They are more cartels with limited exemptions from antitrust legislation “in the best interests of their consumers.” It’s only a happy coincidence that such an arrangement allows U.S. major league franchise owners to virtually guarantee themselves a profit without needing to be a success on the field, court or ice.
UEFA certainly appears to be more player friendly than our domestic leagues and that’s the real mystery to me. Like our health insurance system does, our big league sports employers have heavily weighted the free agency system to deter job jumping.
I know that I’ve seen this point made before on this board and I’ll disagree now the same way I did then. American sports are definitely capitalist, but they are regulated. Think of it like antitrust laws in America that enforce competition and try to prevent monopolies. I suppose that would seem socialist in comparison to European sports, which function like completely unregulated capitalism (anarcho-capitalism?).
A different way of considering things. In American sports, the player has a contract with his team, but the team is highly regulated by the league. The teams are considered ‘franchises’. So sending a player’s contract to another franchise is kind of like if some big corporation decided to send you to their offices in another city.
In European football leagues, the teams are considered separate clubs and the league is just a necessary awning over the clubs. So in some respects you can see it as companies in the same line of business, but a talent buying company is paying another company to cancel their non-compete clause in the contract (and end the contract entirely) with the talent. The employee will then have to sign another contract with the buying company.
Is that correct though? Isn’t such as the NFL something of a closed shop? Doesn’t that reduce competition and enforce a monopoly?
I rather like the fact that I could take my own local team right to the highest levels of football if I were able to win enough games. Does such a mechanism exist in American Football?
Well, one is free to start their own league. The current NFL after all is the result of a merger in 1966 (officially realized in 1970) between the original NFL and the upstart AFL.
Aside from that, there is no recourse other than trying to convince the NFL that your location would be a fantastic place for an expansion franchise.
In that sense it functions like an oligarchy. The 32 owners call the shots. Whether or not an expansion team is allowed in is largely up to them. So it’s a closed shop, yes. But an oligarchy is not antithetical to capitalism, they are often the product of one.
The other way you get an NFL team is to buy it from a current owner. That’s pretty damn capitalist to me.
Relegation is probably the only aspect where soccer is more egalitarian than US sports. Sure, a crazy billionaire could decide to invest an insane amount of money at a loss in order to buy the talent that was needed to take their local team to the top levels of the sport, but that really doesn’t much happen. Most owners want at least a chance of profitability and such a model isn’t sustainable. This is like a American touting the greatness of their healthcare system because everyone “has access to great healthcare”…if they have the money to burn.
And, in American professional sports, regardless of which team a player has signed a contract with, the basic structure of the contracts themselves are standardized, and the league can void a contract that violates the terms of its labor agreement with the players’ union.
(Are there even players’ unions in European football?)
While it is often phrased like that, officially what happens is that the player needs to pay out his cancellation clause to the club he’s leaving; the new club covers this cost for the player as a hiring incentive.
The word “unions” is dangerous in a transatlantic context, since it means different things in the US and in Europe; also, the answer will change by location. In Spain, male players in soccer and many other sports are considered professional and therefore allowed to bargain collectively; an individual player can bargain better conditions, but he will always have at least the conditions of the collective bargains to fall back on. They are also, as professionals, covered by general labor laws such as Social Security Law and Labor Safety Law. One of the biggest if not the biggest issues with our female sports is that female athletes are considered amateurs in any sport and at any level, and therefore do not enjoy either the right to bargain collectively or the protections of labor laws.
Really? restrictive work practices, a closed shop and insanely high financial bar for entry?
Blackburn Rovers won the whole thing. The cliche of football club owners in the UK is of the chairman being a wealthy fan and sinking his money in his club to move them up the league.
There is no guarantee of profitability in the English game. You play poorly, you get relegated. Read up on Leeds United.
Anyone could create a club, from scratch, and take them through the leagues and into the top flight and it wouldn’t take a billionaire to do it. AFC Wimbledon were formed from scratch and rose to the 3rd tier of football with every possibility of getting to the top. FC Barcelona plus many other football teams are actually owned by their fans, it is not an unusual model and there is nothing stopping any group doing the same, certainly there is no group of people telling them that they can’t.
I don’t think your analogy works. How much does a franchise cost in the NFL? Is there anything stopping a local team rising into the NFL other than results? The entry conditions to the top flight in the NFL are higher, both in cost and in restrictions, than in the English football structure.
In Spain it’s a legal requirement. There is a type of corporate structure called a Sociedad Deportiva (Sports Association), which covers any sports-based association, from modest pool clubs featuring a half-olympic pool for the grown-ups and a 4 sq.m. handspan-deep for the kiddies, to Primera teams: they are owned by the socios (“partners”, “associates”, and the root of the word Sociedad), and each socio can own one and only one participación. The richest socio of Barça has exactly as much voting power as a newborn baby who got a participación as a birth gift from a proud grandparent. To play in la Liga or in any other official Spanish sports league you have to be a Sociedad Deportiva, period.
We don’t really have “local teams.” We have major leagues who reap the most attention and revenues and we have scattered minor leagues, some of whose teams are affiliated with major league clubs. There is no movement between leagues and the major leagues only invite new franchises into the fold rarely these days. Small towns in the US rarely have clubs in any major sport playing with regularity and that’s a shame, imo. Imagine if the FA structure scaled up to a nation six times larger.
Wait, are all Spanish clubs supporter owned? I thought Germany was the only country where that was required. I knew about Barca and Real but not the rest.
I could probably make a real pest of myself in this forum by posing the question “what do we need owners for?” and arguing in favor of complete supporter ownership.
Exactly this. Yes, in the four major sports in North America, there are levels of play below the “top tier” (defined as the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB), but the next level (or multiple levels) down are either (a) college teams, or (b) developmental “minor league” teams which are directly affiliated with (and under the control of) a top-tier team.
The “local teams” in the US are usually the local high school teams, and maybe the local / regional college teams. And, those serve as feeder systems for the higher levels, but at an individual player level.
Yes, there are “minor league” professional teams which are independent of the major league systems (for example, the independent minor league baseball teams), but the talent levels on those teams are invariably far below those of not only the major league teams, but the top tier of the minor leagues. The reason for that is pretty clear – if a player is good enough to be competing at a higher level, he’s already been signed to a contract by a major league team.
Thus, those “independent” teams are filled with players who are still living the dream – either they’re convinced that they’re good enough to play at a higher level, and are hoping to get exposure, or they’re just playing for the love of the game. The independent teams are nearly always running on a shoestring budget, and tend to come and go frequently.
And, so, the “mobility” in North American sports is at the individual player level, not at the team level.
the only smallish town with a major league team in the US is the Green Bay Packers. And they have a unique ownership, they are owned by 360,000 stockholders as a non profit rather than mostly by 1 rich guy.
I’d never thought about it, but just looked up the situation in Norway. Any football club in Norway has to be “self owned”, i.e. it’s an independent organization with members who pay a membership fee rather than one that has owners and shares that can be traded.
If you’ve paid for a membership you can participate in annual votes for club government.
I don’t know if this applies to other sports as well, as this is straight out of the bylaws of the Norway’s Football Association.
ETA: And with one more Google Search, this applies to all members of Norway’s Sports Association. Only “self owned” clubs can be members.
