The Sports Public Option
Right now in American culture there is a reckoning going on about the economic well-being of Americans across many socio-economic backgrounds. Over the last 50 years, corporations and public policy have greatly diminished, and made it harder to get into the middle class of America. At the present moment, just about the entire GDP in America is due to spending between large corporations on the buildout of Artificial Intelligence. How does the stock market continue to go up when the fortunes of so many seem stuck in reverse? Great question for someone else to answer. To aid the people left behind by the market failure leading to higher costs in housing, healthcare, food costs, and other areas is what’s needed to deliver professional sports fan bases from incompetent owners: a public option.
I want to be careful about tying the frustration of people insecure about their financial well-being to the plight of struggling professional sports franchises, but I’m here to do it because what’s a Substack for if not semi-controversial, semi-well-developed opinions. I also think the link is worth mentioning because the solution to each situation is the same.
While a public option for sports would unfold a little differently, it would require the intervention of the government to step in and fix what I think you could term are both situations of market failure. In the first scenario, the prices of everything are too high, due to a range of factors from lack of competition, to unnecessary middlemen, to predatory pricing, and the double whammy of people’s wages in the aggregate stagnating for the most part over the last 50 years. For professional sports teams it’s a little bit different.
As outlined in my first column, teams with superior ownership enjoy an unfair advantage over teams with incompetents serving as majority owners. It’s a story as old as the leagues themselves. Billionaires hate accountability, even more so when they have to do it to themselves. I’m also guessing other owners would prefer incompetents running other teams so they have a better chance of winning games. However, as I also outlined in my previous column, professional sports strive to see competition at its highest level. Fan bases having to watch horrible teams year after year because owners are terrible serves no one, except the other teams who benefit from having the advantage.
The only way to fix it nowadays is by the other owners voting out the incompetent owner, which is not going to happen. There’s so many examples of owners being unwilling to throw out bad owners even when there is clear evidence they’ve done horrible things, like Mark Cuban’s full-throated defense of Donald Sterling being supposedly held to an unfair standard in 2014.
Professional sports teams associated with individual cities have a relationship with those cities unlike anything else in any other domain. The city supports the franchise providing all of its revenue from TV to merchandise to buying Chipotle on the real estate developed around the arena. Of course, this is augmented by national TV money allocated across teams evenly. At the end of the day, the operating revenue for the team comes from the fans in the city of the team. They’ll be cheering for the team before and after whoever owns it today. Despite the fact they finance the operation, they hold no power in team decisions. Unlike other private businesses earning revenue from the city’s population there are no other options for professional basketball, football, baseball teams, or hockey teams (unless you’re in NY or LA).
Since professional sports teams enjoy a monopoly on fan attention and wallet share in the cities where they exist, fans should have a tool of accountability at their disposal to remove leadership no longer serving the interests of the team or the fans. Fan bases shouldn’t have to sit through multiple decades of Donald Sterling, Daniel Snyder, or Vivek Ranadivé. It shall be called “The Sports Public Option”. Catchy, I know.
In the same way you can gather enough signatures to put a proposition on the ballot, cities should be able to do the same thing to remove owners and interview different leadership for their teams. Or, they should have the option of raising enough revenue to publicly own the teams themselves since owners of professional sports teams provide little to no value to their teams, and beg for publicly financed stadium money. My mistake. I implied they might provide a little value to teams. The fact is they provide absolutely no value. They hire the people who make the decisions and then the only thing they might do is become a pain in the ass to the people they hired, the fans, or more likely both.
Fans deserve an option to hold owners accountable when they are an anvil around the neck of a city’s team.