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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.
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.
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.
My preferred modern (and non-American) model is the German Bundesliga 50+1 rule,[1] which unlike the Packers is actively employed and enforced within both the league and regulatory bodies, with external ownership instead being the legacy, rare, and endangered exception.
> 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.
Worth noting the 50+1 rule has cracks though—Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg are corporate-exempt legacy cases, and RB Leipzig basically engineered around it with a tiny voting membership. So even the "actively enforced" model has carve-outs once enough money leans on it.
Worked adjacent to a small-market team's ops side years back. Financials being public actually changes fan behavior, people stop assuming ticket hikes fund a title run and start asking where money goes. Every other franchise gets to hide behind "trust us, we're investing in the roster."
I grew up idolizing Roger Staubach and followed football fanatically. Over the years, I lost all interest. To me, how the Dallas Cowboys is considered the most valuable franchise while putting out 26 years of ineptitude is mind boggling. I used to watch the games and analyst commentary fanatically. I haven’t watched any game or the Superbowl for ten years. To me, it is now all about sports betting. Who wins is besides the point. It is just naked gambling. I usually have a live and let live attitude. But I have seen gambling destroyed families. It is the work of the devil.
Betting apps at 3am, servers melt under load, book eats losses quiet, nobody blinks. Ineptitude don't matter when product's the bet slip, not the team.
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.
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
This is only a problem because of the American franchise system where teams are part of a league and fully depend on it. Football teams in Europe play in a league. If the Premier League decided to kick out Man City for some reason they would still exist, own their trademarks and be able to play matches (but also lose major sponsors and have to negotiate with the EFL to get back in the pyramid).
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.
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.
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.
Green Bay's been municipal-adjacent since 1923, nonprofit, no single owner. Never scaled because NFL banned the model after them. Cities already know how to co-own teams, league just doesn't let it happen anymore.
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.
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.
Actually, it’s the anti-trust exemptions / lack of enforcement that allows the leagues (owned by the billionaire team owners) to decide who can and can’t own a team.
Otherwise teams could and probably would be purchased by publicly-owned corporations.
Tried starting a supporters trust for a lower-league club once, UK model similar to Green Bay. Falls apart at scale because most leagues require single controlling owner for liability and voting purposes. It's a bylaws problem, not a fan-interest problem. Change the bylaws, ownership structure changes overnight.
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.