The Slow Demise of Professional Sports

Of course, the title is an exaggeration, but it gets the point across. Professional sports is and has been plagued for some time by a glaring structural problem that will probably not lead to its demise, but has and will taint athletics and I would argue become a major politico-economic problem that must be dealt with. What's the problem? MONEY. In particular, outrageous salaries to players.

I am a lifelong fan of professional sports, some would say a near fanatic especially for football and soccer. I love to pull for my teams and follow every detail with near obsession. But for as long as I fully understood it, I have been frustrated with the ridiculous salaries that professional athletes receive for less than half a year of "work" (if you can call playing a game work). Before I get to ways to change it, let me first go through why professional athletes do deserve high salaries.When I say high, I mean at most maybe 1-2 million dollars a year. That is about 20-40 times a normal salary.

Reason#1: Athletes can really only have a "career" in professional sports for at most 15 years, but more likely about 8-10 years. I'm perfectly comfortable allowing players to live their lives in leisure after they finish their careers (I feel this way because I realize that becoming a professional sports player usually means sacrificing the development of other marketable skills, despite what college athletic programs claim. It would be unfair to ask these athletes to work menial jobs the rest of their lives, if for no other reason than they'll be hounded by every janitor they're working with to sign autographs). Since professional athletes basically retire by age 32, they'll need enough income while they're working to cover expenses for the rest of their lives. To do that, they need pretty high salaries.

Reason #2: Jobs in the public eye demand higher salaries. The difference between an amateur olympic athlete and a professional athlete is that athletes in professional sports have to deal with ongoing public pressure and exposure. Normally, such occupations demand high salaries. Of course, there are plenty of athletes that face ongoing public pressure and don't get paid at all (Collegiate athletes, for example. These athletes do get paid in another way, though: scholarships to prestigious universities. Considering how profitable college sports are, particularly men's basketball and football, these players are actually grossly underpaid. Many of them are getting very poor educations. But that's all another diatribe...) In any case, high profile occupations generally command high salaries, so it is somewhat reasonable for players to ask for huge salaries, despite the fact they're only playing a game.

Reason #3: Professional athletes are entertainers. When you put their salaries up next to other entertainers, say in music or film, their salaries are actually relatively low.

Reason #4: Sports generate tons and tons of money. Since the players are the ones playing the game, don't they deserve to reap the benefits of their efforts? Who else deserves the money? The owners? The players drive the sports and their rare skills are what make watching them entertaining.

The above are the reasons that professional athletes deserve much higher than average salaries despite only playing about half of the year in 2-3 hour spurts. Yet, they do not deserve, nor should they receive, salaries in the range of tens of millions of dollars. After all, they are just playing a game and they are just serving a fan base. They contribute nothing particularly valuable to society (except for occasionally being good role models, which, by the way, they are not paid for being) and they are an elite few who have been given talent far beyond anyone else. No matter how hard I worked, I could never become a professional athlete. By random, these professional athletes have taken advantage of their God-given talents, which admittedly took a lot of work on their part, and are receiving ridiculous salaries because of their freak athleticism. How fast a WR can run his 40 or the wingspan of a small forward will have no corresponding change in our GDP or our standard of living. Ironically, a serious cutback in salaries will have negligible impact on how interested athletes are in joining professional sports teams. Professional sports will have plenty of applicants regardless of salary (in economics we call this an inelastic labor market). Cutting back on player salaries will not change little Johnny's boyhood dream to play for the Dodgers. Raising salaries will not attract any new entries into the sport. The continued growth of these salaries is an economic injustice.

So, how should we fix the problem. I have an easy solution. In fact it's so easy, there is no way it will ever happen. My solution calls for 2 steps:

Step 1: Packerfy all Franchise sports teams. In case you weren't aware, the Green Bay Packers are the only team in American sports that is publicly owned. The Packers are not owned by a person, but rather by the city of Green Bay. Management issues are dealt with through an advisory council, which, by the way, is the way about 90% of American sports teams are run. The big difference is that some jackass named Cuban, Steinbrenner, or Modell doesn't earn a profit on the team. All "profit" is reinvested in the team. Doing this would essentially Europeanize American Sports. This has some advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that, like I said, some jackass isn't earning a profit on your outrageously priced seats and there is no way the team could pack up and leave. The disadvantage is that there would be no flexibility in where teams are located. For example, Los Angeles, as it turns out, is a surprisingly lousy place to be a football team. If all teams were public, the Los Angeles Rams, as an example, who would have been owned by a Greater Los Angeles District would remain there forever. But, in a way that I believe offsets any negatives to making the change, by Packerfying American sports, there would no longer be the tension between awarding profits to owners vs. players. This would also eliminate price gouging as the team would be serving whom they're supposed to be serving: the fans. An alarming trend in American sports is to outprice about 85% of the population by charging ridiculous fees by building smaller, grander stadiums with absurd numbers of luxury boxes. This is the most profitable way to run a team. If an owner is not accountable to the fans, they have no reason to do otherwise. Packerfying would also eliminate ruthless bargaining by sports team owners with city officials. 'If they won't build us the stadium we want to play 8 games a year in, we'll just leave.' And they can. Economically they should. Of course, losing a sports team can cost a city tens of millions of dollars a year, not to mention public outrage. It's such an enormous incentive, that cities will actually fork over the money to build such ridiculous stadiums.

Step #2: Of course, Europeanizing will only be half of a solution. After all, European soccer players make just as much money as American football players. But, Europeanizing will allow the second step because it will no longer favor the wildcat owner over the hard-working players: A Drastic and Heavy salary cap. A salary cap that would mean that top players make at the very most 3 million dollars a year, but more like 1-2 million dollars a year for most elite players. See, the reason that salaries have gotten so high is that teams understand that winning sells tickets. Since a couple of players can be the difference between a championship and being...the 49ers, owners are willing to pay those salaries because there is competition to do so and their team can still be profitable. If a salary that severely cut a team's payroll were enforced, and the team was Packerized, that money could be saved and reinvested, or even better...invested into the community. Since playing professional sports is so wage inelastic, one could set salaries at just about any amount and still attract sufficient (probably the same number of) applicants. As I mentioned earlier, professional athletes still should get paid a lot, but not as much as they're getting.

Placing this salary cap and Packerizing American Sports would have the following effects:
1. More investment in fan services
2. cheaper tickets
3. Less gross inequalities in our society
4. more connection between sports players and fans (which would be better for the game)
5. Less idealization of sports players. As is, professional athletics is unfortunately an inner-city African-American kid's perceived best shot at improving his lot in life (Why study in school when you could be practicing your free throws?)
6. An end to that uncomfortable situation where that creepy old guy lifts the Lombardi trophy and all your favorite players and coaches hail him for doing such a great job of making millions off of them.
7. No more blackmailing of cities by owners looking for bigger stadiums
8. More investment in the community through taxes or otherwise.
9. Better run teams (Al Davis has no idea what he's doing. He would have been voted out decades ago.)
10. A stop in the Bourgeiosefication of stadiums. Luxury Boxes could be filled with real fans, not hip yuppies looking for a seasoned Warriors game to go with their Brie and Merlot.

Honestly, sports is just one area where intense economic injustices are taking place. To truly tackle this problem and others like it, we must first rethink how he distribute wealth in our society and alter it accordingly. No matter how much A-Rod makes this year, the insanity of CEO salaries is far more egregious. Perhaps some of the strategies used to fix sports could be used to fix our society at large...I'll save that for another diatribe.