Most US sportswriting is blantantly in the tank for the owners of professional sports franchises, often simply rewriting press releases taking the owners' negotiating positions as unworthy of questioning and simply juxtaposing them to statements from players. It's the sort of "balanced" and "objective" reporting that abrogates any responsibility for skeptical and critical analysis on the part of the journalists and turns them into stenographers. This is a key factor in the right-ward shift of the Overton Window ("Paul Ryan says X; let's see what Nancy Pelosi says in response"), but that's a topic for another time.
There are exceptions among sportswriters however, and their analyses can help us see how professional sports can provide a window onto current political economy. For instance, Tom Ziller has an excellent piece on the NBA lockout here.
That proposal would cap player salary at $2 billion a year.... What the $2 billion cap does is re-route all future growth of the league's revenue straight to the owners' pocketbooks. The NBA and players' union negotiated deals in 1998 and 2005 to share revenue between the owners and players, with the very obvious understanding that, as in any business in the world, the owners assume the costs of doing business and any inherent risks. Now the owners complain that they have no guaranteed profit, that even though the league is doing well, there's no mechanism to ensure individual teams do well financially.
A quote from one of the commenters is quite astute:
the richest guys caused the situation they are trying to exploit. if as the union says, the owners shortfall is due to debt fueled purchases of teams, then it really is the same as Republican un financed tax cuts, wars, medicare part D creation, and defunding and rolling back of financial regulation that caused the deficit to balloon and them to call for hard spending caps. imagine if all labor relations in this country had been like the old NBA CBA with productivity growth shared between owners and labor. well you don’t need to imagine, if that had been the case the median family income would be $92K instead of just under $50K. fans, who tend overwhelmingly to be workers not capital, need to learn from these situations.
In another example, Dave Zirin analyses the Los Angeles Dodgers situation here (a classic case of asset-stripping). Zirin quotes Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post:
the Dodgers now represent 'a particularly vicious form of capitalism that America has come to know too well the past few decades: a new owner takes over a venerable firm and extracts what he can for himself, decimating the company and damaging the community in the process.'
I love sports in (almost) all its forms, but a great love of sports doesn't have to mean ignoring how sport spectacles are produced.
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