You can make a rival football league to compete with the nfl it’s not anticompetitive
It’s a problem with me. The good citizens of Des Moines can’t have a team in the “national” football league? Shreveport? San Antonio? Los Angeles?
On your other point, the NFLPA stands no chance in negotiations with the league. It’s a group of people one missed paycheck away from foreclosure (save those obvious arguments for now) versus 31 billionaires.
No, you can’t, because the NFL and Major League Baseball actually behave in anticompetitive manners. Court rulings have, in fact, found that they do.
However, because of their popularity and the lack of seriousness that the matter has been given at various points in history, they’ve been allowed to get away with a lot of it.
The Supreme Court issued a ridiculous ruling that Major League Baseball doesn’t engage in interstate commerce and is thus exempt from the federal antitrust laws.
The NFL was successfully sued by the USFL for its anticompetitive television contracting, but the court in that case awarded the USFL only a nominal judgment.
The NFL and MLB’s anticompetitive practices are being protected by the courts and the politicians.
In another minor loss, the Oakland Raiders successfully sued the NFL under antitrust law when they tried to block the move to Los Angeles.
These leagues are demonstrably anticompetitive cartels. The question to ask is why we allow it.
CTE.
We all have our different lines we won’t cross. I’m aware that odds are that the shirts I buy are made in some Third World sweatshop that jeopardizes the lives and well-being of their workers, but I’ve got to have shirts, and it’s not like there’s a smartphone app that would allow me to wave the phone over a shirt to see if it was made in such a sweatshop.
But I know that when I’m watching the NFL (and probably NCAA football as well), I’m watching a bunch of guys administer whacks to each other that will eventually result in permanent and severe brain damage for some of them. And unlike with the shirts, I don’t need to watch football.
Call me a bleeding heart, but deriving entertainment from watching people gradually get brain-damaged is something I am just not okay with doing.
Specifically, they got awarded $1. But since treble damages applied, they actually got $3.
I bet that showed the NFL.
Yeah, it showed them that they could get away with murder.
We allow it because it’s sports. It’s not like it’s some vital industry to the national economy. It’s essentially entertainment and we’d rather keep it entertaining that open it up to the free market.
That’s the reason we don’t like expansion. It limits the number of available job opportunities in professional sports and raises the level of play to a higher level. If there were a hundred or more teams in the NFL none of them would be all that great - there isn’t a talent pool large enough to fill that many rosters. Professional football would just be an extension of NCAA football. Instead we limit the number of teams to thirty-two and make every team an elite team.
I’m afraid this is self-delusional American bullshit. We have more football players with which to stock teams than we can shake a stick at. Opportunities are limited not to provide the highest level of competition but to maintain the smallest number of slices cut from the pie (and increase leverage over the labor force).
Again, other places have figured out how to make this work.
I agree with most of the criticisms of American sports made here, and I would like to see the antitrust exemptions revoked. And there’s a lot to like about the European football, anyone-can-form-a-club model. But the reality of where that model leads must be acknowledged: in theory anyone can form a club and climb all the way to the top. In practice, the champion is tends to be the richest of the rich (Man U, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, etc.) year after year, and worst-to-first jumps in one year are very rare.
In contrast, in the (cartelized/socialist) NFL generally about half the teams that make the playoffs one year will miss it the next, and it’s much more possible for a team to go from laughingstock to contender in a short time. MLB and the NBA are not quite as good in this respect, but still better than European football.
Personally, I would like to see a return to the pre-depression “free minors,” in baseball, and a couple pro under-25 leagues created as an alternative to college football.