The American sports plutocracy

This all supposes that the sports team owners really are that: independent owners. Sure that’s what we call them, but it’s more accurate to say they are equity partners in a common enterprise.

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.

I vote with my wallet—zero spending on sports, zero time watching sports, zero betting on sports, zero reading about sports. I don’t feel like I miss out on anything. If I had any interest in sports I could go play them for free, but I tend to opt for unorganized outdoor activities.

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.

I wish the author could have made more concrete examples on this. I guess for me what's more revealing is more recently, the ease to which the leagues (I mainly follow basketball and soccer, but this probably true for many) adopted partnerships with gambling (sorry "prediction market") companies, essentially going from 'we will go after players who gamble to "why don't we let the fans gamble". I think the ease and speed of it more concerning for me.

I like the article, but some of the issues are the law and other issues seem to be not the law, and it confuses me. For example, the fact that teams can’t join the NBA doesn’t seem to be a law in particular.

The Green Bay Packers are the model for community ownership of a sports team.

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.

Per Thompson, after roasting everything wrong with wealth and power concentration in professional sports...

> 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 an interesting comparison between American sports leagues and the ruthless competitiveness of European football.

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.

Once the “biggest crime athlete can commit” became betting on own games / sport (this supercedes all other crimes including rape, domestic violence, mutilating dogs…) the sports as we knew it came to an end. I used to be huge sports fan, the watch-meaningless-regular-season-NBA-game-in-January kind… now it has been years since I watched any sports game outside national team matches

The corruption of the Trump administration knows no bounds. He makes the Marcos family look like pick pockets.

Yeah but this is the entire point of Neoliberal economics: enabling rent seeking behaviour to allow Capital to accrue wealth by virtue of being the biggest pile of wealth. It's ultimately not sustainable: the reductio ad absurdum of this state of affairs is one Capitalist owning everything. Clearly the pitchforks will come out before that, its just a question of how long it takes before it all explodes

Seems like between the lines there is a little success jealousy. Only a billionaire can own one of these major teams, and you get all of the problems this carries. It doesn't seem unique, and if anything its an anti-climatic use of wealth that could be spent on a million other problems. That's all I took away.