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07 April 2001
Posted in
Writing -
Essays
Why isn't a free market meritocracy good enough for our national pastimes?
The United States has been leading the charge of free-market capitalism across the globe for some time. And despite some creeping elements of socialism infecting its economic and political fronts, it nonetheless stands out against most other nations as a paragon of the market-based rewards system.
However, there is one prominent arena in which American business has not only embraced the anti-capitalist tenets of socialism but at times veers toward the red-faced, pinko-thinking, dictator-making ideology of pure communism. Ironically, it's the arena that most meat-eating patriots regard with the same rabid devotion they offer their trucks and their mothers: sport.
Yes, American sports are rife with the pungent stench of Marxist thought, where the system is designed to not only reward the weak but also to restrict participation to the despots in charge. And to make matters worse, while the red scourge has sterilized our professional athletic competitions from a true achievement-based rewards system, the democratic socialist countries of Europe have developed a hierarchy of professional sport that beautifully reflects the free-market ideal. How did that happen?
For a simple model of socialism, we need look no further than the NBA, the National Basketball Association. This premier professional basketball league exists in a vacuum. There are 29 elite teams, the same every year (with occasional marketing-based name changes and expansion additions), and at the end of each season the champions are rewarded with the unproven title of "World Champions" while the very worst performing teams are charitably gifted young stars guaranteed to sell more replica jerseys. And all teams are rewarded with another series of lucrative merchandising and television pay-per-view contracts. Sounds like a win-win situation as they replay their farce over seasons to come.
Now, what other American industry beyond sport offers such rich rewards to all participants and offers such generous charities to its biggest failures? Well, none. In the world of business, big and small, if you fail to offer a product that holds up against the competition, you disappear. In U.S. professional sport you are magically sustained by the closed system, and encouraged to improve with first choice at drafting young talent.
That's not how it works overseas. Easily the most prominent European sport is soccer, and each national league on the continent has a similarly structured professional league. There are many more professional teams (in England, for example, a country roughly the size of the California, there are 92). These teams are divided into several similarly sized divisions based on performance. Using England as an example, the Premier League features the top 20 teams, the First Division includes the next 24 teams, the Second Division the next 24, and the Third Division, the last 24.
Naturally the 20 teams in the Premier League are often the richest, but not necessarily. In any true rewards-based system, the teams that offer the best product are going to have the highest attendance, the best merchandising deals, and the highest television viewership. But riches in themselves are not a qualification to belong to this elite group - it is a dynamic system based on performance.
In each division the teams who fill the bottom three or four positions in the league table must battle to see who is allowed to stay in their current division and who will be relegated into the next lower division. Likewise, the top teams in the lower divisions are rewarded with the opportunity for promotion into a more skillful and profitable division.
The consequences of this merit-based system are vast. When a team is relegated, the financial punishments are harsh: star players frequently desert the club, television and marketing revenues are severely depleted, and attendances frequently drop; whereas the exact opposite occurs for the promoted teams, who find that achievement results in added riches and the ability to attract better players, which are both necessary as they struggle to keep pace with the tougher competition. The effect this system also has on the dramatic potential of the sport, too, is invaluable. Every game is important. Instead of lazily playing sub-par for the promise of a hot draft pick, low quality teams must fight desperately for survival in fear of relegation.
It's the equivalent of the CBA's Idaho Stampede moving into the NBA while the Vancouver Grizzlies are booted down.
For the teams at the very top of the Premier League and the very bottom of the Third Division the rewards and punishments are even more extreme. The best teams in the top league are rewarded with inclusion the next season in a glamorous and lucrative auxiliary competition against similarly rewarded teams from other leagues throughout the continent as they vie for an even greater geographic supremacy (and the winners of this competition earn the chance to compete against equally victorious teams from other continents). Meanwhile, the teams who fail to finish anywhere but last place in the lowest professional division of the league are cruelly - but justly - stripped of professional status and dropped into the enormous semi-pro system in their country, while the most successful semi-pro team enjoys a thrilling rise into the pro game.
The American Dream can come true - but, in sport, only outside these shores, it seems. And when you look at the emerging professional soccer league in the United States in this context, it is a downright paragon of Communist state control.
Major League Soccer had a lot going against it when it kicked off in the Spring of 1995. Earlier national soccer leagues had destroyed themselves through mismanagement, and in an effort to safeguard against the great financial disparity between teams that capsized the NASL in the early 1980s, the MLS came up with a totally un-American idea that will either destroy the league or at the very least limit its success both financially and with fans of "the beautiful game," unless the league releases its teams into complete private ownership once the league is on its feet (which means now).
In the MLS, the totalitarian league itself owns all player contracts and distributes them amongst the teams to ensure that no one team dominates as the New York Cosmos did the NASL, driving every other team to dwindling attendances and ruin. This sounds suspiciously akin to redistribution of wealth. The league also has a controlling stake in each team. Although this move was made to encourage investment in the fledgling league, what ambitious businessman is going to pour his capital into a project managed against the rules of competition by a fascist? What millionaire maverick will take the financial risk without a chance of untempered success? Beyond from the comparative lack of public interest, MLS teams, because of this very system, will never compete with likes of Manchester United or FC Barcelona for the same reason that there are few quality leaders of industry to be found in Cuba or China.
Why is American sport so undemocratic? It's fair to say that it's a matter of protection of investment, perhaps bordering on antitrust. With such generous riches to be made as the owner of a professional football, basketball, or baseball team in this country, these business leaders who typically decry government regulation have happily created their own socialist democracy which protects their investments no matter how poor the product.
It's truly ironic that sports team owners whose families made their millions by taking risks in the competitive marketplace would run so scared from the idea that their sports franchise should not play by the same rules. If they really are skilled business people, it should benefit them in the long run to increase competition - not to mention the benefits for the fans, for whom too many domestic pro sports have gone pitifully stale, and for whom 'Cinderella stories' are often dreamed of but never realized. Cinderella is locked out of the party, and that's not very American, now is it?
