming pools for kids.
There are two annual baseball events that I have usually attended in past years. I think Imma skip both of them this year. I have not enjoyed live baseball games in my adulthood. They are a circus of peak capitalist greed, centered around selling merch, cheap booze, terrible food, cheap liquor, gambling, and awful beer. Everyone who stays for at least 7 innings is staggering out, drunk as a skunk. Whether I ride the train home or I get on the roads, I'm positively surrounded by drunk zombie people. Woe betide us if the home team didn't win.
I cannot seem to enjoy myself in the stands. Most other people are appallingly rude and don't care if I'm bothered by them. I went to a Spring Training game one time and I swear that I was somehow targeted by frat boys, who were so obnoxious that the family next to me just moved to another section entirely.
My dad loves baseball. His Baseball Superfan spend is $0 or near it. He hasn't attended a live game since the 1980s, but he watches it all on TV. He simply isn't interested in merch or memorabilia or any of that marketing around it. He simply loves the game in its purity.
Baseball has been a game of moral fiber, respectable players, and good clean fun. But it seems that activists and jerks set out to ruin the experience for people like me. I'm not having it. I'd have way more fun at a punk rock women's roller derby bout.
Wait, when was this?
I mean, Babe Ruth was infamous for drinking and womanizing.
Example: guy hits homerun adding to his teams 5 point lead and stands in the batters box admiring his hit before taking a slow excited jog around the bases -- thats just `rubbing it in` and unbecoming. No one who has played the game or watches regularly will blink an eye when his teammate comes up to bat and gets drilled with the baseball -- including the guy hit. There wont be a fight, he wont yell or charge at the pitcher, he will take his base and he'll take care of it in the locker room with the guy that showed up the badly losing teams pitcher.
For an example of a fan violating this see Steve Bartman[0] an especially egregious violation of "unwritten" rules due to the games importance and its impact on the home team while being a home fan
Other sports, this may lead to brawls or petty snipping in the media and resentment which spilled over to fans. Back when the Radiers were in Oakland and Chargers in san diego you'd want nothing to do with that unless you were looking for a fight. Same with teams in the other football sport.
Committing violence against an innocent bystander, in return for mere nonviolent disrespect, is the complete opposite of morality.
> There wont be a fight, he wont yell or charge at the pitcher,
I'm not sure we're watching the same game. ;-)
It's not an innocent bystander, it's against the team to tell the team to check their member. It's not the philosophical understanding of "morality" it's the practiced version. And the "morality" part is not the message telling the other group to check it's out of line member, it's that there is a thread of character or "morality" in the first place to allow a team (or society) to keep order from within to avoid wider violence/incidents that spill over into adjacent populations and last far longer as seen in other sports
> I'm not sure we're watching the same game
If a pitcher is frustrated at losing and beans a guy for no other apparent reason, then either the batter will charge the pitcher or the star player on the pitchers team will get drilled when he comes up to bat and that'll be the end of it. That what i mean with the "unwritten" rules, to the casual observer it just looks like typical fighting or payback for some random thing like other sports, but there is a "gentleman's code" to it
But "the team" doesn't get hit. One guy gets hit.
> It's not the philosophical understanding of "morality" it's the practiced version.
It's practiced violence.
> to avoid wider violence
Eye for an eye never ends. The way to avoid violence is to never start it.
> there is a "gentleman's code" to it
No, it's a caveman code for brutes. Gentlemen use words to settle their disagreements, not fastballs.
It's not to be admired. It's an idiotic tradition that should end.
Moreover, the kind of frontier justice promoted here should absolutely not be implemented in society at large, as implied by your first reply to me. I would certainly not put athletes in charge of policing morals (not that our current crop of unathletic billionaires is any better).
I've been a baseball fan for years, and I've always hated that attitude. Bob Costas and other purists always talk about the "sanctity of the game" - it's a bunch of BS. First of all the game was never the "pure" or "holy" activity that people make it out to be. The history of the game is full of racism, sexism, drugs, womanizing, greed and so on. Not trying to be a hater, just telling facts. The game's purists like to look at history with rose colored glasses.
And as far as the fans, I wish the fans would be more passionate about the game. I've been to games in other countries - Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, and it's awesome. I'd rather have rowdy fans than people falling asleep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FDrcWTSczs . I mean, come on, that's a Yankees/Red Sox game, one of the biggest rivalries in sports, and the dude is asleep?! No thanks. Give me the screamers and the drunks.
Good Lord, what games have you been going to? I see a couple MLB games live every year and a few minor league games. I haven't seen anything like what you're describing. That doesn't mean there are no drunks or obnoxious fans, but that's the risk of doing something in public. The last game I saw live was San Francisco at Milwaukee in June. Giants won 1-0, and the home team crowd was fine. And I mean the Brewers fans like their beer, but in no way was it a zombie apocalypse. Last game I saw in Oracle Park last year was also fine. Even Boston a few years ago, which definitely has more of a college town vibe than SF or Milwaukee, was hardly zombie land.
I'll also say that AAA ball is typically awesome. The games are much cheaper than the big leagues, you get to see some big league talent rehabbing from time to time and see the occasional prospect who gets called up. They also tend to be very family friendly.
> Baseball has been a game of moral fiber, respectable players, and good clean fun. But it seems that activists and jerks set out to ruin the experience for people like me. I'm not having it. I'd have way more fun at a punk rock women's roller derby bout.
I don't know about that. Baseball has a certain level of honor, sometimes an excessive amount e.g. some of the "code" that has started to fade away the last decade or so. It also invented the concept of a nearly all-powerful commissioner, which was created specifically because players threw a World Series for a payout. It's a wonderful game, a thinking person's game, but it's always been quintessentially American for both good and ill ever since it scaled nationwide during the Civil War.
Professional sports in the US are mostly exempt from antitrust law [0], so it would take a change of law rather than a change in administration for anything to happen here.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Pr...
It’s not interesting to say that a sports league controls whether there is a new team. Of course it does, just as an existing supermarket chain decides where to open new stores, or an airline decides what cities to fly to. Competition for a sports league comes from other leagues (not necessarily in the same sport) or from different forms of entertainment entirely.
That implies equitable treatment. The reality is there is a class of filthy rich people that make a game of shaking down government bodies to pay for their entertainment venues so they can swim in more money on the public dime.
Equitable would be if a public entity invests 60% into a stadium, they get 60% of the revenue. No billionaire grifter will allow that to happen.
Of course the NFL hates this for all the reasons mentioned in the article, and also because the Packers are the only team to publicly reveal their finances. Thus, the NFL decided to ban ownership models like this, making the Packers the one and only.
> The name of the rule refers to the need for members of a club to hold 50 percent, plus one more vote, of voting rights - i.e. a majority. In short, it means that clubs - and, by extension, the fans - have the ultimate say in how they are run, not an outside influence or investor.
> Under German Football League (DFL) rules, football clubs will not be allowed to play in the Bundesliga (or second division) if outside investors have the greatest say.
> In essence, this means that private or commercial investors cannot take over clubs and potentially push through measures that prioritise profit over the wishes of supporters. The ruling simultaneously protects against reckless owners and safeguards the democratic customs of German clubs.
...
> Using the concrete example of Bayern Munich, the shareholders of the men's first team (FC Bayern München AG) are the members' club (FC Bayern München e.V. - 75%), Adidas (8.3%), Allianz (8.3%) and Audi (8.3%).
> Things are organised differently at Dortmund. The members' club (consisting of 168,163 members as of November 2022) actually only controls 4.61% of Borussia Dortmund GmbH & Co. KGaA, which oversees the men's first team, reserves and U19s. Signal Iduna hold 5.98% of shares, Bernd Geske 8.24%, Evonik Industries 8.19% and the remaining 72.27% is floated on the stock market. However, the management company in charge of running the football club, Borussia Dortmund Geschäftsführungs-GmbH, is 100% owned by the members' club, ensuring control of matters and thus compliance with 50+1.
The rule's been challenged or subverted frequently. The most recent ruling on it was two days ago from the German Federal Cartel Office:[2]
> It is intended to stop rich, and often foreign, investors transforming German football in the way the English Premier League has changed while keeping smaller clubs competitive. But the likes of Bayern Munich would like the rule scrapped to boost their own coffers.
> A prerequisite for the 50+1 rule is that it be applied consistently and without differences, a statement from the Federal Cartel Office said following a review.
> The Bundesliga - the new name for the German Football League (DFL) which runs the top two men's divisions - must also ensure fans have a role and there is open access to membership, according to watchdog president Andreas Mundt.
> This could be viewed as a nudge to RB Leipzig - controlled by the Red Bull empire - to open up the club more to members.
1: https://www.bundesliga.com/en/faq/what-are-the-rules-and-reg...
2: https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/german-watchdog-permits-fo...
Leagues don't get to decide if a new club can form in the first place. They can control who gets access (like the failed Super League that would have a semi closed system) but licensing rules fall under the national federation. Every team is its own corporation that's either controlled by club members, publicly traded or a privately owned company. Other teams can't just block them from selling shares out of economic self-interest.
> But ameliorations are possible. Tax law could further restrict the ability to team owners to amortize. And honestly, I don’t know why some local governments shouldn’t own stakes in the professional sports teams that they often directly finance.
Is anyone drafting a manifesto reforming US sports? Local playbooks for public stadium owners? State labor laws? State taxes? Bills that toss out federal monopoly law exclusions? Laws that compensate student athletes with lifetime platinum healthcare? Not my field but it seems there should be more of a movement.
It's quite possible in English football to found a "startup" like AFC Wimbledon and get it into the major leagues.
But there's still barriers - an absolutely astronomical investment is required to compete in the Premier league. "Welcome To Wrexham" really illustrates the power-scaling of wealth, as Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac (and many of their club's players) go from big millionaire fish in a small pond, to small fish in the multi-billionaire sovereign wealth fund pond.
“Republicans vote socialist on football”
Rent seeking is enabled by government involvement in markets. The idea that it was the point of "Neoliberal economics" is simply wrong.
Twaddle. Bad government can increase it, but government is also the only force with the capacity to oppose it. In other news, medicine can kill you.
Adam Smith noted rent-seeking in the 18th century. We have had plenty of laissez-faire government during that time. It did not eliminate rent-seeking.
It did not eliminate rent-seeking because rent-seeking is not created by the application of this or that economic policy; it's because animals seek easy meat.
Over time, that trumps any system based on codified rule of law. It is, by Gödel, impossible to write law that decides the legality of all behaviour. Sufficiently smart sociopaths will get around any codified system. Ideology founders on biology.
That does not mean we should give them free reign. The solution to am arms race is not to place your head on the block - not when your enemy is a sociopath.
Free market fundamentalism, like all dogma, is espoused by exactly two sets of people: grifters, and cretins. Ideology - be it free market fundamentalism or communism or any other holy book that claims to solve 7 billion humans doing human things - is nothing more than the expression of a hunger for simple solutions to complex problems. There is no fault in _liking_ simple solutions, but _needing_ them is an intellectual disability.
This is when you can tell someone has a really strong argument. Anyone who disagrees with you is, by definition, scum.
A true Scotsman would never support free markets fundamentalism.
You're taking a strawman of the parent post. Their point was about people espousing dogma. You turned that into 'anyone who disagrees with me'. Not cool
I could have guessed your beliefs... but i didn't. I used "laissez faire" because that encapsulates what you wrote, and no more.
I did put all of laissez-faire in a sack and beat it like vermin. It's not a intellectual position, it's a grift. I gave you the condensed argument already.
I apologise to HN at large for letting my temper get the better of me, which is a disservice to the ethos. I'm working on it.
I do not apologise to you, strictnein. I recognise three sins: littering, cruelty to the defenceless, and wilful ignorance.
Otherwise teams could and probably would be purchased by publicly-owned corporations.
There are numerous current and historic examples of corporate ownership in the other 3 leagues. Toronto's teams are all owned by Rogers. The Angels and Ducks were once owned by Disney. Comcast owns the Flyers and once owned the 76ers. CBS owned the Yankees.