While Super Bowl LVIII is still fresh in mind, this may be an apt time to examine America’s new national sport and its impact on national life and culture.
To begin with, professional football is now the national game. Years ago, the late comedian George Carlin half-seriously explained why: It was a game, he said, attuned to America’s position as the world’s number one superpower, a game replete with military allusions and jargon (the “bomb,” the “blitz”). Baseball, our former national game, Carlin speculated, was too leisurely, too pastoral, too placid for a frenetic urban society, especially one whose defense budget had become larger than the overall budgets of most countries and whose populace was increasingly armed to the teeth.
The Super Bowl itself has replaced the World Series as a defining American event. When I was a youngster in school — here, I’m dating myself — lessons were interrupted so the class could listen to the Series together on the teacher’s radio. (Games were commonly played on weekday afternoons, though never at night.) Usually, it was Dodgers versus Yankees, and everyone picked a rooting side.
Baseball is a sport that remains family oriented. The local ball park is still where parents take the kids for an outing, as my father took me years ago — usually for a relatively few dollars, although our regional major league franchise, the Boston Red Sox, has started charging a small fortune. Bigtime football is different, a venue where adults gather to eat and drink, or (in the case of the Super Bowl) hold parties and do business.
Except for fanatical backers of the teams involved, who apparently mortgage their homes to buy absurdly over-priced tickets and travel to the game, Super Bowl attendees are largely the rich and famous. The former, who fly in on private planes, are there to make contacts and deals in their private boxes; the latter, the Taylor Swifts of the world, are there mostly to be seen and advance their careers. The National Football League (NFL) and the broadcasting networks love these extraneous aspects of the big game; they’re good for business and TV ratings.
The Super Bowl is really a cultural happening, not an athletic contest. Most of the millions tuning in at home tend not to be knowledgeable about the nuances of the sport; rather, they are casual fans or not fans at all. Witness the emergence of the Super Bowl party, only tangentially related to football, an institution now on a par with the annual Christmas party. More people appear to be focused on the extravagant, hyped-up halftime show than with happenings on the field. Judging by media attention, the single biggest Super Bowl attraction is the “competition” between the slickly produced commercials shown during interminable TV time-outs.
Then, there’s gambling on the game, formerly considered socially and morally destructive, but suddenly endorsed by the strait-laced NFL itself. Thanks to the US Supreme Court — in 2018, it struck down a federal law banning sports betting outside of Nevada — gambling has become common most everywhere sports are played and especially on Super Bowl Sunday.
Las Vegas, gaming capital of America, recently acquired an NFL franchise of its own; it was the natural venue for this year’s festivities. If I were to guess, I’d say more people followed the outcome of Kansas City versus San Francisco for reasons of betting (an estimated $1.5 billion was legally wagered) than for anything else. This logically flowed from the league’s lucrative promotional tie-in with the sleazy gambling industry.
At bottom, professional football and the Super Bowl are mostly about business and not about sport. The pro game has become one of the biggest financial enterprises in America, and it’s run by our billionaire class, the same people who presently direct most aspects of national life and not just the economy. Their money controls our politics, our institutions of government, our media (this paper excepted, of course), and lately our healthcare system. Why not sports?
The evolution of the NFL is illustrative. As Robert W. Peterson’s splendid little history (“Pigskin: The Early Years of Pro Football”) recounts, the league’s founding fathers in the 1920s and 1930s (George Halas, Curly Lambeau, Art Rooney, et al.) were not businessmen but sportsmen — owner-coaches, players, or former players, who loved the game for its own sake and operated it on the proverbial shoestring. Its first president was the immortal Jim Thorpe, still an active player.
Things have changed since then. At present, according to the website ProFootballNetwork.com, 30 of the 32 NFL teams are owned by billionaire business investors, virtually none of them former athletes and few with a sports background. Only a handful regard their teams as their primary businesses; they view them as secondary financial investments that could just as easily be widget factories.
These owners buy and sell their franchises, move them at will, and express few community ties or loyalties except when, like the Buffalo Bills’ ownership, exacting public subsidies from pliant politicians (in this case, New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul) to finance their new, state-of-the-art, multipurposed stadiums. The main agenda topic at their upcoming annual meeting will be whether to accept private-equity firms as future team owners.
There’s always been one exception to this dreary recitation: the publicly owned Green Bay (Wisc.) Packers. One of the original NFL clubs, the Packers are the league’s remaining small-market team and the only one not exclusively owned by wealthy individuals, families or limited partnerships. It was established as a nonprofit entity in 1923, with stock initially sold in small amounts to 500 members of the local community. During the Depression, the franchise was literally saved by the contributions of townspeople, making it a true community enterprise. Today, its stock is collectively held by roughly 500,000 Packer fans across the US, none of whom can own more than 200,000 shares, or 4% of the team.
In the 1980s, the billionaire’s club that is the NFL decreed that, the Packers excepted (their ownership structure was grandfathered), nothing like this would ever happen again; it now requires every team to be owned by a single owner or small group of owners (no more than 32), one of whom must hold at least a 30% share. There’s no crying in baseball, and, evidently, there will be no socialism in football.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2024
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