Senior kinesiology major
On Sunday afternoons, many Americans enjoy watching good old-fashioned American football. While most people are more concerned about their team’s performance on the field, I have recently been more curious about the financial and managerial practices of the National Football League.
Despite all the money associated with the NFL, it is designated as a nonprofit organization. This seems to be a contradiction, considering the NFL has a yearly revenue of more than $9 billion. A majority of this revenue is generated from the NFL’s ability to negotiate the league television deals as a 32-unit business block. Because the NFL is negotiating as a group, $6 billion of the shared profit is divided equally. As such, each team will receive 3.1 percent of the revenue generated by the NFL regardless of whether the team won the Super Bowl or failed to win a game all season.
After learning that the NFL runs in this manner, I began thinking this sounds like a socialist system in which all members involved will benefit as the group benefits as a whole. This stands in stark contrast to the ideologies of most NFL team owners. A large number of the NFL team owners are conservative Republicans who are actively involved in endorsing Republican candidates in political races all across the country. If these NFL owners are such adamant Republicans, aligning with a group that traditionally endorses the idea of laissez-faire government and individual success, it seems strange that they readily adopt socialist ideals when it suits them.
For owners of teams who apparently support the idea of the free market, they have a funny way of endorsing what the free market entails. For example, the NFL has various antitrust protections that allow it to function the way it does. Antitrust laws are a series of laws developed by the U.S. government to protect consumers from predatory business and to preserve an open-market economy. Antitrust protection goes against the idea of laissez-faire economics, which would allow a business to monopolize a market and protect it from any competition. In European soccer, each franchise functions independently of the others, which is more in line with the free market ideals that NFL owners appear to champion but disregard in the face of profit.
I love watching football as much as the next guy, but I would like to see some consistency from this country’s economic leaders, particularly the owners of NFL franchises.
Ian Lacy is a senior kinesiology major. He can be reached at ilacydbk@gmail.com.
