The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit
Mark Walter's sale of the Lakers for a $12.5 billion valuation—after a year of doing nothing but facing fraud investigations—exposes the rotten core of billionaire sports ownership. American law shields leagues from antitrust, lets owners collude on revenue and labor, and subsidizes stadiums with billions in tax breaks, all while letting owners dodge taxes. This legal cartel turns already-rich billionaires into absurdly richer ones, and Derek Thompson argues the system is a public conspiracy that should be reformed.
What we have today is a handful of lucky, franchise-owning billionaires who get to sit at a poker table where every card they turn over has a face or an ace.
- massysett
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.
- iamnothere
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.
- tolugenius
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.
- gcapu
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.
- evanwolf
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.