To say so is errant, ignorant nonsense, trotted out by nerds who believe they have finally bested the jocks.
To say so is errant, ignorant nonsense, trotted out by nerds who believe they have finally bested the jocks.
M uch as the music industry churns out songs made for people unaware that their favorite style of modern music has been done (much better) in the past, the internet hot-take industry thrives on recycling bold proclamations that have aged like an egg-salad sandwich in the sun.
This week, the Economist trotted out the tired line that American sports, while allegedly a free-market meritocracy, is actually run by a secret cabal of socialists. The column notes that American leagues such as the NFL feature salary caps and player drafts, which redistribute talent and resources to the less fortunate teams.
“The system is socialism in action,” the Economist notes. “As Karl Marx almost said: ‘Each player, according to his abilities, is assigned to each team, according to its needs.’”
This calumny against American sports is an old one. In his 2012 book The New New Rules, comedian Bill Maher fingered socialism as the reason the NFL was so great, singing the praises of the league’s income-redistribution plan.
“The NFL literally shares the wealth. TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put all of it in a big commie pot and split it 32 ways,” Maher wrote, adding that “the same angry white males who hate Obama because he’s ‘redistributing wealth’ just love football, a sport that succeeds economically because it does just that.”
Not to be outdone, the New York Times’ Binyamin Appelbaum produced a 2020 video in which he claimed to uncover rampant socialism in the NBA, further arguing that the concepts meant to cap teams’ success are what American society as a whole is missing. In the column that appeared with the video, he wrote that “the N.B.A. knows that unregulated competition would be a disaster.” (In the same year, Appelbaum set himself apart by accusing Pete Buttigieg of fixing Canadian bread prices.) “And the N.B.A.’s rules . . . could help to revive the American economy, too,” he added.
He went on to suggest that if the wealthiest Americans had to subsidize the poorest Americans in the same way the Los Angeles Lakers subsidize, say, the Orlando Magic, America would have a “level playing field.”
All of this, of course, is errant, ignorant nonsense, trotted out by nerds believing they have finally bested the jocks.
American sports leagues are not an example of socialism — they are a strong refutation of it. Each league is a mega-corporation acting in a free market in competition for entertainment dollars. And the one product each league has to sell is competition.
The socialism-in-sports dorks think each NBA team is like a separate fast-food chain, all competing for customers, until the league levels the playing field by taxing the rich ones and giving to the poor ones.
But this has it completely wrong. It is the sports leagues themselves that are the burger joints in competition with one another, and the leagues’ skyrocketing revenues are proof that the free-market battle for sports dollars is fierce, thriving, and conducive to creating a superior product.
The NFL knows that football teams can’t compete against each other in the same way that Best Buy competes with Target or Macy’s competes with Nordstrom. Instead, the league is competing with the NBA, Major League Baseball, movies, and all other forms of entertainment for dollars. That’s why it knows it has to sell competition as its product and do it better than the other sports leagues. And thus it created the hard salary cap and revenue sharing — to make sure fans in Green Bay can be just as excited about their team as the fans in New York.
Further, the teams aren’t funded by a government body that forcibly takes money from regular people in order to pay Aaron Rodgers’s salary. Football teams and their players make a lot of money because people love to watch it — the NFL is rich because it is popular.
Appelbaum rightly notes that if teams could spend whatever they wanted, the big-market teams with the most TV revenue and richest owners would buy all the best players and win everything. The Economist piece explains that this is how the English Premier League soccer system works, where only seven teams in the league have won the title since 1992. (More on this later.)
It is true: People go to games because the outcome is not predetermined. Maybe their team will win, maybe it will lose. And, of course, some teams are better than others. If the rich NBA teams could just buy all the best players, teams such as Milwaukee, San Antonio, and Oklahoma City would barely exist. A huge chunk of the league would just be dead teams walking. To inject some sort of equality, the league tries to level spending and gives the worst teams the best draft picks for the next year.
But the profit motive for the league and its owners is what pushes the league to innovate and make its product as attractive as it can be to as many people as possible.
If Appelbaum’s fantasy view of the NBA’s socialism applied to the real world and the wealthy leagues were more heavily taxed to pay for government programs, NBA teams would be playing fewer games, with lesser players, and in run-down arenas. If there’s no motive for the league to make any profit, why put out a top-notch product?
Take Major League Baseball, which is currently revamping its rules to provide a more exciting product for its fans. Infield shifts, interminable at-bats, and extra-innings games that go on for four and five hours are now likely a thing of the past because the league wants larger viewership and increasing revenue.
In a socialist utopia, however, that increasing revenue would be snatched from the league and distributed elsewhere. So why make the effort to innovate? Let’s let games go on for a full day. Implement a rule that each team can have one known steroid user on its roster. Have a tie game settled by a home-run derby. Who cares at that point?
It is equally silly to believe that redistributing wealth in the free market at large is similar to redistributing it in a closed entertainment league. When the NBA sends money from rich teams to poor teams, the league is giving money to itself. It is simply passing cash from one hand to the other — investing money from one successful business model (an NBA franchise) to another successful business model (another NBA franchise). It is not as if the luxury tax paid by the Golden State Warriors is going to fund an upstart pickleball league.
Further, treating sports teams within a hyperbaric entertainment chamber as though they are businesses in the free market is like saying you should structure your interpersonal relationships in the manner of a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills.
If you tax and regulate the New York Knicks, the result will be that they don’t get to sign Giannis Antetokounmpo, the league remains competitive, and non–New York fans remain happy. But out in the real world, if you tax and regulate Apple, the company has less money to invest in innovative research that could better the lives of every future American. If you tax and regulate drug companies, they may have to drop the research and development of life-saving medications. The stakes are entirely different and significantly higher.
In other words, the socialist fanboys believe the fallacy that, as in sports, there is a fixed amount of wealth to be shared among businesses, and each business and individual should be given his “just” portion of the pie. But this clearly is not the case in the real world — businesses that innovate create wealth for everyone. The pie actually gets bigger. For instance, had the government interjected and capped the growth of Amazon, you might not be able to go to the site and buy a copy of Binyamin Appelbaum’s book The Economists’ Hour explaining why free markets are poisonous.
Those thirsting for sweet socialism cheer for salary caps because they limit how successful a team can be. The NBA rules exist so the Lakers don’t get too good. Having similar limits on our wealthiest, most innovative industries would cripple the American economy, punishing success and rewarding the untested.
Suppose this theory were applied to a hugely successful corporation like, say, the New York Times. Think the Gray Lady would be willing to cut her profits (and likely her staff) in half to give that money to a media start-up? The Times has proven a successful model — “socialism” would mean dismantling that model so America’s most successful newspaper could subsidize start-ups like “Cats That Look Like Matthew McConaughey” Substacks.
For further evidence the sports world isn’t like the free market, just look to how player contracts are handled. Should we move to a system where employees are “owned” and cannot move to another company unless traded by the company they currently work for? Sorry, Binyamin, pack your bags! You’ve been traded to National Review!
Finally, it is worth reflecting for a moment on the Premier League, in which salaries run rampant and the rich teams dominate the league year after year.
Obviously, such a system works in England because the league is selling something other than competition. In Great Britain, soccer (football) is virtually a monopoly; while some Brits enjoy tennis and boxing and cricket and rugby, soccer is the only major sports league that brings millions of rabid fans to parks across England every week.
Given that the league has no real competition in the sports market, it instead sells tradition and excellence. Take my beloved Tottenham Hotspur. The club was founded in 1882, and generations of fans have grown up as Spurs fans. You are virtually locked in as a supporter at birth, following nearly 150 years of your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents rooting for the squad.
So people in England don’t really mind if the same teams win every year — the experience is far more rooted culturally in their lives, like going to church. (Rumor has it Jesus was a devastating goalie, as he could save anything in sight.)
The reasons sports-style “socialism” wouldn’t work in society as a whole are as numerous as there are professional sports teams in America. Athletics in the U.S. are not proof of socialism’s benefits, they are a direct refutation of its flaws. Sports remains the ultimate meritocracy — if it wasn’t, Patrick Mahomes would have to play quarterback wearing boxing gloves.
Historically, to support socialism has been to root for decades of failure, misery, and hopelessness. Kind of like being a fan of the Minnesota Vikings.