Chapter 11: Sports and The Economy

Major sport sponsorships enable companies that sell tobacco, alcohol, and junk food to link their products and logos with popular activities.

Executives at these companies know that people associate sports with strong, healthy bodies instead of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, tooth decay, and other forms of poor health associated with their products. Their hope is to use sports to increase their legitimacy as "corporate citizens" and defuse resistance to their policies and products.

Most of the individuals or companies that own minor-league teams in North America don't make much money. Many are happy to break even and avoid the losses that are commonplace at this level of sports ownership. Also, many teams, leagues, and events have been financial disasters over the past 50 years.

Five football leagues, a hockey league, a few soccer leagues, a volleyball league, four men's and five women's basketball leagues, a team tennis league, and a number of basketball and soccer teams have gone out of business, leaving many owners, sponsors, and promoters in debt. This list covers only the United States and doesn't include all those who have lost money on tournaments and special events.

Changes in commercialized spectator sports usually do a combination of these six things:

(1) speed up the action; (2) increase scoring; (3) balance competition; (4) maximize drama; (5) heighten attachment to players and teams; and (6) provide "commercial time-outs."

When spectators say they saw "a good game," they usually mean that it was one in which

(1) they were attached personally or emotionally to an athlete or a team; (2) the outcome was in doubt until the last minutes or seconds; (3) the stakes were so high that players were totally committed to and engrossed in the action; or (4) there were skilled and dramatic performances. Events containing all four of these factors are remembered and discussed for many years.

Strikes or lockouts occur in either of two situations:

(a) when business conditions change to the point that owners or players decide that the existing CBA is no longer fair or reasonable, and (b) when a CBA has expired and the owners and players cannot come to an agreement. Back when players had low salaries and little control over working conditions in their sport, strikes were more likely than lockouts. But now that players have legal leverage as they negotiate their salaries and have been able to control important aspects of their working conditions through CBAs, strikes are less common and lockouts are more common.

NFL executives understand the importance of this connection between youth sports and spectator interest.

For example, as parents learn more about the dangers of brain injuries in football, the NFL has joined with USA Football to conduct a major public relations campaign to convince parents that football is being made safer and that they should encourage their sons to play the game. If youth football programs decline, so does the number of future players, season ticket purchasers, and media consumers of football.

Commercialization also forces more established sports to make action more exciting and understandable for spectators, but the changes seldom alter the basic internal organization and goals of the sports.

For example, rules in the NFL have been changed to protect quarterbacks, increase passing as an offensive strategy, discourage field goals, protect players from career-ending injuries, establish "television/commercial time-outs," and set game schedules to fit the interests of commercial sponsors. But the basic organization and goals of the game have remained the same.

This issue is not limited to NASCAR. Those who control commercial sports must eventually deal with similar questions.

For example, what happens to a sport when heroic orientations are pushed to extremes? Are spectators willing to have aesthetic orientations abandoned in favor of the heroic? What would events be like if this happened? One way to answer this question is to study professional wrestling—a sport turned into heroic spectacle in a quest to be entertaining.

When ranchers want to show ownership of animals, they burn their logos into the animals' hides. The brand is their mark of ownership. And in the realm of sports, nearly all major stadiums and arenas in North America now display the brands of airlines, banks, brewers, and a gang of companies selling cars, oil, auto parts, energy, soft drinks, and communications services and products.

For the venues in which NFL, NBA, and MLB teams play, these branding or naming rights sell for $3 million to $23 million per year. Deals usually are for 10-30 years and often include signage in and around the venue, the use of luxury boxes and club seats, promotional rights for events, and exclusive concession rights (e.g., the four Pepsi Centers in the United States sell only Pepsi products to fans).

Many college athletes recognize that they lack rights, but it has been difficult for them to lobby for changes. Challenging universities or the NCAA in court is expensive and would take far longer than the 4-5 years that athletes spend in a college sport career.

Forming an athletes' organization might make it possible to bargain for rights, but bringing together athletes from many campuses and sports would require resources that athletes don't have. As a result, many college athletes are in a dependent status and under the control of their coaches and athletic departments.

When social life is highly controlled and organized, everyday routines often cause people to feel emotionally constrained. This fosters a search for activities that offer tension-excitement and emotional arousal.

According to sociologists Eric Dunning and Norbert Elias, historical evidence suggests that this is common in modern societies. Sports, they contend, provide activities in which rules and norms can be shaped to foster emotional arousal and exciting actions, thereby eliminating boredom without disrupting social order in society

As of 2020, twenty-one states have approved sports betting in some form and all but six of the other twenty-nine states have voted down bills to allow it, but other bills will be brought to many of those states in the near future as attitudes against gambling continue to soften and as legislators seek new tax revenues.

According to the projections of a research firm that studies gaming, the revenue made by legal sports betting operations in the United States during 2019 will top $800 million. That would increase to $17.3 billion if sports betting were legal in all 50 states, and the total projected amount of money that would be bet each year on sports if it were legal in all 50 states would be well over $250 billion with three-fourths of all bets placed online; Under these conditions, the potential revenue increases for major men's sports leagues and teams are significant

Most of this money has gone into the pockets of team owners, executives, and players, who spend part of it in Denver but much of it elsewhere.

Also, the owners keep half of the stadium naming-rights money and the other half goes into the public fund to pay maintenance costs for the stadium, which is the responsibility of the taxpayers. Many of the stay-at-home fans of the team pay larger cable and satellite costs to see games and spend at least fifty hours a year sitting down watching Bronco games and consuming food and drinks at home or in bars. They become emotionally invested in the team, players, and outcomes of games and seasons, and they have fun with family and friends when watching and talking about things related to "their" team.

Therefore, rules in the X Games maximize "big air," dangerous and spectacular moves, and the technical aspects of equipment, often manufactured by event sponsors.

And when mixed martial arts was commercialized in the form of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), holding the fights in a cage was clearly an entertainment strategy—and it has been successful!

The progressive commercialization of certain sports has increased profits for team owners, league officials, media companies, and corporate sponsors. It has also provided some athletes with higher salaries and the general public with more media access to sports events.

At the same time, it has marginalized or excluded athletes and fans from decision-making processes related to how sports are organized, played, and watched. When decisions driven by commercial interests conflict with the interests of athletes and fans, they have occasionally resisted the power brokers in the sports industrial complex and tried to force a showdown to have their voices heard.

Commercial sports occur within a promotional culture created to sell athletic performances to audiences and sell audiences to sponsors. These sports are promoted through marketing hype based on stories, myths, and images created around players, teams, and even stadiums or arenas.

Athletes become entertainers, and the orientations of nearly everyone in sports shift toward an emphasis on heroic action and away from aesthetic action.

As a point of comparison, the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys are valued at $4.6 and $5 billion respectively, but they have fewer than 30 million social media followers between them.

Barcelona FC has ten times more followers than the Dallas Cowboys, and about the same number of followers as all thirty-two NFL teams combined. The only US team with a strong global profile is the Los Angeles Lakers, with nearly 30 million social media followers and high brand recognition. These data have attracted the attention of the leaders of US sport leagues because they indicate that there is much room for global expansion.

Two other sport teams with similar global recognition and value are Manchester United FC in England's Premier League and Barcelona FC in La Liga with Real Madrid.

Barcelona, long known as a football club of the working class, has 193 million social media followers worldwide and may be the most recognizable sport brand in the world because of its working-class identification.

Investments in sports and sport events are motivated by many factors. In some cases, investors are wealthy fans looking to satisfy lifelong fantasies, build their egos, or socialize with celebrity athletes.

Buying a team or sponsoring major events gives them more enjoyment and prestige than other business ventures, often making them instant celebrities in an exclusive business club that plays by less restrictive rules than other businesses

Media promote the commercialization of sports by publicizing and covering events in ways that sustain spectator interest. Television increases spectator access to events and athletes worldwide and provides unique representations of sports.

Camera coverage enables viewers to focus on the action and view replays in slow motion as they listen to the "insider" comments of announcers—all of which further immerses spectators into vicarious and potentially exciting sport experiences.

On-air commentators serve the media audience as fellow spectators who embellish the action and heighten identification with athletes and teams.

Commentators provide inside stories, analyze strategies, describe athletes as personalities, and magnify the importance an excitement of events.

Professional wrestling is commercialization pushed to an extreme.

It isolates elements of commercial sports and dramatizes them through parody and caricature. In the process, it abandons aesthetic orientations and highlights the heroic.

The National Hockey League, a long-time opponent of sports betting signed partnership deals with William Hill, part of the world's largest gaming organization; with FanDuel, the daily fantasy sports organization that is now an official sports betting operation; and with El Dorado Resorts that have gambling operations directly connected with NHL teams located in states where sports betting is or will soon be legal

In fact, the FanDuel Sportsbook will have its logo embedded in the ice as the New Jersey Devils play their games in the Prudential Center arena. Strangely, the NHL is also partners with DraftKings, a competitor of FanDuel, and has even invested in the company as it moves into the sports betting business.

The popularity of professional wrestling is grounded in the heroic actions of performers combined with story lines and personas that engage spectators' concerns with issues related to social class, gender, ethnicity, job security, and national identity.

In most cases, story lines and personas are performed by hypermasculine, heterosexual, and homophobic strong men who are arbitrarily victimized or privileged by greedy, underhanded corporate bosses or random, unpredictable events. The men are either supported or undermined by women, represented as alluring and vulnerable sex objects or exotic and heavily muscled sadomasochists. Overall, events are staged to represent male fantasies and fears about sex and power, and their concerns about work in a world where men feel they are losing control.

Can corporations go too far in their branding of sports? People in New Jersey didn't resist when a local elementary school sold naming rights for its gym to ShopRite, a supermarket chain.

Most high school and college sports programs have not resisted. Football fans don't object when McDonald's is touted as the NFL's Official Fast-Food Sponsor, and Olympic officials, who claim to be dedicated to health and fitness, have long accepted McDonald's and Coca-Cola as official sponsors of the Olympic Games. Despite a handful of cases where people objected to ads located on the actual field of play, sports are for sale, and corporations are willing buyers when deals boost their power and profits and promote consumption as a lifestyle.

The legal status of professional athletes in individual sports varies greatly from sport to sport and even from one athlete to another. Although there are important differences between boxing, bowling, golf, tennis, auto racing, rodeo, horse racing, track-and-field, skiing, biking, and a number of recently professionalized action sports, a few generalizations can be made.

The legal status of athletes in individual sports largely depends on what athletes must do to train and qualify for competitions. For example, few athletes can afford to pay for all the training needed to develop professional-level skills in a sport. Furthermore, they don't have the knowledge or connections to meet the formal requirements to become an official competitor in their sport, which may include having a recognized agent or manager (as in boxing), being formally accepted by other participants (as in most auto racing), obtaining membership in a professional organization (as in most bowling, golf, and tennis tournaments), or gaining a special invitation through an official selection group (as in professional track-and-field meets).

Unlike the professional leagues, the NCAA has not been eager to endorse sports betting

Professional players generally make too much money to risk participating in match- or prop-fixing, but college players are not paid and are more likely candidates for cooperating with corrupt gamblers for a share of payouts on "fixed" bets. To discourage this and to warn players of the dangers of betting on sports, the NCAA plans anti-gambling education and enforcement programs for all athletes, especially the men on high profile football and basketball teams. In the meantime, Division I universities, the high-profile conferences, and the NCAA will benefit from sports betting if they can demand more rights fees from media companies. Again, the more people bet on sports, the more they consume sports through media.

The majority of men and women playing professional tennis, golf, and other individual sports do not make enough prize money to pay their training and travel expenses each year, although many have sponsors that subsidize them.

Some athletes with sponsors may be under contract to share their winnings with them. The sponsors/investors cover expenses during the lean years but then take a percentage of prize money if and when the athletes win matches or tournaments.

So-called amateur sports don't have owners, but they do have commercial sponsors and governing bodies that control events and athletes. Generally, the sponsors in the United States are corporations interested in using amateur sports for publicity and advertising purposes.

The governing bodies of amateur sports operate on a nonprofit basis, although they use revenues from events to maintain their organizations and exert control over amateur sports. They generally hire for-profit companies to organize, publicize, and administer the events for them.

Commercial sports are organized and played for profit. Their success depends on gate receipts, concessions, sponsorships, the sale of media broadcasting rights, and other revenue streams associated with sport images and personalities. Therefore, commercial sports grow and prosper best under five social and economic conditions #3

Third, commercial sports are a luxury, and they prosper only when the standard of living is high enough that people have time and resources to play and watch events that have no tangible products required for survival. Transportation and communications technologies must exist for sponsors to make money. Therefore, commercial sports are common in wealthy, urban, and industrial or post-industrial societies; they seldom exist in labor-intensive, poor societies where people must use all their resources to survive.

When sports promote the idea that success is achieved through hard work and skill, their ideology is reaffirmed, and they become more secure in their beliefs. This is why sports media commentators emphasize that athletes and teams succeed when they work hard and have talent.

This also is why corporations use the bodies of elite athletes to represent their public relations and marketing images—the finely tuned bodies of athletes are concrete examples of skill, power, and success as well as the use of science and technology (Hoberman, 1994). When high-profile athletes can deliver this message for corporations, lucrative endorsements come their way.

Each league also has unique internal agreements regulating how teams can negotiate the sale of local broadcasting rights to their games. The NFL does not allow teams to sign independent television or radio contracts for local broadcasts of their games, but MLB does.

This creates significant disparities in the incomes of baseball teams, because the New York Yankees can negotiate a local media rights deal that may be a hundred times higher than what the Kansas City Royals can negotiate in a much smaller media market.

In the United States, the "gold medal" achievement for a corporation is to convert the company into a brand that can be associated with various forms of status and identity. Sports serve as effective sites for doing this as sport images and products can be used to represent people's identities at the same time that they can represent other things that give them status in particular social worlds.

This dynamic drives consumption and corporate profits. As a result, most people inadvertently boost brand power by wearing clothes that prominently display corporate or team logos. But corporations have convinced them that this is part of personal identity construction rather than free advertising for a company that cares nothing about them personally.

The tendency to think alike has been especially strong among the owners of teams in the major North American sport leagues.

Unity among owners has led to the formation of effective cartels.

The continuing wave of new stadium construction and renovation is the result of owners demanding venues that generate new revenue streams.

This is why these stadiums resemble shopping malls built around playing fields. Sociologist George Ritzer (2005) describes them as "cathedrals of consumption" designed so that consumption is seamlessly included in spectator experiences. Owners see this as important because it enables them to capture a greater share of the entertainment dollar in a highly competitive urban entertainment market. Their revenue generating strategy is to use as much public money as possible to build new venues that contain more luxury boxes and fewer "cheap seats." Then they increase the price of tickets and concessions, and use the same strategy again when another new venue will increase their revenues even more.

Like many athletes before them, the athletes in action sports find it difficult to oppose the power of the media and corporate sponsors. If they want the rewards offered in commercial sports, they answer first to the sponsors.

This isn't new; sponsors traditionally define the conditions of sport participation. But some people view the power shifts that come with commercialization in critical terms, assessing carefully the pros and cons of a commercial model in which corporations set the terms and conditions of playing sports. Commercialization may not significantly change the structure and goals of some sports, but it does come with major changes in power relations and the organizational contexts in which sports are played.

The organizations that control commercial sports are designed to maximize profits. Decision making promotes economic interests and defines athletes as commodities to be managed. Therefore, athletes in commercial sports usually are cut out of decision-making processes, even when the decisions affect their health and the rewards they receive for playing.

This leads them to develop strategies to represent their interests relative to the interests of team owners, agents, advertising executives, media people, and corporate sponsors. For example, athletes in ESPN's X Games constantly struggle to maintain the "alternative" spirit and norms of their sport cultures as they participate under conditions controlled by ESPN and corporate sponsors.

In the face of this situation, representatives of over 100 athlete organizations met in Switzerland in 2011 to explore how they could create an independent voice for athletes worldwide.

This led to the formation of the UNI World Athletes in 2014 which quickly morphed into the World Players Association (WPA) that now has 85,000 professional athletes as members and is formally connected with over 100 athlete organizations in 60 countries.

When a new stadium is built, the value of the team that plays there increases at least 25 percent.

This means that if a city builds a $700 million stadium for an NFL team that is valued at $4 billion, the franchise value will increase about $1 billion. This increase goes directly to the owners as team value.

Athletes in some leagues have formed players associations to compel officials and team owners to recognize their interests in decision-making processes.

This strategy has succeeded in some professional leagues, but most athletes don't have access to such associations, so they remain excluded from decision-making that impacts their health and careers

When sports are commercialized, athletes are entertainers. This is obvious at the professional level, but it's also true in other commercial sports such as big-time college football and basketball. Professional athletes are paid for their efforts, whereas amateur athletes receive rewards within limits set by the organizations that govern their lives. This raises these two questions:

What is the legal status of the athlete-entertainers in sports? How are athlete-entertainers rewarded for their work?

When sports depend on the revenues they generate, control in sports organizations shifts away from the athletes and toward those with the resources to produce and promote sports. Athletes in heavily commercialized sports generally lose effective control over the conditions of their own sport participation.

These conditions are controlled by a combination of general managers, team owners, corporate sponsors, advertisers, media personnel, marketing and publicity staff, professional management staff, accountants, and agents.

The AAU has a long history of sport sponsorship, but today it focuses mostly on youth sports. It continues to exist only because it signed in 1994 a 30-year cooperative deal with Walt Disney World Resort. The deal specified that the AAU would hold most of its national championships in over 25 different youth sports at the Wide World of Sports facilities in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

These facilities are located next to Disney World, which meant that as tens of thousands of young athletes came to national AAU tournaments, they would be escorted by families that would turn the trip into a vacation and spend extra days and much money at Disney World. When Disney merged with Capital Cities/ABC in 1995 and acquired the upstart ESPN in the deal, the AAU gained an influential media partner.

The people who object to stadium subsidies seldom have resources to oppose the well-financed, professionally packaged proposals developed by the consultants hired by team owners. The social activists who might lead the opposition already deal full time with problems related to unemployment, underfunded schools, homelessness, poor health, and the lack of needed social services in cities.

They cannot abandon these tasks to lobby against using public money to benefit billionaire team owners and millionaire celebrity athletes. At the same time, local people are persuaded to think that team owners will abandon their city if they don't pony up public money to build a new facility with the requisite number of luxury suites and club seats.

Some people prefer the NFL stadium, but many others might prefer an abundance of local recreation facilities, if they had a choice. Among those preferring the stadium are people with the power and resources to obtain what they want. And they want new stadiums and access to the revenue streams that a stadium generates.

They have memberships in athletic and fitness clubs and don't care about building public recreation centers. Even their children play sports in private clubs and on teams that use private facilities. Additionally, they have mini fitness centers in their homes. This is how power and social class shape local cultures, access to particular kinds of sport facilities, and priorities for spending public money related to sports.

Those who invest in sports enjoy their status, but they don't allow fun and fantasy to interfere with business and the growth of their capital. They don't enjoy losing money or sharing power. They may look at their athletes as heroes, but they want to control them and maximize investment returns.

They may be civic boosters and supporters of public projects, but they define the "public good" in terms that emphasize capitalist expansion and their own business interests, usually to the exclusion of other definitions. They may not agree with fellow owners and sponsors on all issues, but they do agree that their investments must be protected and their profits maximized.

Centralized state-sponsored sport authorities administer amateur sports in nearly all countries except the United States.

They work with the national governing bodies (NGBs) of individual sports, and together they control events, athletes, and revenues. Sport Canada and the Canadian Olympic Association are examples of such centralized authorities; they develop the policies that govern the various national sport organizations in Canada, from youth sports to national teams.

Sports generally involve a tension between order and disruption. To manage this tension, norms and rules in sports must be loose enough to allow exciting action, but not so loose that they permit uncontrolled violence or other forms of destructive actions.

When norms and rules are too constraining, sports are boring and people lose interest; when they are too loose, sports become sites for reckless and dangerous actions that jeopardize health and social order. The challenge is to find and maintain a balance.

IOC officials know that drinking cola does not meet the nutritional needs of elite athletes or the health goals of the Olympic movement, but they respond supportively to this executive's message. Coca-Cola has worked for nearly a century to colonize their minds and establish the outposts through which this message has been transmitted. This is why past official program brochures for the Olympics contains these words:

Without sponsors, there would be no Olympic Games. Without the Olympic Games, there would be no dreams. Without dreams, there would be nothing (cited in Horne, 2007).

The people who profit from commercial sports always have their eyes open to the existence of new revenue streams.

a 2018 US Supreme Court decision allowed states to approve sports betting. As state officials realize that it is easier to control corruption in connection with legalized gambling than with illegal gambling, they are cautiously moving in that direction

Sport spectators are likely to be plentiful in societies where there's a general quest for excitement...

an ideological emphasis on material success, childhood experiences with sports, and easy access to sports through the media.

Each league—the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB—is also a monopsony, or a single buyer of a product or service

in this case, elite athletic labor in a particular sport. This means that if a college football player wants to play professional football in the United States, he has one choice: the NFL. And the NFL, like other monopsony leagues, has developed a system to force new players to negotiate contracts only with the team that drafts them. This enables owners to sign new players to contracts without bidding against other teams, which might be willing to pay particular players more money.

A cartel

is a centralized group that coordinates the actions of a selected collection of people or businesses. Therefore, even though each sport franchise in each league is usually a separate business, the team owners in each sport come together to form a cartel representing their collective interests. The cartel is used to control inter-team competition for players, fans, media revenues, and sales of licensed merchandise. Additionally, it's used to eliminate competition from others who might form teams and leagues in the same sports.

The legal status of athletes in certain individual sports is defined in the bylaws of professional organizations such as

the Professional Golf Association (PGA), the Ladies' Professional Golf Association (LPGA), the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA). When athletes play a role in controlling these organizations, the policies support athletes' rights and enable them to manage some of the conditions under which they compete. Without such organizations, athletes in these sports would have few rights as workers.

Apart from sport governing bodies like the US Golf Association and the US Tennis Association that continue to sponsor official tournaments for amateurs

the only sport governing bodies that use an amateur status eligibility requirement are the Amateur Athletic Association (AAU) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

The belief that cities cannot have "major league status" unless they have professional sports teams and sports megaevents has enabled sports team owners and promoters to receive public money. Most common is the use of public funds to build arenas and stadiums.

this "stadium socialism" enables wealthy and powerful capitalists to use public money for personal gain, but when the media discuss this transfer of funds, it is usually described as "economic development" rather than "welfare for the rich."

The term, amateur, can mean many things, but it is used here to refer

to athletes whose participation eligibility requires that they make no money from their athletic performances or in connection with their status as an athlete. Prior to 1971, the IOC and the NGBs of many sports required all competitors to be amateurs. But this became increasingly impractical as national and international athletes trained full time. Keeping the amateur requirement would exclude anyone who didn't come from a wealthy background. So the IOC and other sports organizations changed their rules and changed them again to allow established professional athletes to participate.

If players don't like the terms of a current CBA and the owners refuse to talk with them, the players may call a strike,

which is a work stoppage in which employees refuse to work until a labor dispute is resolved, and players agree to sign a new CBA.

When a cartel succeeds, as it has in each of the major men's professional team sports, it becomes a monopoly

—the one and only provider of a particular product or service.

The dramatic increase in salaries at the top level of pro sports since 1980 can be attributed to two factors:

(1) changes in the legal status and rights of players, which have led to free agency and the use of a salary arbitration process and (2) increased revenues, especially through the sale of media rights, flowing to leagues and owners.increases in player salaries correspond closely with court decisions and labor agreements that changed the legal status of athletes and gave them bargaining power in contract negotiations with team owners.

All amateur sports organizations share an interest in two things:

(1) controlling the athletes in their sports and (2) controlling the money generated from sponsorships and competitive events.

The owners of top pro teams in the major men's sports make money from four primary sources:

(1) media rights, (2) gate receipts, (3) sponsors, and (4) merchandising. The amounts and proportions of each of these revenue sources vary from league to league and team to team.

The use of public assistance to subsidize stadiums and arenas for team owners is based on a belief that these venues benefit the entire community in the following five ways:

1. A stadium and pro team create jobs; those who hold the jobs spend money and pay taxes in the city so that everyone benefits. 2. Stadium construction infuses money into the local economy; this money is spent over and over and generates tax revenues as it circulates. 3. The team attracts businesses to the city, and this increases local revenues. 4. The team attracts regional and national media attention, which boosts tourism and contributes to overall economic development. 5.The team creates positive psychic and social benefits, boosting social unity and feelings of pride and well-being in the local population.

Although it's been a struggle for professional team athletes to maintain their unions, they realize that crucial labor issues must be negotiated every time they renew their CBA with the owners' cartel. At this time, the main issues negotiated in CBAs are the following:

1. The definition of league revenues, and the percentage of those revenues that the team owners must allocate to players' salaries and benefits. 2. The extent to which owners can share revenues with one another (and thereby reduce incentives to win and to pay large salaries to players who would help the team to win). 3. Salary limits for rookies signing their first pro contract, salary restrictions for veteran players, and minimum salary levels for all players. 4. The conditions under which players can become free agents and the rights of players who are free agents. 5. A salary cap that sets the maximum player payroll for teams and a formula determining the fines that an owner must pay if the team's payroll exceeds the cap. 6. A total team salary floor that sets the minimum payroll for each team in a league. 7. The conditions under which players or teams can request an outside arbitrator to determine the fairness of an existing or proposed contract. 8. Changes in the rules of the game.

Because attachment, uncertainty, high stakes, and performance attract spectators, successful commercial sports are organized to maximize the probability that all four factors will exist in an event. To understand how this affects sports, we will consider the impact of commercialization on the following three aspects of sports:

1. the internal structure and goals of sports 2. The orientations of athletes, coaches, and sponsors 3. The people and organizations that control sports.

Despite these claims made by owners and their allies, impact studies done by independent researchers generally reach the following conclusions: #5

A pro sport team can make some people feel good and may enhance general perceptions of a city, but this is difficult to measure and little is known about its consequences for the city as a whole. Additionally, the feelings of fans often vary with the success of a team, and the feelings of those who are not fans may not be improved by a men's sport team that reaffirms traditional masculinity and values emphasizing domination and conquest.

The owners know that they can outlast the players through a work stoppage. They are independently wealthy and will take short-term losses for long-term gains. The players, on the other hand, have short careers and must take advantage of their youth while they have it.

A season-long lockout could mean a 15 to 33 percent loss of sport career lifetime income for each player; for the owners, it's a minor blip in their investment portfolios. Additionally, the owners know that younger, lower-paid players have different contract concerns than highly paid stars, and this difference will eventually erode unity among the players. Then the owners can make a deal that favors themselves.

Market economies always privilege the interests of those who have the power and resources to select sports for promotion and coverage. Unless those people want to play, sponsor, or watch a sport, it won't be commercialized on a large scale, nor will it be given cultural significance in society.

A sport won't become a "national pastime" or be associated with "character," community spirit, civic unity, and political loyalty unless it's favored by people with resources.

At the same time, as corporations and outside investors have become team owners, they seek high investment returns and predictability in their financial projections and feel that they must have more control over players' salaries and benefits.

Additionally, they generally detest players' associations because they are basically labor unions. One owners' strategy to gain more control has been to request that certain parts of an existing CBA be renegotiated because there are new issues that they face. But if players are happy with the existing CBA, they are not interested in talking about anything with owners. The result of this situation is that owners have imposed lockouts on players, which means that there are no more games or practices, and players receive no paychecks. NHL owners locked out players in 2004-2005 and 2012-2013; NBA owners locked out players in 2011, as did NFL owners.

The only amateur athletes in the Olympics today are boxers and wrestlers.

Allowing professionals to compete in these two sports is seen as a safety issue, so the amateur requirement has been retained. All other Olympic athletes may compete for prize money and work in sports, which had been prohibited for most of the twentieth century.

David Carter from the Sports Marketing Company in California knows that high school sports need revenues, so he predicts that "commercialism is coming to a school near you: the high school cheerleaders will be brought to you by Gatorade, and the football team will be presented by Outback [Steakhouse]"

As corporations brand public spaces, community identities often come to be linked with brands, thereby converting the physical embodiments of local traditions and histories into highly visible signs that promote consumption and identify corporations as providers of pleasure and excitement. In the process, the public good is replaced by the corporate good, even in spaces paid for and owned by citizen-taxpayers.

Like athletes, fans also are excluded in the decision-making processes of commercial sports. In cases where teams are sponsored through a club system in which members historically participated in decision-making related to club affairs, these members and the larger fan groups to which they belong have recently protested the decisions of team owners and management and called for fan voices to be heard on a range of issues

As professional club teams generated more revenues, especially from sponsors and the sales of media rights, they depended less and less on the support of local communities, especially segments of those communities that had been long-time, working-class supporters of local clubs. Stadiums were renovated or constructed in new locations with the intent of attracting wealthier and less rowdy spectators who would pay higher prices for tickets in venues where all their experiences were commodified. In the process, male working-class fans were treated as consumers to be regulated and controlled and then marginalized to the point that they felt disconnected with the teams around which their identities had been formed for generations. Combined with feelings of powerlessness in other aspects of their lives, this led some fans to use football/soccer as a context in which to voice their resistance to neo-liberal trends driven by commercial interests.

When thinking about public subsidies to sport teams, it's helpful to consider alternative uses of public funds. For example, my former hometown of Colorado Springs used $6 million of public money in 2000 to construct a youth sport complex consisting of 12 baseball, softball, and T-ball fields of various sizes with bleacher seating; ten soccer/football fields; six volleyball courts; an in-line skating rink; a batting cage (for baseball hitting practice); and multiple basketball courts.

At the same time, $300 million of tax money from six Denver metro counties was used to build a new stadium for Pat Bowlen, the wealthy owner of the Denver Broncos. Instead of doing this, the counties could have done what Colorado Springs did and used the $300 million to build 600 baseball, softball, and T-ball fields; 500 soccer/football fields; 300 volleyball courts; 50 in-line skating rinks; 50 batting cages; and 250 basketball courts around the metro area.

In general, the owners don't want to spend more than 40 to 50 percent of total revenues on players' salaries and benefits. Ideally, they'd like to keep 60 percent or more of all revenues so there would be plenty of money left over for them after they pay all the bills.

At this point, most players in the big spectator sports think they should be entitled to at least 50 cents of every dollar of revenue that is collected by the league and teams. Through the recent lockouts the owners have succeeded in pushing the players' percentage lower. Future lockouts will indicate how low they can force the share of revenues going to players.

What happens to sports as they shift from being activities organized for players to activities organized for paying spectators and sponsors? Do they change? If so, in what ways? When a sport is converted into commercial entertainment, its success depends solely on spectator appeal. Although spectators watch sports for many reasons, their interest is tied to a combination of four factors (Cox, 2018; Lee, 2018):

Attachment to those involved ("Do I know, like, or strongly identify with players and/or teams?") The uncertainty of an event's outcome ("Will it be a close contest?" and "Who might win?") The stakes associated with an event ("How much money, status, or danger is involved in the contest?") The anticipated display of excellence, heroics, or dramatic expression by the athletes ("Are the players and/or teams skilled and entertaining?" and "Might they set a record?" or "be the best team/athlete ever?")

In all other cases, it is corporations who choose who and what they wish to brand. For example, some athletes as young as 12 years old may be known as Nike, Adidas, or Under Armour athletes.

Corporate executives now try to brand athletes as early as possible so that they can socialize the athletes to develop marketable personas that can be used to effectively promote corporate interests.

The Super Bowl, far too expensive for any single corporation to brand on its own, is known as much for its ads as for the game itself. Corporate sponsors of the 2020 Super Bowl paid about $5.5 million for thirty-second commercial spots during the telecast of the game—that's over $183,000 per second!

Corporate sponsors pay this rate because their ads are seen live by viewers who can't "fast forward" through commercials and they receive exposure beyond the game itself—in terms of previews, summaries, highlights, evaluations, and rankings in other media coverage—and they will be available for years on the Internet where people can see every ad starting with the 1969 Super Bowl. Corporations have branded the Super Bowl to such an extent that it has been described as a program where the commercials are the entertainment, and the game may or may not be entertaining.

Sponsorship patterns in amateur sports take many forms. Universities, for example, "sell" their athletic departments, allowing corporations to brand their athletic teams and the bodies of athletes in exchange for money, scholarships, equipment, and apparel.

Corporations and universities usually enter these agreements outside of any democratic processes involving votes by students, athletes, or the citizens whose taxes fund the universities.

Future forms of corporate branding are difficult to predict because it's hard to say where people will draw the line and prevent corporations from colonizing their lives. Ads during television coverage are now inserted digitally on the field, court, and other surfaces of arenas and stadiums so that viewers cannot escape them even when they record events and delete commercials.

Corporations spend more of their advertising money today to purchase brand-placement rights, so their names, logos, and products appear directly in the content of sports. This maximizes the branding of playing fields/spaces, uniforms, and athletes' bodies.

This explanation of spectator interest raises the question, "Why do so many people give priority to sports over other activities in their quest for excitement?"

Cultural theorists suggest that answers can be found by looking at the connection between ideology and cultural practices. This leads us to consider the following factors.

Commercial sports are organized and played for profit. Their success depends on gate receipts, concessions, sponsorships, the sale of media broadcasting rights, and other revenue streams associated with sport images and personalities. Therefore, commercial sports grow and prosper best under five social and economic conditions #5

Fifth, commercial sports flourish in cultures where lifestyles emphasize consumption and material status symbols. This enables everything associated with sports to be marketed and sold: athletes (including their names, autographs, and images), merchandise, team names, and logos. When people express their identities through clothing, other possessions, and their associations with status symbols and celebrities, they will spend money on sports that have meaning in their social world. The success of commercial sports depends on selling symbols and emotional experiences to audiences, and then selling audiences to sponsors and the media.

Commercial sports are organized and played for profit. Their success depends on gate receipts, concessions, sponsorships, the sale of media broadcasting rights, and other revenue streams associated with sport images and personalities. Therefore, commercial sports grow and prosper best under five social and economic conditions #1

First, they are most prevalent in market economies where material rewards are highly valued by athletes, team owners, event sponsors, and spectators.

In the United States, the organization and control of amateur sports is much less centralized. Policies, rules, fund-raising strategies, and methods of operating vary from one organization to the next. For example, the major governing body in intercollegiate sports is the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

For amateur sports not connected with universities, the major controlling organization is the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC). However, within the USOPC, each of the 47 separate NGBs regulate and control a particular amateur sport. NGBs raise most of their own funds through corporate and individual sponsors, and each one sets its own policies to supplement the rules and policies of the USOPC and IOC. The USOPC has long tried to establish continuity in American amateur sports, but the NGBs and other organizations are very protective of their own turf, and they seldom give up power; instead, they fight to maintain exclusive control over rules, revenues, and athletes. This has caused many political battles in and among organizations.

The WPA gives players a forum for connecting with each other and sharing information about experiences, working conditions, and labor relations. It also works directly with local athlete organizations.

For example, WPA officials met with athletes and officials from the European Basketball Player Associations in Italy during 2019 to strengthen social dialogue and the bargaining power among professional players from France, Spain, and Italy (EUAthletes, 2017). Annual WPA conferences are organized around seminars and education programs for athletes at all points in their careers and around political issues related to working conditions and human rights (the 2021 conference to be held in the USA).

Independent researchers explain that positive effects are bound to occur when a city spends $500 million to a billion dollars of public money on a project. However, they also point out that the public good might be better served if tax money were spent on things other than a stadium.

For example, during the mid-1990s, the city of Cleveland spent nearly a billion dollars of public money to build three sport facilities and related infrastructure. Inner-city residents during the same years pleaded with the city to install a drinking fountain in a park in a working-class neighborhood, and teachers held classes in renovated shower rooms in local public schools because there was no money to fund new educational facilities for inner-city students.

Sports most likely to be commercialized are those watched, played, or used for profit by people who control economic resources in society.

For example, golf is a major commercial sport, even though it does not lend itself to commercial presentation. It's inconvenient to stage a golf event for a live audience or to televise it. Camera placement and media commentary are difficult to arrange, and live spectators see only a small portion of the action. Golf does not involve vigorous action or head-to-head competition, except in rare cases of match play. Usually, if you don't play golf or know the players, you have little or no reason to watch it.

Because certain sports capture the attention, emotions, and allegiance of so many people worldwide, corporations are eager to sponsor them. Corporations need symbols of success and productivity that they can use as "marketing hooks" for products and as representations of their images.

For example, people around the world still associate Michael Jordan with the "Air Jordan" trademark copyrighted by Nike; and many people now assume a connection between the Olympics and both McDonald's and Coca-Cola.

A review of rule changes in many sports shows the importance of these factors.

For example, the designated hitter position in baseball's American League was added to increase scoring opportunities and heighten dramatic action. Soccer rules were changed to prevent matches from ending in ties. Tennis scoring was changed to meet the time requirements of television networks. Golf tournaments now involve total stroke counts rather than match play, so that big-name players aren't eliminated in an early round of a televised event. Free throws were minimized in basketball to speed up action. A sudden-death overtime period followed by a player versus goalie shootout (if needed) is now used by the National Hockey League to eliminate tie games and provide spectators with exciting action.

Although the official position of people in major commercial sports organizations has been anti-gambling, most of them had a quick change of heart as they identified ways to increase revenues in connection with sports betting

For example, the top professional men's leagues asked states to give them a share of gambling revenues for overseeing "the integrity of games," and providing the game data that made bets possibles. The states denied these requests which led the leagues to partner with casinos and sports betting operations in sponsorship and partnership deals. NBA officials were among the first to work with US and international sportsbooks, including MGM Resorts (and casinos) to sell them advertising opportunities as well as official NBA and WNBA game data that is used to calculate the odds for in-game betting

Disney World benefitted from the tourism generated by the tournaments and the AAU leaders had new headquarters, an attractive marketing position, and financial security. As they have recruited young athletes and youth sport teams into their organization, families have spent untold millions of dollars as their children have played in what are hyped as national championships year after year after year.

For example, when the AAU held its 12-day Junior National Volleyball Championships in June 2019, they brought 2,800 teams and 45,000 participants from around the world to Orlando. With them came family members, 9,000 team coaches, and 700 college coaches wanting to scout and recruit players. A total of over 120,000 "volleyball people" had an estimated economic impact of 91 million dollars for the Orlando/Central Florida area. This, of course, is a new monetized version of amateurism in which people can generate massive revenues under the cover of non-profit organizations that operate with and like businesses. This has converted youth sports into a massive industry.

Spectator interest often is initiated during childhood sports experiences. When organized youth sports programs emphasize skills, competition, and success, participants are likely to grow up wanting to watch elite athletes.

For young people who continue to play sports, watching elite athletes provides them with models for playing and improving skills; for those who discontinue active participation, watching elite athletes provides continuous connections with the images and experiences of success that they learned while playing organized youth sports.

Commercial sports are organized and played for profit. Their success depends on gate receipts, concessions, sponsorships, the sale of media broadcasting rights, and other revenue streams associated with sport images and personalities. Therefore, commercial sports grow and prosper best under five social and economic conditions #4

Fourth, commercial sports require large amounts of capital (money or credit) to build and maintain stadiums and arenas in which events can be played and watched. Capital can be accumulated in the public or private sector, but in either case, the willingness to invest in sports depends on anticipated payoffs in the form of publicity, profits, or power. Private investment in sports occurs when investors expect financial profits; public investment occurs when political leaders believe that commercial sports serve their personal interests, the interests of "the public," or a combination of both.

The economic stakes for athletes and sponsors have never been higher than they are today. The bottom line has replaced the goal line. Sports are now evaluated by gate receipts, concessions and merchandise sales, licensing fees, media rights contracts, and social media followers.

Games and events are evaluated using media criteria such as market share, ratings points, and the cost of commercial time. Athletes are evaluated by their entertainment value as well as physical skills. Stadiums, teams, and events are named after corporations and linked to corporate logos instead of people and places that have local historical meaning.

Commercial sports are now global in scope.

Globalization has occurred because (1) those who control, sponsor, and promote sports seek new ways to expand markets and maximize profits, and (2) transnational corporations use sports as vehicles for introducing their products and services around the world. This makes sports a form of global cultural trade that is exported and imported in a manner similar to other products.

This benefits corporations, especially in major cities where four large billboards can cost up to $100,000 a month ($1.2 million per year).

Having multiple billboard-like surfaces inside and outside a stadium is viewed as a good investment by corporate executives, especially when the name of their company is used in everyday conversations and they receive "sport perks" for themselves, customers, and friends.

Sociologist Brendan Maguire used structural theory to hypothesize that pro wrestling is popular because it "addresses the anxiety and angst associated with community breakdown, social disenchantment, and political correctness"

He explained that when community ties are strong and social satisfaction is high and social control is not overly constraining, people have little anxiety and little need to be entertained by dramatic parodies of heroic wrestling action.

Although the NCAA now allows its Division I member institutions to award multiple year scholarships and adjust scholarship amounts to cover the full cost of attending a particular university, it continues to require that athletes remain amateurs.

However, as more people have seen the hypocrisy of this, the NCAA is, as I write this, being pressured to revise its definition of amateur to allow athletes to profit from using their names under certain conditions. At the same time, the NCAA resists defining college athletes as employees, which would change the entire landscape of college sports in the United States.

Women who want to be a part of the power structure in the United States often find that they must learn to "talk football" so they can communicate with the men who have created organizational cultures and control women's careers.

If female executives don't go to the next big football game and take clients with them, they risk being excluded from the "masculinity loop" that is central to corporate culture and communication. When they go to work every Monday during the fall, they know that their ability to "talk football" can keep them in touch with male co-workers.

In less than a generation, sports have been so thoroughly branded that many people, especially those younger than 30 years old, see this situation as "normal"—as the way it is and should be. Does this mean that corporations have established ideological outposts in their heads to the point that they accept corporate power as inevitable and even desirable?

If so, corporate hegemony is deeply entrenched, even if some people resist and argue that the control of sports should not rest in the hands of corporate entities accountable only to market forces. If so, commercial sports are a site where people with political and financial resources can package their values and ideas and present them in a form that most people see as normal, acceptable, and even entertaining.

Which of these two alternatives would have had the most positive impact on the overall quality of life in the Denver metro area?

If the money had been spent on local recreation facilities, individuals and families in the region would now have easy access to one or more of them seven days a week for a nominal cost. Maybe people in the region would be more physically active and healthier. Instead, the region has a 72,000-seat stadium used by the Denver Broncos ten times a year, or thirteen times if they make the playoffs with home-field advantage and win all games leading up to the Super Bowl.

Prior to the mid-1970s pro athletes made two to four times more than median family income in the United States. After free agency was allowed in the 1970s, salaries skyrocketed. With rising revenues from gate receipts and media rights, salaries increased rapidly as teams competed for players and negotiated new Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs) with players' unions.

In 2019, the ratio of average salaries relative to median family income was 104:1 for the NBA; 60:1 for MLB; 37:1 for the NHL; 39:1 for the NFL; 5:1 for the MLS, 1:1 for the WNBA and .3:1 for the NWSL.

As long as the reserve system was legal, owners could maintain low salaries and near-total control over the conditions under which athletes played their sports. Parts of the reserve system continue to exist in professional sports, but players' associations (that is, unions) in each of the major professional leagues for men have challenged the system in court and forced significant changes that increased their rights as workers so they could negotiate with owners to control conditions of their work and establish guidelines for their salaries.

In any other business, a reserve system of the type used in men's professional sports would violate antitrust laws. Companies cannot control employee movement from firm to firm, and they certainly cannot draft employees so that no other company can hire them, nor can they trade them at will to another company. But this type of reserve system, with modifications since the 1970s, has been defined by the US Congress as legal in sports, and owners use it with minimal interference from any government agency.

Players in the NBA G League make $35,000 per year plus a few benefits, although a few "select" players can make up to $125,000—a concession made by the NBA to keep top players from seeking contracts with teams in other countries. The players in the highest level of minor league hockey make a minimum of $47,500 per year plus some benefits, and some players have six-figure salaries when they are on-call to move up to the NHL. The minimum salary for rookies in a minor hockey league is $1840 per month, about $700 per month more than the baseball players make.

In most cases, being a professional athlete in all but the top men's team sports continues to be a seasonal job with few benefits and little or no career security. The leagues struggle to survive, players often do not make a living wage, they have little control over where they live, and job security is nonexistent. The players are motivated by the love of the game or by the myth that you can be anything you want to be if you work hard enough.

Worldwide, sports betting is a multibillion-dollar business.

It has for some time been legal in most of Europe and parts of Asia, although it is regulated by national governments. International sports betting is estimated to be a $250 billion business and the United States already accounts for about $70 billion of that amount with most of that amount being wagered illegally (Gray, 2019). Legalization will certainly increase that betting activity.

The sport with the longest history of global expansion is soccer, which is governed by FIFA—the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. The top soccer clubs in Europe have used multiple strategies to expand their global marketing reach. The best current example is Real Madrid Football Club (FC) in the Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional, or La Liga, the premier twenty-team league in Spain.

It was valued at $4.4 billion in 2019 and is owned by about 60,000 club members. It has over 207 million social media followers and is rated as one of the twenty most recognizable brands in the world.

The success of this strategy led a Coca-Cola executive to tell IOC officials that they owed loyalty to Coke. He explained that

Just as sponsors have the responsibility to preserve the integrity of the sport, enhance its image, help grow its prestige and its attendance, so too, do you [in sports] have responsibility and accountability to the sponsor.

Owner-athlete relations change every time a new CBA is negotiated and signed. Although team owners, league officials, and some fans dislike the players' unions, these organizations have enabled players to gain more control over their salaries and working conditions.

Labor negotiations and players' strikes in professional team sports have focused primarily on issues of freedom and control over careers, rather than money, although money has certainly been an issue. As a result, free agency now exists for all players after they've been under contract for a certain number of years, and owners no longer have absolute control over players' careers.

Whenever athletes need sponsors to pay for training or agents to help them meet participation requirements, their legal status is shaped by the contracts they sign with these people and then with the organizations that regulate participation. This is why the legal status of athletes in individual sports varies so widely.

Let's use boxing as an example. Because many boxers come from low-income backgrounds, they lack the resources to develop high-level boxing skills and arrange official bouts with other boxers. They must have trainers, managers, and sponsors, and the support of these people always comes with conditions that are written in formal contracts or based on informal agreements. In either case, boxers must forfeit control over much of their lives and a portion of the rewards they may earn in future bouts. This means that few boxers have much control over their careers, even when they win large amounts of prize money. They are forced to trade control over their bodies and careers for the opportunity to continue boxing. This is an example of how class relations operate in sports: when people lack resources, they are limited in the ways they can negotiate the conditions under which their sport careers occur.

As with team sports, publicity is given to the highest-paid athletes in individual sports. However, the reality is that many players in these sports don't make enough money from tournament winnings to pay all their expenses and support themselves comfortably.

Many golfers, tennis players, bowlers, track-and-field athletes, auto and motorcycle racers, rodeo riders, figure skaters, and others must carefully manage their money so that they don't spend more than they win as they travel from event to event. When tournament winnings are listed in the newspaper, nothing is said about the expenses for hotels, food, and transportation or about other expenses for coaches, agents, managers, and various support people. The top money winners don't worry about these expenses, but most athletes in individual sports are not big money winners.

To understand the range of incomes in top level men's team sports, consider that in recent seasons the total salaries of 15 percent of MLB players have been about the same as the total salaries of the other 85 percent of players. This is why the average—or mean—salary in Major League Baseball was about $4.38 million in 2019, whereas the median salary is less than one-third that amount at $1.4 million per year. The big salaries for a few players drive up the average for the entire league.

Mega-salaries in men's professional team sports did not exist before the 1980s. That players' average salaries have grown far beyond median family income in the United States. For example, players in 1950 had salaries not much higher than median family income at that time. In 2018-19, the average NBA salary was more than 100 times greater than the median family income!

For over 20 years, Monday Nitro and Monday Night Raw have cut into the audience for Monday Night Football and the finals of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. Raw, Smackdown!, and WWE Main Event have had viewer ratings consistently higher than mainstream sport events, and WWE pay-per-view events often generate impressive revenues.

Monday Night Raw and SmackDown Live are the two longest running weekly episodic programs in US primetime history, and Total Divas, a reality series about women wrestlers, is running in its ninth season.

Branded as World Wrestling Entertainment, professional wrestling events remain among the highest-rated programs on television worldwide.

More than 8000 hours of WWE programming is available in 180 countries and 28 languages, and the WWE Network now provides historical as well as current coverage and commentary of wrestling matches dating back to 1993.

Commercial sports organizations are businesses, and their goal is to expand into as many markets as possible. In fact, future profits for major professional sports depend on selling media rights and consumer merchandise.

Most leagues now market themselves outside their home countries and use various strategies to develop identification with their sport, teams, and players. In this way, sports organizations become exporters of culture as well as products to be consumed.

Many people don't think of athletes as workers, and they overlook owner-player relations in professional sports as a form of labor relations.

Most people associate sports with play, and they see athletes as having fun rather than working. However, when sports are businesses, players are workers, even though they may have fun on the job. This isn't unique; many workers enjoy their jobs. But regardless of enjoyment, issues of legal status and fair rewards for work are important. focuses on the United States and does not consider all the sports that collect gate receipts but never make enough money to pay for anything but basic expenses, if that. Therefore, we don't discuss high school sports, non-revenue-producing college sports, or other nonprofit local sports in which teams sell tickets to events.

Sport events also are branded. College football fans in the United States watch everything from the Playstation Fiesta Bowl to the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl during December and early January. College football is clearly branded, as are the athletes who wear corporate logos on their shirts, shoes, helmets, and warm-up clothing.

NASCAR auto and truck racing has always been heavily branded. Although they have changed their branding strategies recently, they still have branded races such as Coca Cola 600, Coke Zero Sugar 400, Food City 500, Hollywood Casino 400, and Big Machine Vodka 400 at the Brickyard. Additionally, racecars are billboards with surface spaces purchased by companies selling products that often cannot be advertised on network television, such as hard liquor and tobacco. This is why it was so important for NASCAR to be nationally televised—the liquor and tobacco companies wanted their brand names in front of a national audience for 250 to 600 laps during races.

Sociologists Kevin Delaney and Rick Eckstein (2003) studied the Cleveland case along with eight other cities where public money was used to build stadiums for private use. They concluded that the results in Cleveland were better than in the other cities. However, they found no evidence that the three stadiums fostered a downtown rejuvenation, as stadium proponents had predicted.

Neither the number of businesses nor job creation rates increased, and in the three years following the construction, the cost for each new job created was $231,000, nearly twenty times higher than the cost to develop jobs with public programs. The new sport facilities failed to lower poverty rates, improve schools, or increase the availability of safe, low-cost housing (deMause and Cagan, 2008), but they did force poor people to move to other areas of town which gave developers cheap access to land on which they could build.

Sports have been used as public entertainment through history. However, they've never been so thoroughly commercialized as they are today.

Never before have economic factors so totally dominated decisions about sports, and never before have economic organizations and corporate interests had so much power and control over the meaning, purpose, and organization of sports.

Overall, a few athletes in individual sports have large incomes, whereas most others struggle to cover expenses.

Only when sport events are broadcast on television can athletes compete for major prize money and earn large incomes, unless they are amateurs or have not bargained for their rights as workers.

Starting in the late 1990s, professional wrestling captured widespread spectator interest and was a smashing commercial success. It bodyslammed its way into popular culture worldwide. It featured events in sold out stadiums nearly every night in North American cities. Raw Is War and Smackdown! were top-ranked programs on ad-supported cable television.

Pay-per-view events often subscribed over half a million viewers at $30 per month and up to $50 for special events. Matches were televised in nine languages in 120 countries, wrestling videos were the best-selling "sports videos" in the world, and wrestling action figures outsold all other characters in popular culture.

Professional events in golf, tennis, beach volleyball, skiing, ice skating, and most other sports are now named after global corporations that want their names and products to be recognized worldwide. Corporations also brand teams in cycling, soccer, rugby, and many other sports.

Professional baseball teams in Japan are named after corporations, not cities. Players and even referees in most sports wear the corporate logos of sponsors on their uniforms. Because European soccer was televised for many years by public TV stations that had no commercials, corporations put their logos on the players themselves and around the walls of the playing fields so that spectators would see them constantly. This tradition continues even though commercial media now own the rights to televise most sport events worldwide.

Commercial sports are organized and played for profit. Their success depends on gate receipts, concessions, sponsorships, the sale of media broadcasting rights, and other revenue streams associated with sport images and personalities. Therefore, commercial sports grow and prosper best under five social and economic conditions. #2

Second, they usually exist in societies that have large, densely populated cities with high concentrations of potential spectators. Although some forms of commercial sports can be maintained in rural, agricultural societies, their revenues would not support full-time professional athletes or sport promoters.

Professional sports in North America are privately owned by individuals, partnerships, or corporations. The wealth and power of owners is greatest at the top levels of professional sports and less so in minor leagues and sports with relatively small audiences.

Similarly, sponsors and event promoters range from individuals to large transnational corporations, depending on the size of events.

Corporate branders now give priority to sports that appeal to young males, a demographic category defined as "hard to reach." So there are the X Games, Dew Tour, numerous events sponsored by Red Bull Energy Drink, Van's Triple Crown (surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding), McDonald's All-American High School Basketball Games, Monster Energy AMA Supercross, GoPro Mountain Games, and the Nike Hoop Summit.

Sports agents today tell athletes that they can be brands and their goal should be to merge with other commercial entities rather than simply endorse a company's products. Michael Jordan was the first to do this. He initially endorsed Nike products but gradually became a brand in his own right. Today he has his own line of products in addition to "Air Jordan." Tony Hawk has done this with his own line of skateboards and other products. However, this strategy is possible only for athletes whose celebrity is great enough to be converted into a brand.

This collection of golf supporters has economic clout that goes far beyond personal and family lives. This makes golf an attractive sport for corporations that have images and products that appeal to consumers with money and influence. This is why auto companies with high-priced cars sponsor and advertise on the PGA, LPGA, and Champions (Senior) PGA tours. This also is why major television networks cover golf tournaments: They can sell commercial time at a high rate per minute because those watching golf have money to spend—their money and the money of the companies they control. The converse of this is also true:

Sports attracting low- and middle-income audiences are ignored by television or covered only under special circumstances. If wealthy executives bowled, we would see more bowling on commercial television and more bowling facilities on prime real estate in cities; but wealthy people seldom bowl, so bowling receives little coverage.

Despite these claims made by owners and their allies, impact studies done by independent researchers generally reach the following conclusions: #4

Stadiums and teams generate public relations for the city, but this has mixed results for tourism because fans who spend money in and around the stadium have fewer dollars to spend in their own neighborhoods. A stadium often helps nearby businesses, but it often hurts outlying businesses. When a family of four spends $13,000 for average NBA season tickets, and another $5000 for meals and parking for 41 home games, it will spend less money on dinners and entertainment close to home—if they have any money left!

Despite these claims made by owners and their allies, impact studies done by independent researchers generally reach the following conclusions: #3

Stadiums attract other businesses, but most are restaurant and entertainment franchises headquartered in other cities. These franchises often have enough cash to undercut and drive out locally owned businesses. Out-of-town people do attend games, but most people who buy tickets live close enough to make day trips to games, and their purchases inside the stadium don't benefit businesses outside the stadium gates.

Despite these claims made by owners and their allies, impact studies done by independent researchers generally reach the following conclusions: #1

Teams and stadiums create jobs, but apart from highly paid athletes and team executives, these jobs are low paid, part-time, and seasonal. Additionally, many athletes on the team don't live in the city or spend their money there.

The two major fan organizations in the United States are the League of Fans (LOF) and the Sports Fans Coalition (SFC), formed in the 1970s and 2009, respectively. SFC is self-described as "a grassroots, sports fans advocacy organization . . . made up of sports fans who want to have a say in how the sports industry works, and to put fans first"

The LOF, on the other hand, is "a sports reform project founded by long-time social and political activist, Ralph Nader, to fight for the higher principles of justice, fair play, equal opportunity and civil rights in sports; and to encourage safety and civic responsibility in sports industry and culture"

College athletes lack power to negotiate the conditions of their sport participation. Even in revenue-producing college sports, they have few rights and no meaningful way of filing complaints when they've been treated unfairly or denied the right to play their sports.

The athletes are not allowed to share the revenues that they may generate or benefit when universities and the NCAA use their names and images in marketing campaigns.

As heroic orientations become more important, so do concerns about athletes becoming entertainers and sports turning into circus spectacles. For example, as accidents in NASCAR races have been linked to issues of revenge between drivers and strategies to prevent certain drivers from winning series championships, some people wonder if the sport is turning into a weekly circus act (Gluck, 2015).

The challenge facing NASCAR executives is to decide whether the races are a form of honest competition or spectacles that pit drivers against each other in demolition derbies.

Despite these claims made by owners and their allies, impact studies done by independent researchers generally reach the following conclusions:#2

The companies that design and build stadiums are seldom local, and construction materials and workers on major projects often come from outside the region or even from outside the country. Therefore, much of the money spent on a stadium or arena does not circulate as stadium boosters predict.

Team owners justify the reserve system by saying that it's needed to maintain competitive balance between teams in their leagues. They argue that, if athletes could play with any team, the wealthiest owners in the biggest cities and TV markets would buy all the good athletes and prevent teams in smaller cities and TV markets from being winners.

The irony of this argument is that team owners are free-market capitalists who argue that free-market processes would destroy their business! They embrace regulation and "sport socialism" because it protects their power and wealth; they form cartels to restrict athletes' rights and salaries, but they advocate deregulation in the economy as a whole. Their positions are ideologically inconsistent, but profitable for them.

Most sports fans in the United States have never heard of these organizations. Their identities are connected with teams and athletes and they are not actively concerned about social and labor issues in sports. If they seek a feeling of power as fans, they often participate in fantasy sports where they create their own fantasy teams to manage.

The major sport leagues own and promote fantasy sports because it increases fan engagement and league income and leads fans to feel that they are in control even though they have no real power.

Professional athletes always have objected to the reserve system, but it wasn't until 1976 that court rulings gave professional athletes the right to become free agents under certain conditions.

The meaning of free agency varies, but in all leagues it allows some players whose contracts have expired to seek contracts with other teams that bid for their services. This change has had a dramatic effect on the salaries of top professional athletes from the late 1970s to the present.

Corporate interests influence team colors, uniform designs, event schedules, media coverage, and the comments of announcers during games and matches. Media companies and other corporations sponsor and plan events, and they own a growing number of sport teams. Many sports are corporate enterprises, tied to marketing concerns and processes of global capitalist expansion.

The mergers of major corporate conglomerates that began in the 1990s and now continue in the twenty-first century have connected sport teams and events with media and entertainment companies. The names of transnational corporations are now synonymous with the athletes, events, and sports that bring pleasure to the lives of millions of people.

The issues in each of the owner-imposed lockouts over the recent past have been different, but in each case the owners wanted to keep a larger share of revenues and give players less. They also wanted lower "caps," or payroll limits for each team so they could pay players less and give teams in the smaller markets a better chance to compete more successfully with wealthier teams in larger markets.

The owners also wanted to limit when and how players become free agents, because free agency forces them to compete with each other when trying to sign good players to contracts. Unregulated free agency gives leverage to the players, and owners don't like that kind of "free-market" situation. Finally, the owners usually want the CBA to contain limits on what they pay top players on their teams. This makes it easier for them to negotiate deals without paying what the players might receive from other teams.

To prevent people from realizing how public money is used to subsidize their wealth, the owners make sure that announcers describe their teams as your New York Giants, Cleveland Cavaliers, Detroit Red Wings, or Colorado Rockies.

The owners are happy to support the illusion that their teams belong to the community, as long as they collect the revenues and capital gains while taxpayers take the risks and receive little benefit apart from the emotional perks that come from living in a region that has a professional men's sport team located there.

As opposed to athletes in high-revenue sports, athletes in most minor leagues and lower-revenue sports have few rights and little control over their careers

The players at this level far outnumber players in the top levels of professional sports, and they often work for low pay under uncertain conditions, and with few rights. Owners almost always have the last word in these sports, although most owners at this level don't usually make large amounts of money.

Despite publicity given to the supercontracts of some athletes in the top professional leagues, salaries vary widely across the levels and divisions of professional team sports. For example, in 2019 there were about 6,500 minor league baseball players on 244 teams in North America.

The teams exploit "the dream" that these young men have of playing on a Major League team, so the basic salary is $1,160 per month in a 5-month season. This amounts to $7.25 per hour for a 40-hour work week. However, most players work 50-70 hour weeks and are not paid for spring training or for any conditioning time during the off season. To make matters worse, the US Congress passed the Save America's Pastime Act in 2019 to exempt teams from federal fair labor laws so they are not required to pay overtime after 40 hours of work in a week.

Similarly, the large corporations that sponsor particular events, from major golf and tennis tournaments to NASCAR and Grand Prix races, know the costs and benefits involved.

Their association with top events provides them with advertising platforms and connects them with clearly identified categories of consumers. Media companies also sponsor events so they can control their own programming, as in the case of ESPN's X Games, Red Bull sports, and others.

Fan organizations, such as Against Modern Football, Anti-Modern Football, Stand Against Modern Football, and the Football Supporters Federation (in the UK) were formed over the past 20 years to protest the commercialization of football in European and Latin American countries. Although these organizations enabled people to express their dissatisfaction with being pushed aside in decision-making processes and having local traditions ignored as football was commodified, few of them have had long term impact.

Their members were vocal in protesting commercialization but they seldom had strategies for change or even a clear vision for what they wanted football to be (Cloake, 2013). As a result, they were rarely taken seriously by new club owners whose power and wealth enabled them to ignore the protests or solicit the support of local police to quiet the fans. Only in a few cases, mostly at local levels, have organizations had enough power to be consulted by club officials on certain policies.

Although these changes are grounded in commercialization, they haven't altered the internal structure and goals of long-established sports. Teams remain the same size with similar positions, and outscoring opponents remains the primary goal. But games and matches are presented as total entertainment experiences.

There's loud music, rapidly changing video displays, light displays, cheerleaders and mascots that present entertaining performances, and announcers that heighten drama with excited and colorful descriptions of the action. This entertainment package represents a change, but it affects the context surrounding a game or match rather than the structure and goals of the sport itself.

Cultural theories, on the other hand, lead to other hypotheses based on past evidence that the popularity of any cultural practice, including professional wrestling, depends on the extent to which it reaffirms the ideologies that people use to make sense of their lives and the world around them.

Therefore, the goal of those who produce sport entertainment is to provide spectators with pleasure and excitement that occurs within the boundaries of the ring, court, and playing field. Spectators enjoy the action and the power structure of sport remains intact.

The owners of major men's professional sport franchises in North America are very different from owners at other levels of commercial sports. Teams or franchises in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB in 2019 were valued from about $290 million (Arizona Coyotes in the NHL) to about $5 billion (Dallas Cowboys in the NFL).

Therefore, the owners of teams in these leagues are large corporations and a few very wealthy individuals with assets ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Each of these four major men's leagues is organized as a monopoly. Most teams in these leagues play in publicly subsidized facilities, owners make good to excellent returns on their investments, and support from media companies and corporate sponsors almost guarantees continued financial success at this level of ownership.

Like the AAU, the NCAA also requires amateur status to participate in college sports. This generally means that athletes cannot have played any sport in which they received cash or in-kind rewards and they cannot have worked in a job where they were hired for their sport skills. However, the NCAA has changed the meaning of amateur many times in its history, especially as it applies to athletes in the Division I revenue-producing sports of football, men's basketball (Schneider, 2011; Zimbalist and Sack, 2013).

These changes have been justified in various and sometimes contradictory terms, but they have been made primarily to retain control over athletes while avoiding the charge that big-time college sport programs are using a professional business model and, therefore, should pay players cash salaries and pay taxes on the income made by profit-generating teams (Huma and Staurowsky, 2011, 2012). In fact, it takes 40 bylaws to define "amateur status" in the NCAA rule book, because it is difficult to make sense of amateurism in connection with teams and athletic programs operated as businesses but described as non-profit educational activities.

Because many people in a mass audience lack technical knowledge about the sport they watch, they are entertained mostly by intense action, danger, the dramatic expressions of athletes and coaches, and manifestations of commitment to victory.

These things are easily understood by spectators who don't know enough about the sport to be captivated by precise physical skills and subtle strategies.

But golf is popular among wealthy and powerful men, who are important to sponsors and advertisers because they make consumption decisions for themselves, their families, their businesses, and thousands of employees who work under their supervision.

They buy luxury cars and other high-end products for themselves, but more important to advertisers is that they buy thousands of company cars and computers for employees and make large investment decisions related to pensions and company capital. They buy luxury cars and other high-end products for themselves, but more important to advertisers is that they buy thousands of company cars and computers for employees and make large investment decisions related to pensions and company capital.

Sponsorship agreements cause problems for professional athletes in many individual sports. Being contractually tied, for example, to an equipment manufacturer or another sponsor often puts athletes in a state of dependency.

They may not have the freedom to choose when or how often they will compete, and sponsors may require them to attend social functions, at which they talk with fan-consumers, sign autographs, and promote products.

Like other multinational corporations, these companies buy commercial time during sport events to promote the belief that pleasure and excitement in people's everyday lives depend on them.

They use this belief as an ideological outpost in the minds of people worldwide, and as information is filtered through these outposts, corporate executives hope to defuse opposition to the products and operational practices of their companies. When successful, this strategy boosts their legitimacy and contributes to corporate hegemony worldwide.

Of course, the sponsors themselves could not have written a statement better suited to their purposes.

They want people to focus on dreams rather than the realities related to consumption and global corporate expansion; the Olympic Games continue to be awash in Coca-Cola imagery as outposts continue to be established in the minds of billions of potential consumers of soft drinks.

Companies whose profits depend on selling alcohol, tobacco, fossil fuels, fast food, soft drinks, and candy are especially eager to have their products associated with sports. This enables them to defuse negative publicity about unhealthy and negative aspects of their products and production processes.

They want people to think that "if the sports we love are brought to us by beer, cigarettes, liquor, soft drinks, beef burgers, deep-fried foods, candy bars, and fossil fuels, these things must have some redeeming qualities."

Because there are dangers associated with heroic orientations, some athletes try to limit an emphasis on heroic actions in their sports. This has occurred in figure skating as some athletes favor restrictions on the number of triple and quadruple jumps required in skating programs.

They worry that the quest for commercial success jeopardizes their bodies. Other skaters, however, adopt heroic orientations to please audiences and conform to shifts in the orientations of judges, coaches, and other skaters. As a result, they train to successfully land a succession of triple jumps along with quad jumps without breaking bones or destroying the continuity of their skating programs. Aesthetic orientations still exist, but heroic orientations have been woven into popular definitions of "quality" in skating performances.

Since the stadium was built, the team has played fewer than eleven home games per season except in 2015, and spectators have paid an average of over $85 a seat for 210 home games from 2001 through 2018.

This amounts to about $1.3 billion; and with parking and concessions expenditures, people have paid about $1.6 billion to attend games in a stadium subsidized by their taxes.

Spectator interest in sports is highest among those who believe in a meritocratic ideal: the idea that success is always based on skill and hard work, and skill and hard work always lead to success.

This belief supports a widely held class ideology in societies with capitalist economies. Those who hold it often use sports as a model for how the social world should operate.

The desire for global expansion is the main reason why the NBA has played 73 preseason and 30 regular season games outside North America since the early 1990s. Additionally, the league has a history of sending teams to Europe to play local clubs and to other parts of the world to play exhibition games.

This exposure helped market NBA broadcasting rights and official NBA products worldwide. Today, the NBA finals and the NBA All-Star games are televised annually in 215 countries in 50 languages and there were 108 international players from 42 countries playing in the league during the 2018-19 season. Outside the United States, China constitutes the largest NBA market and player development focus. More than 50,000 stores in China sell NBA merchandise, about 30 percent of all visitors to NBA.com enter through the Mandarin language portal at the site, and over 25 million people watch weekly NBA games televised in China. Additionally, the NBA and FIBA, the international basketball federation, launched a league in Africa in 2020 to give the game a more global footprint

Television recruits new spectators by teaching newcomers the rules and strategies of a sport at home with family and friends without purchasing expensive tickets.

This is a painless way to be socialized into a spectator role, and it increases the number of people who will eventually buy tickets, watch televised games, pay for cable and satellite sports programming, and even become pay-per-view customers in the future.

Commercialization influences the internal structure and goals of newly developed sports, but it has less influence on long-established sports. New sports developed explicitly for commercial purposes are organized to maximize what a target audience will find entertaining.

This is not the only factor that influences the internal structure and goals of new sports, but it is the primary one. It is apparent in indoor soccer, indoor lacrosse, arena football, beach volleyball, American Ninja Warrior, and commercialized action sports.

Being part of a legal cartel enables most team owners to make impressive sums of money. During the mid-1960s, NFL teams were bought and sold for about $10 million; in 2020 the average franchise value was close to $3 billion. That amounts to an average annual return of over $50 million on an original investment of $10 million.

This is what a cartel does: it limits the supply of teams and drives up the value of existing teams. Of course, team owners do not include capital gains (in the team value) when they announce that annual profits are low and they must raise ticket prices and have a new stadium so they can be "competitive" with other teams. When you are in a cartel, you can get away with this deception and commercial blackmail without going to jail. Additionally, team owners use their power to influence the rule makers who set the rules that govern them.

Players realize what a mass audience wants and often "play to the crowd" with heroic displays and exciting or controversial personas. They may even refer to games as "showtime." In commercial terms, a player's style and persona often are as valuable as technical skills.

This is why announcers and journalists focus on athletes who can make the big plays and are willing to talk in dramatic terms about their performances. A mass audience is thrilled by long touchdown passes, home runs, and athletes who collapse as they surpass their physical limits.

This is why football is now known as "America's game"—it celebrates and privileges the values and experiences of the men who control and benefit from corporate wealth and power in North America.

This is why men pay thousands of dollars to buy expensive season tickets to college and professional football games, why male executives use corporation money to buy expensive blocks of "company tickets" to football games, and why corporation presidents write hundred-thousand-dollar checks to pay for luxury boxes and club seats for themselves, friends, and clients. They enjoy football, but most important, it reproduces an ideology that fosters their interests.

We now live in an era of transnational corporations (TNCs) that influence economic activity worldwide, affecting who has jobs, the kinds of work people do, salaries and working conditions, the products that people can buy, where they can buy them, and what they cost. When these corporations sponsor sports, they negotiate deals that promote their interests, increase their power, and create positive images of themselves as "global citizens and leaders."

This is worth an investment of billions of dollars each year. For example, eleven global corporations, including Coca-Cola and McDonald's each paid $100 million just for the rights to advertise in connection with the recent Olympic Games; and Anheuser-Busch (Budweiser) spent nearly $500 million for commercial time during Super Bowls between 2003 and 2019.

At the same time, the owners of the three sport teams received a fifty-year exemption on taxes related to their teams and facilities, and $120 million in tax abatements on other real estate development in the area around the stadiums.

This means that the city annually forfeited about $50 million in city and county tax revenues at a time when there were desperate needs among residents. In the meantime, the franchise values for the NFL, NBA, and MLB teams in Cleveland increased dramatically, giving multimillion-dollar capital gains to each of the wealthy owners.

The branding of sports also is apparent inside stadiums, where nearly every available surface is sold for corporate displays. Surfaces without corporate messages are now defined as wasted space, even in publicly owned facilities.

This occurs at all levels of sports. For instance, many corporations desperately want to establish outposts in the minds of high school students who are in the process of forming lifelong preferences for products such as soft drinks.

This symbiotic relationship between the non-profit AAU and the for-profit Walt Disney Company (and ESPN) was a major marketing triumph for both organizations. The AAU relocated its headquarters to Lake Buena Vista and now holds over 40 national tournaments at the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex.

This provided programing opportunities for ESPN. It also enabled them to track young athletes and develop storylines for those who might be successful in the future, and it gave them a golden opportunity to recruit new ESPN viewers/subscribers at a young age.

The desire for global expansion has led NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB teams to play exhibition and regular season games in Mexico, China, Japan, England, France, Germany, and Australia and to subsidize leagues and outreach programs for marketing purposes.

This spirit of globalization is neither new nor limited to North American sports organizations. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has incorporated national Olympic committees from every nation worldwide and has turned the Olympic Games into the most successful and financially lucrative media sport events in history. Furthermore, the IOC, like some other sports organizations, has turned itself and the Olympics into a global brand.

The biggest differences between the major men's sport leagues are related to their contractual agreements with the players' association in each league. Although each league gives players as few rights and as little money as possible, athletes have negotiated over the last five decades to gain control over their careers, regulate the conditions of their sport participation, and increase their salaries.

This topic is discussed in the section on page 404, titled "Legal Status and Incomes of Athletes in Commercial Sports."

The WPA has also teamed up with other organizations concerned with human rights and working conditions to influence the governance and policies of the IOC, FIFA, and other international and national sports governing bodies. A major effort in 2017 led to the announcement of a Universal Declaration of Player Rights that addressed "persistent, systemic and long-standing violations of players' fundamental rights throughout world sport" (EUAthletes, 2018).

This was important because it was the first time that an international document articulated the "human and labor rights" of players worldwide. According to Brendan Schwab, director of the WPA, the declaration filled a glaring gap because in the thousands of pages of sport rule books worldwide there was not one statement about the personal, labor, or legal rights of athletes (Schwab, 2018). Due to player support for the WPA, it is likely that it will advance a long-term process of making athletes' voices heard on issues related to the humanity of sports—issues rarely addressed by commercial sports organizations seeking to increase revenues.

When spectators lack technical knowledge about football, for example, they are entertained more by a running back's end-zone antics after a touchdown than by the lineman's block that enabled the running back to score the touchdown.

Those who know little about the technical aspects of ice skating are entertained more by triple and quadruple jumps than routines that are carefully choreographed and flawlessly executed. Without dangerous jumps, naïve spectators become bored because they don't recognize subtle differences in the skills and routines of skaters. Those who lack technical knowledge about basketball are more impressed by slam dunks than a well-coordinated defensive strategy that wins a game.

These organizations both work to inform the public and policy-makers about issues that negatively impact fans and athletes. SFC focuses more on the interests of fans and sports governance issues, and it tends to use a legal-political approach as it deals with these issues. The LOF is more of a think tank focusing on social justice, public policy, and general reform issues; it tends to use a public information and social influence approach.

Two of the current projects for the SFC (as of mid-2019) were (1) creating legal agreements in which the public funding of stadiums is tied together with guaranteed benefits for fans and the local community and (2) soliciting public support for a Sports Bettors' Bill of Rights to protect fans as sports betting becomes legal in more states. At the same time, LOF was working on (1) head injuries and brain trauma suffered by athletes and (2) promoting cardio-based physical education and sport-for-all programs in schools as opposed to the current emphasis on exclusive varsity sports.

The legal status of athletes has always been the most controversial issue in professional team sports.

Until the mid-1970s, professional athletes in the major sport leagues had little or no legal power to control their careers. They could play only for the team that drafted and owned them. They could not control when and to whom they might be traded during their careers, even when their contracts expired or were revoked by owners. Furthermore, they were obliged to sign standard contracts saying that they agreed to forfeit to their owners all rights over their careers. Basically, they were bought and sold like property and seldom consulted about their wishes. They were at the mercy of team owners, managers, and coaches.

Despite being shut out of direct gambling-related revenues, team owners and league officials know that media companies will benefit from increased sports betting because people who bet on sports are highly engaged fans who often consume televised sports obsessively, buy expensive cable and pay-per-view packages, and seek media content that they use to inform their bets

When media revenues increase, sport leagues and teams seek more money when they sell the rights to broadcast their games.

As a cartel, the owners prevent new leagues from being established and competing with them for players, and they also prevent new teams from entering their league without their permission.

When permission is given, it involves conditions set by the cartel. For example, the new team owner is charged an entry fee to become a part of the league and must give back to the cartel some of the team's profits for a certain number of years. Furthermore, a new owner can locate only in a city approved by the cartel, and no current owner can move a team to another city without cartel approval.

The NGBs of US amateur sports depend on corporate sponsorships to pay for athlete training, operating expenses, and competitive events. Corporate logos appear on the clothing and equipment of amateur athletes. A few top athletes may sign endorsement deals as individuals, but they cannot do so when the deals conflict with the interests of NGB sponsors.

When this model of corporate sponsorship is used, the economics of sports are linked to the fluctuations of market economies and the profits of large corporations. Corporations sponsor only those sports that foster their interests, and economic conditions influence their ability and willingness to maintain sponsorships. For example, when the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA) and its 180 professional athletes needed $20 million in 2003 to survive another year, Nike could have reduced the $450-million deal they made with Manchester United, a men's soccer team in England, so it could support WUSA, but it didn't because corporations are about profits, and women's soccer didn't fit into their business plans.

As cultural ideas about gender changed and women rejected the norm of "stand by your man no matter what," and claimed control over their bodies, careers, and presentation of self, WWE brought them into the ring to fight it out.

Wrestling fans responded as headliners Ronda Rousey, Charlotte Flair, and Becky Lynch attracted a sellout crowd of over 82,000 to a 2019 WrestleMania event in Met Life Stadium (New Jersey). Instead of fighting over a man, these women displayed attitude and aspiration as they performed as individuals striving for success.

Overall, commercialization involves a shift in orientations so that the danger of movement becomes important...

in addition to the beauty of movement; style and dramatic expression become important in addition to skills; pushing beyond personal limits becomes important in addition to exploring limits; and commitment to victory for the team and sponsor becomes important in addition to the personal joy of participation. Aesthetic orientations don't disappear in commercial sports, but they are combined with heroic orientations to produce changes in what constitutes a memorable sport event.

In all sports, this form of employee restriction was called the reserve system because

it was a set of practices that enabled team owners to reserve the labor of athletes for themselves and control the movement of athletes from team to team in their sport.

Each of these issues can be contentious in CBA negotiations, or even before a CBA is up for renewal. If owners don't like the terms of a current CBA and the players' association refuses to talk with them about changes, the owners may use a lockout,

or an employer-imposed work stoppage that, in the case of professional sports, suspends all games and practices until the dispute is resolved and the CBA is revised to the owners' satisfaction.