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Like any red-blooded American male (and many women also), I am a big fan of sports.  Or, perhaps I should say that I used to be.  Setting aside economics for a second, I have been growing increasingly frustrated with the world of sports as a whole, specifically with all of the me-first, self-absorbed, above-the-law attitudes. I completely understand that many of the athletes possess unearthly abilities and that the average life span for a professional athlete’s career is significantly shorter than that of a corporate executive (as evidenced by the number of elderly executives versus the number of professional athletes who even make it into their late 30’s in their respective sports).  Can sports teams continue to justify increased salaries each year, with annual increases in ticket prices while the rest of the country (and world) suffers?

Over the last decade or so, athlete contracts have skyrocketed, while the salaries of the people who actually pay them are lucky to see maybe 3% increases year-over-year.  Yes, it is the fans who are the ultimate employers, even though the team owners’ are the ones who write the checks.  Without fans buying tickets, concessions, licensed merchandise, even watching the games on television so that the stations can pay advertising revenues back to the leagues (which then trickle down to the individual teams via revenue sharing), the teams would have no money with which to pay these exorbitant salaries.  Yet, athletes continue to receive monster contracts and threaten to hold out if not “rewarded” for their efforts on the fields, courts, rinks, etc.  Just today pitcher CC Sabathia received the largest contract for a pitcher from the New York Yankees valued at $160 million over 7 years.  That averages out to be just under $23 million per year ($22.86 million pre-tax to be exact), and it was guaranteed!  No company on the planet that I know of gives employees guarantees that they will have a job for even a day in the future let alone 7 years.

Alas, the first cracks in the dam have already sprung.  The Arena Football League has just canceled the 2009 season, and the National Football League has announced that it will cut more than 10% of it’s headquarters staff.  According to foxsports.com:

The NFL is eliminating about 150 of its staff of 1,100 in New York, NFL Films in New Jersey and television and Internet production facilities in Los Angeles. petechiae and coumadin use

In addition, NASCAR has already seen several of it teams cut staff, lose support from the major US auto manufacturers, and has seen many companies either pull their sponsorship entirely or cut back significantly.  General Motors even cut ties with Tiger Woods as the sponsor for it’s Buick lineup of cars. The National Basketball Association has closed it’s Los Angeles, CA office, and several tournaments in the Professional Golfers Association and the LPGA have lost sponsorship as well.

When the Canadian dollar was falling and the economy was struggling, it lost professional sports teams in the National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, and Major League Baseball (the National Football League does not have any teams outside of the United States).  Perhaps we will start to see a reversal of this trend should matters not improve.  Perhaps teams will start folding under the pressure of the poor state of the economy.  Perhaps, one day, the athletes and the leagues themselves will come to the realization that without the common folks, the working class, the everyday consumer there is no way professional sports can exist.  Maybe then, we will see teams hold their ground and not give in to the player who cries over reworking his contract after one or two good years and lets them sit out and lose that fat paycheck that the spectators would give anything to earn even a fraction of an an annual basis to play a game they grew up dreaming of playing professionally.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.