- You never have a billionaire owner who destroys the team with meddling
- You never have a billionaire's failson in your personnel department or something
- The city never gets extorted into building a billion-dollar stadium for a billionaire owner
- The team never moves
- You never have an ownership group that prioritizes profit maximization over on-field competitiveness
Players having an ownership stake in their teams would obviously be good, too, although I wonder if players would prefer that to the revenue sharing agreements they have now.
Because you mention players, how fucked up is the NCAA system?
That seemed like the worst kind of deal a proffesional athlete can get, could you maybe even call it slavery with additional steps?
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The NCAA is fucked up for sure. I think comparisons to slavery are a huge stretch, though -- shitty, exploitative wage labor jobs are already terrible, and are a much better comparison.
And while it's fair to describe some college athletes as professionals, that label makes less sense when you look at all the sports that don't generate enough revenue to cover their expenses, which is a majority of them.
That might've been a bit of a stretch, true.
I just don't want them to make a profit and at least a modest compensation other than the hope for being drafted.
But you make a good point about smaller sports being supported by this system, although I don't think they'd have a problem funding them, next to paying FB/BB some form of fair compensation, if they wanted to.
Absolutely -- there's plenty of money, it's all how we allocate it. To add more complexity, not all schools have the same revenue-generating sports, which makes any sort of blanket policy more difficult.
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What's the difference between a job and a hobby?
Say I like to go swimming. I don't think anyone would say that's a job. What if I like to go swimming, and am good enough at it that people are willing to pay to see me do it? OK, now we're in job territory. But now what if I'm a college swimmer, and I'm good enough that some people will pay a little to see me, but all of that money is eaten up by the cost of the facility, my coaches, and my scholarship. The school loses money on the swim program. Is that still a job? If it is a job, is tuition/room/board effectively an in-kind living wage?
But say it's a job and I'm not getting paid. It's still not remotely comparable to chattel slavery -- my coach can't whip me, hamstring me, or even kill me if I don't do what I'm told.
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OK, so is being on a college swim team a job if the university runs the swim program at a loss? I don't think it is.
Even non-wage labor is far, far, far removed from chattel slavery. It's a shitty situation, don't get me wrong, but holy fuck your boss can't torture or kill you if you don't stack boxes fast enough. And you can just walk away, too! Any comparison is just absurd, and there's no need for a comparison because directly describing how horrible the bottom rungs of capitalism are is sufficient to make any point needed.
I think, if your scholarship is tied to you performing for the swim team, I would say it is a job.
I could see that if the school was making money off your labor (as is the case in college football, for instance), but I don't think that works for sports that aren't profitable. And it seems like sports -- which don't really produce much beyond entertainment value -- are closer to hobbies than to work when they don't even produce enough entertainment value to cover their own costs.
Then again, you have a training/pipeline problem, where globally all these developing athletes are valuable because they produce the top-tier professionals that do generate significant entertainment value, but locally your individual college swim teams can't make a buck. You see this problem in baseball and boxing, too.
It seems like I'm dancing around questions of productive vs. unproductive labor, but I'm not sure that clarifies the issue of unprofitable college sports all that much. What might clarify the issue is asking "are the athletes being exploited?" If the school gives you a scholarship and loses money on your sport (e.g., swimming) I find it hard to answer that in the affirmative. If the school gives you a scholarship but pockets millions on your sport (e.g., football) I think it's much easier to say yes.