An Odd Couple: The NFL and Socialism

       Nothing in sports was as exciting as hearing Hank Williams Jr ask you if you were “READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL?” It meant that Monday night was being rescued from the mundanity of its own mondayness. The NFL has grown to be the most popular sports league in America. The NFL has captivated American audiences for decades, and it has done so by utilizing socialism?

       Socialism has become a dirty word in some circles. Those circles, I would bet, tend to be circles that circle around a television 16 straight Sundays, plus playoffs, to watch the NFL. For most, socialism is a fully formed idea, but rather a word that means bad. A socialist system grants control over the means of production to the community. Essentially community members get to determine how the economy is run and how its fruits are then dispersed within the community. In this case the NFL is a community of 32 teams that makes economic decisions and regulation for the entire league.

       Revenue, the fruits of production, from television rights and licensing agreements, are evenly distributed among the 32 team community. Each participating team in a game gets a cut of the ticket revenue; split 60% for the home team and 40% for the away team. (Which makes it nice that every team gets an equal number of home and away games). So far, so socialist. However, the NFL does not share stadium concessions and luxury box revenue, but they do have a stadium fund to help teams increase their facilities to help bridge the gap, and they have even enacted a luxury tax that takes from the highest revenue teams and redistributes it to the lowest revenue teams. Can someone give me a, “SUNDAY, BLOODY SUNDAY!”

       What’s amazing is it does not stop there. The league utilizes a draft where the worst teams get the shot at the best incoming players, a salary-cap to prevent teams from outspending other teams, and a scheduling algorithm that gives bad teams an easier schedule the following year. The NFL knows revenue and on-field success have a positive relationship, which is why they game the system to benefit the worst teams. The league tries it best to have every team go 8 and 8, and this is all in an effort to generate as much money as possible.

       The point that flummoxes me the most is that all of this sharing goes completely counter to the capitalist and neo-liberal sentiments of the people that actually own NFL teams. To make matters even more confounding many fans of the NFL love and applaud the sharing that NFL teams partake in, for the good of the game, but are apprehensive and downright counter to sharing tax revenue, the fruits of society’s labor, for the good of society.

       Since the beginning of the Cold War, the United States has acted as a guardian of capitalism. Capitalism and free market concepts have entered the national myth. It is no coincidence that we learn from an early age that the founding fathers opposed taxation without representation, and not that a small group of elites capitalized on a confluence of situations to create their own country where they would hold much more power. Both of these narratives about the Revolutionary War are true, but only one of them a Fifth grader can recite.

       People are easing their views on socialism in America. Young people tend to view it in a much more positive light. Yet, it has become a very divisive force in society. For those that do not think much of socialism I ask you to take a look at the NFL where 29 of the 32 teams are among the 50 most profitable sports franchises in the world. While, there are many issues with how the NFL does its business in regards to its employees, the way it treats each individual team is extraordinary. The fruits of the NFL benefit all of the teams and they all have seen consistent growth for over a decade. America has cast baseball aside in favor of football in our national myth. Perhaps exchanging capitalism for socialism will be what follows.