It’s Time To End Private Ownership of Sports Teams
What’s the point of sports? No, really, let’s think about it. What is the point of having a bunch of people in silly outfits play games instead of getting regular jobs that more clearly benefit society, like being a carpenter or a policeman or a trash collector?
It’s clear, especially now, that having people in silly outfits play games does benefit society a great deal. Sports are an essential part of our culture- something to entertain us and help pass the time but also something to bond over, talk about, and experience in a shared way.
Sports are also a massive economic driver. Each of the top sports leagues make billions of dollars in revenue and sports, like baseball, support not only the players and team employees, but also the sports media, television broadcasters, radio commentators etc. But the support chain doesn’t stop there: the people who make the microphones used by radio broadcasters are affected. The people that make all the component parts of those microphones are affected. There’s parking attendants, concessionaires, the people who make hot dogs, the people who raise the pigs that become hot dogs, the people that grow the crops that feed the pigs that become hot dogs, the people that make the tractors for the people who grow the crops, etc. etc.
Sports are good for the soul of the sports fan. They also happen to be good for the wallets of the people who work in sports and the people that make that work possible.
The tax on this system is the sports owners. They are the inefficiency and they should be cut out like a cancer.
What do sports owners do? They seek to maximize profit for entities that doesn’t need to be profit maximizing. In fact, by seeking to be profit maximizing, these entities are inherently worse at serving their purpose.
Let’s take a look at an article published Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal titled “Why Money, Not Safety, Could Derail Baseball in 2020.” Here are some quotes:
- “…a fierce labor-relations battle that threatens the viability of this season and could serve as an omen for the industry’s future.”
- “But the real fight will have little to do with anything that happens on the field. MLB will ask players to accept a 50/50 split of revenues this season—a complete, albeit temporary, reshaping of the sport’s longstanding economic foundation.”
- “MLB officials say that baseball earns about 40% of its overall revenues from the in-game experience, including tickets, parking and concessions. All of that is gone in a season without spectators, and the league remains concerned that playing with no or few fans could continue into 2021. The owners say it could make better financial sense to not play at all than play without the players sharing the burden.”
Read that last sentence again. The owners say it could make better financial sense to not play at all than play without the players sharing the burden.
Now, I ask you- WHO CARES?
In a time of global crisis, where the fact that we all have nothing to do has an actual, tangible, and very real impact on the mental health of our country, where a documentary about a 20 year old basketball team is the biggest story on the sports landscape, where the NFL had a 3 hour television spectacular to roll out its schedule, raise your hand if you care even the tiniest bit if the 30 billionaires that run MLB teams think it would make better financial sense to not play at all than without sharing the financial burden.
Imagine how insane it would be if there is no baseball in 2020 because the sports owners decide it is more financially prudent to not play than to play without a certain set of conditions. Why would we, as a society, allow this?
Why would cities allow the owners to deprive them of the jobs and revenue that come with games? Why would the general public allow the owners to deprive everyone else of the joy and entertainment of the games?
Who the hell cares about the sports owners? What purpose do they serve?
Owners siphon money off of the top of sports teams’ balance sheets for their own use at the direct expense of those teams’ ability to be competitive and fun and therefore productive to society as sports teams.
Sports teams are not like other businesses. Sure, they compete, but not in competitive marketplaces. If the Miami Marlins are poorly operated they will win fewer games and may make less money as a result, but they are in no danger of going out of business as an economic entity and, more to the point, no one – except maybe the actual owners of the Marlins – would say that making money is the point of the Marlins.
Teams are closer to cultural institutions than traditional businesses. There would be no downside in simply eliminating the top of the org chart and kicking them in the ass on the way out.
What would be the problem if no one owned the damn team? Then no one would try to bilk the tax payers out of billions of dollars to pay for a stadium, no one would be searching for pennies in the couches to pay down the billions of debt that owners needed to take on to buy the team, no one would decide to not play the games because doing so might cost money.
What if the cities nominally ‘owned the team?’ What if a board, maybe even voted on by the citizens, made up of former players and coaches and other team luminaries made hiring and firing decisions for roles like the GM and a EVP-role and did nothing else?
The team’s payrolls would be…whatever the hell they would be! The Royals made $X from ticket sales, tv revenue, merchandise sales, and whatever else. They have $Y in expenses to operate the stadium, pay non-player employees and pay for whatever else they have to pay for. They’re on field payroll would be $X-Y dollars. Boom. Done. No made up budget coming from on high that considers the bottom line.
Cities already pay for all the infrastructure around stadiums and even end up paying for the stadiums themselves more often than they should. Under my model, no more of that. If teams want a new stadium, they can set aside some money every year for a while until they have enough. You know, kind of like everyone else.
For too long fans have put up with horrible owners like James Dolan, Fred Wilpon, and Dan Snyder, crazy owners like Jerry Jones, and worst of all, just regular owners who have the gall to even think about money. What do we, as a society, get out of this arrangement?
We need to abolish the present ownership model of sports. It was never created, it just sort of evolved and now it needs to be unceremoniously killed. Nationalize the damn sports teams!
-Max Frankel
