Money in Sports
...u can put a franchise tag on so many players allowing for that particular players salary to not count against the salary cap for his team. They also share television rights, so that even a team in a small city receives benefits from television. This allows small market teams compete with those teams who are placed in a city with a higher population. The top three salaries in the NFL go as follows: Brain Urlacher (Chicago Bears) 15 million, Laveranues Coles (Washington Redskins) 13.5 million, Torry Holt (St. Louis Rams) 13 million. The main point of all this was to put a strong emphasis on how much money goes to athletes leading me to believe that they aren’t playing for a championship of for the fans but more or less playing for themselves. I think in our society today this is just accepted, but would it have been in the 50’s, 60’s, or 70’s? I mean lets face it we are paying these guys millions of dollars to play a game and entertain us. For a more in detail look at how money is hurting sports today I would like to analyze the game of professional baseball. I think it would be a great benefit if we take a look at the history of the league of baseball first to know exactly where it came from. The first professional baseball team was owned by the players themselves, and gave the players control over when, where, and how much they should play, as well as how the profits should be shared. At that time most of the players liked this type of arrangement. It took more than 1/3 of a century to convince most of them that anyone else should own their labor on their contracts. Even in our current time some still need to be convinced. Prior to 1876, when the National League was formed, professional baseball players often moved around between whatever teams would pay them the most money, or they formed their own teams. But the capitalists who formed the new league had a different thing in mind. They had money for sports fields, promotions, and player salaries, but they insisted that they sign contracts containing reserve clauses giving owners the right to their services, and exclude them from playing for other league teams. This infuriated the players, but since these owners seemed to be the only ones who could bankroll such a large scale operation most players were forced to grudgingly took their pay packages and played the game. In 1882, the American Association was formed. Although the new league also had what the players called a slave system, whereby owners doled out among themselves monopolistic rights for contracting certain players, at least now the players could pick from two different leagues. This meant owners had to compete for them, but this free competition lasted only one year. The owners of the two leagues finally decided among themselves that monopoly was best for all of them; they agreed not to hire each others players. Putting the players right back where they started. Now as we talked about earlier the free market that is the controlling hand in sport, and baseball is its prime example. You read the history now you ask where the game at is right now. Unlike many of the other professional sports organizations baseball operates without any salary cap, so what does this mean? Well basically it means if one team makes all the money that will be the only team that will win, because they can afford the high roller teams. Take baseballs richest franchise the New York Yankees, which has a payroll just over 200 million this year, and currently has guaranteed player contracts worth 566 million from 2005-10. In a recent USA Today survey of all guaranteed contracts for that six-year period, the Yankees obligations are more than three times the next highest team, The Philadelphia Phillies, who have committed 181 million. USA Today recently reported that overall, the 30 MLB teams have guaranteed players 2.8 billion for that six year period ending in 2010. USA Today reveals the Yankees, Red Sox, and Anaheim Angels are the only teams with payrolls above 100 million per year, contrasting with the Milwaukee Brewers who have the lowest payroll of 27.5 million per year. That explains most of what you need to know about the MLB. It doesn’t operate on a level playing field when there can be such a clear cut line between the richest team and the poorest teams lumped together in the same exact league. Consider the highest paid single player on the Yankees, Alex Rodriguez at 22 million, almost make as much as the entire Brewers team. While some teams go up for sale because they can’t afford to keep up, the Yankees just keep outspending everyone else by a huge margin. They have no peers as baseball richest franchise and only encourage rival fans to despair as to how there own club can compete. So what about media rights and shared revenue for small market clubs? Well because the New York media market is so huge, the New York Yankees generate huge media rights revenues, with the TV broadcast deal alone estimated to bring around 1.5 billion over a ten year period. Because of the massive market the Yankees can afford huge payrolls, and while there is some mechanism by which all clubs participate in a revenue pool that distributes income to help top up income for small market teams, but it’s still essentially a league that operates without a cap and it’s survival of the fittest. Contrast that with the NFL where all 32 teams receive an equal share of its multi-billion dollar TV contract, but still leave clubs free to generate other revenues that reward their individual efforts. But the TV parity similar to the AFL plays a huge part in teams being competitive across the league. Baseball missed its greatest opportunity to introduce TV parity in 1994, during the negotiations of a new collective bargaining agreement, when the owners agreed to a revenue sharing plan on the condition that the players union would agree to a salary cap. When both sides failed to reach a compromise the infamous player’s strike which saw most of the season cancelled including the play-offs and World Series. Now...