It’s almost as if capitalist billionaire sports team owners in the US believe that doing everything possible to ensure all parties have equal chances at success is worthwhile and benefits the whole system, and conversely, that allowing completely unrestrained economic competition would lead to ruin. 🤔
Revenue sharing is a business tool used by North American professional sports leagues to redistribute revenues from wealthy large-market clubs to less wealthy small-market clubs.
In professional sports, a salary cap (or wage cap) is an agreement or rule that places a limit on the amount of money that a team can spend on players’ salaries. It exists as a per-player limit or a total limit for the team’s roster, or both.
A draft is a process used in some countries (especially in North America) and sports (especially in closed leagues) to allocate certain players to teams. In a draft, teams take turns selecting from a pool of eligible players.
To encourage parity, teams that do poorly in the previous season usually get to choose first in the postseason draft, sometimes with a “lottery” factor in an attempt to discourage teams from tanking.
Promotion and relegation is used by sports leagues as a process where teams can move up and down among divisions in a league system, based on their performance over a season.
An alternate system of league organization, used primarily in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the United States, is a closed model based on licensing or franchises. This maintains the same teams from year to year, with occasional admission of expansion teams and relocation of existing teams, and with no team movement between the major league and minor leagues.
You forget having the working man funding these dream stadiums with their taxes, then also charging insane amounts to attend the games, so that all those things up there can continue to happen.
Good point!
You, a socialist: “Please, I’m begging you, sports should be a municipal amenity not a profit driven cash grab.”
Me, an American Capitalist: “And then they made me pay for parking! And then I had to give Ticketmaster an extra 12% on top of the entrance price! And then half the stadium was just 20’ advertisement billboards! And it’s all going into the pockets of a dozen extremely rich oligarchs, most of whom don’t even live here!!! JUST LIKE COMMUNIST RUSSIA!”
And then there is the massive tax breaks the stadiums are given so the is even less returning to the city’s coffers.
I can’t believe I paid for US Bank Stadium when I was living downtown Minneapolis. Fucking criminal.
“The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Yes, thank you, that’s the quote I had in mind!
Professional athletes also have some of the strongest unions in the country, since they’re a small group of practically irreplaceable workers, and many of the league structures are the result of collective bargaining between players and owners.
Good point!
Another hypocritical dichotomy is:
Central planning does not and cannot work as efficiently as the free market!
Meanwhile, Amazon and Walmart are literally centrally planned economic production/purchase/distribution systems for nearly every kind of good imaginable, which both benefit massively from government subsidies, but they don’t count because… they’re corporations, and they don’t have perfect monopolies.
… Even though in almost every example given of a ‘centrally planned economy’, the state also did not have a perfect monopoly.
Good point!
Nothing gets you guaranteed hero worship and respect like being able to throw or kick a ball or similar in the US. The economics around it are unsurprisingly huge and complex, as everyone tries to be sure they get their piece.
Wait until you hear about how you cannot pay to watch all the NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL games in your market on a streaming service. Unless something has very recently changed, there’s no method of legitimately paying where you won’t still experience blackouts.
Wait until you hear about how you cannot pay to watch all the NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL games in your market on a streaming service. Unless something has very recently changed, there’s no method of legitimately paying where you won’t still experience blackouts.
Yikes, I hadn’t even thought of that! There are some local games where the only way to watch if you live in that city is to buy a ticket to go to the stadium, right?
I can’t say for sure. I think in at least some cases the blackouts are to support local cable tv, which we no longer subscribe to. I don’t think there tend to be games that can be watched only in person, but it’s possible I just don’t know.
