Posted on 10/08/2017 12:24:42 PM PDT by mbrfl
I just sent this to my Congressman. I encourage others to do likewise. It's time to broach the topic of regulating major league sports in this country. And no, there's nothing unconservative about regulating a monopoly like the NFL. Don't buy the argument that it's un-American to regulate the NFL because is goes against the free market. The NFL is anything BUT a free market, and it never has been.
Mr. Desantis
I am writing to encourage you to introduce legislation to fix the broken state of major league sports in this country. The NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL are de facto monopolies of their given sports and should be regulated as such - with the concerns of the consumer placed first, rather than the concerns of the owners and players. The problems with major league sports in this country are structural, and long standing. The NFL has never been a free market, and yet Congress has never fully addressed this issue. In some regards the law acknowledges the necessity of coordination amongst owners, and therefore allows a degree of cooperation and communication between them that would be considered collusion in any other industry. In other areas, specifically labor, the courts have imposed a strict free market interpretation on the leagues which has created out of control salaries, free agency, and ultimately an unaccountability and entitled attitude amongst the players. When you have an industry that exists in such a legal limbo, those with the deepest pockets will exploit the inconsistencies in the system to achieve the outcome that is most beneficial to themselves.
As such, it is entirely appropriate for Congress to play a role in this issue. It's time to decide whether the major sports leagues should be viewed as a natural monopoly and regulated as such, with the interests of the consumer being placed first, or be viewed as a free market, in which case the leagues need to be dissolved. While one can debate which of those two options is the best solution, the status quo is unacceptable.
It's hard to imagine what the outcome would be if the leagues were simply forced to dissolve. Perhaps the market would respond with the creation of more independent teams who would schedule competition with one another individually, just as with boxing matches.
The option of requiring the individual team owners to merge and create one entity rather than maintain the façade of independence seems more reasonable to me. After all, there is an inherent contradiction in viewing competitors on the field as economic competitors. In fact, a strict enforcement of free market principles on league play is oxymoronic. Both parties to a competition have to, by definition, engage in a degree of cooperation and coordinate amongst themselves.
What would such a merger look like? In broad terms, the owners would be required to exchange ownership of their individual teams, in exchange for shares in the new entity - let's call it the NNFL (i.e. the new nfl). The amount of shares could be determined by the market value of the individual teams. From there, the NNFL would be able to set up a uniform, incentive based salary structure, a uniform code of behavior whose enforcement would not bend to the whims of an individual owner, and a policy on free agency that would make the game more enjoyable for the fans. The mission of the coaches and GM's would remain the same - to compete to the best of their ability with the resources given to them by ownership. But salary and disciplinary decisions would be out of their hands and would instead be controlled by NNFL ownership, whose mission would be to oversee the competition, ensure its fairness, and look out for the well being of the product as a whole rather than the interests of one team.
In such a scenario, there would need to be some legal oversight - just as exists with other monopolies such as electric companies - to ensure they manage their business properly.
Thank you for your time. Please feel free to contact me if you feel there is any way I can help to push this idea forward.
I didn’t say I like the status quo, I said you can’t change it by going after the NFL as a monopoly. The bottom line is the NFL has no more of a monopoly than any other sole purveyor of a highly specified product. It just so happens that in this case it’s a $13 billion dollar highly specified product, other than the sheer size of their market it’s no different than a BigMac or specific model of car, or any other uniquely defined product.
The electric company is a utility, in America we specifically decided to make utilities into local monopolies. It doesn’t have to be that way. We made a conscious with the good and bad that comes with it.
Stop going personal, it just shows you’ve run out of logic. Those things don’t have anything to do with the legal structure of the league. It’s the raw money coming in that makes it all happen. Money is power and power corrupts. You spread around $5 billion (player portion of the revenue) to 1600 people (roughly the number of player), people who have specifically trained their whole lives to be one of those 1600 people, avoiding learning many other things (like morals) because they didn’t have the time things are gonna happen.
And really, stop making it personal. That’s a refuge for those that lack facts and logic. It’s not about principle, it’s about reality. The reality is attacking NFL as a monopoly is sound and fury signifying nothing. You can make a lot of noise but if it actually gets to court they’ll win, and nothing will change. If you want the NFL to change you need to stop watching. It’s just that simple. It’s a business, the pocketbook rules. Those are the facts, nothing personal.
Those are mostly local.
It’s the cause of the excesses that we see in professional sports today - namely player and owner unaccountability, excessive salaries, free agency etc
Why exactly do I care about any of these things? What other industries do we want the government to regulate in order to limit salaries?
“Stop going personal, it just shows you’ve run out of logic”
Relax. Nobody’s getting personal. And no, I haven’t run out of logic. You just haven’t been following it.
The bottom line is this. Whether you consider the NFL to be an industry in and of itself or you consider it to be merely one enterprise amongst many competing businesses in the larger category of leisure/entertainment is largely irrelevant. The bottom line is that which ever opinion you hold on that question, the NFL is still poorly regulated.
If you believe, as you do, that the NFL is, to all intents and purposes, just one company in the larger entertainment industry, then is it right that the courts have prohibited them from setting a uniform pay scale and controlling free agency? Other business in the entertainment industry don’t have to deal with such restrictions. From that point of view, the NFL is over regulated compared to other business in the entertainment industry. And there is a clear cause and effect between past court rulings on this issue and player salaries and free agency.
Likewise, if you view professional football as an industry in and of itself, and the NFL as the sole provider of that product, it’s still poorly regulated.
We can differ on the question of monopoly or not, but either way, the NFL is poorly regulated. Not unregulated, but poorly regulated because those regulations put in place were never designed to benefit the consumer. They were designed to benefit the players in some regards and the owners in other regards.
The public has a right to question the current state of regulation which in the past, has largely fallen to the interpretation of the courts because Congress has never addressed this particular case in a comprehensive, responsible way.
One final point. We’re not debating whether the sports leagues should be regulated. They already are. The question is whether they should continue to be regulated in the current manner, with the players interests being put first, whether they should they become unregulated, or whether the manner in which they are regulated should change so that the interests of the fans are placed first.
“You NEED power for your life
You don’t need entertainment”
And? That has nothing to do with the definition of a monopoly. You can have a monopoly in any industry, and there are many reasons why they can form. In most industries, when monopolies form, they occur because one company outperforms the competition to such a degree, sometimes due to predatory practices, that the end result is a single provider. Usually when that happens, the company is forced to split up into multiple companies.
In the case of utilities, past lawmakers have deemed them to be what economists call a natural monopoly, meaning that the market forces for that industry favor a single provider to such a degree that consolidation is inevitable. In such instances, lawmakers have allowed the monopoly to remain in existence, but provide governmental oversight to prevent abuses like price gauging, etc.
My personal opinion is that sports leagues are a form of natural monopoly, as fans tend to favor a single professional sports league for any given sport. The fate of competing leagues in the past that have tried to challenge the NFL, NBA, and NHL would tend to support that theory. They have all either ended up merging with the existing league, or have gone out of business.
“All of which leads me to believe that one of us has no clue what a monopoly is ...
... and I’m thinking it ain’t me.”
Think again.
If you think arena football or high school football compete with the NFL for viewership, think again. College football may compete to a certain extent, but most NFL fans would tell you that the two are sufficiently distinct as to make poor substitutes for one another.
But regardless, the existence of College football as a possible competitor with the NFL is largely a moot point. Some may differ on whether professional football is distinct enough to be considered an industry in and of itself or whether the NFL should more rightly be viewed as one business among many in the larger industry of entertainment/leisure. The point is, the courts have taken the position that professional sports leagues should be viewed as an industry rather than a single business. They have reasonably pointed to the fact that the teams are individually owned, to make that case. But the problem with that is that, if it is an industry then the NFL is the sole provider within that industry. Since they determine how many teams should be allowed to compete in their league and have the power to keep new owners out, this would represent collusion if from the stand point of the courts. And yet it is allowed to continue.
My main point is that, if viewed as a monopoly, the NFL is poorly regulated. If viewed as a single business, it’s still poorly regulated. The courts have taken the position that the teams that make up the NFL should be viewed as a free market with respect to whether on not team owners should be allowed to collectively restrict free agency or impose significant limits on player salaries.
The bottom line is that professional sports leagues are a strange mix, partly market and partly a single business. They have been allowed to remain in this limbo status without Congress or the courts ever really asking the question of what’s the most appropriate way to view them. What we’ve ended up with is a mix of legal rulings that sometimes view them as an industry, and sometimes as a business, with no rhyme or reason. And the result is what we have today. And if you follow the cause and effect of these rulings, they’re directly related to the inability of the NFL to effectively control their employees.
“Why exactly do I care about any of these things?”
Who said you care?
“What other industries do we want the government to regulate in order to limit salaries”
Who said I want to regulate them? They’re already regulated. If regulating industries bothers you, then why aren’t you upset by that?
Why should they be regulated? That’s the problem with your whole concept. There is literally nothing to regulate. Your starting point is innately false, and laughably silly. Book publishers aren’t regulated, movie studios aren’t regulated, record companies aren’t regulated, and there is no logical reason for sports companies to be regulated either.
You’re wrong. We ARE debating whether sports companies should be regulated, the answer is: no, that’s a terrible idea.
What’s to stop someone from starting their own Pro Football league and competing with the NFL? That would make it a de facto non monopoly right?
Which exist. In this modern world of 157 channels and nothing on it’s even easy to get TV contracts (the primary point of the NFL’s “monopoly exemption” and the USFL suit). The hard part is getting enough money to compete for good players. But yeah, given the rather substantial list of semi-pro leagues out there claims of their monopoly are pretty easy to fight.
It’s like saying that Apple has a monopoly on iPhones.
Yup. That’s exactly my contention. The only thing the NFL has a monopoly on is those 32 teams playing under that rulebook. Not the most actionable monopoly I’ve seen.
Something like the NFL draft, with players being picked by one team, and with minimum salaries and salary caps, would not be legally allowed in businesses without anti-trust exemption.
A new league would have to have such an exemption to be competitive between clubs and with the NFL as entertainment.
The NFL is one company. If McDonalds wanted to have minimum salaries for their employees across their company wouldn’t that be the same thing?
The draft has nothing to do with monopoly exemptions (which only talks about broadcasting rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_Broadcasting_Act_of_1961) and is purely a function of the structure of the business. The NFL is a hub and franchise business, there is a core structure and the teams are franchises that follow rules set forth by the hub. It’s no different than McDonalds, which also has rules about grabbing employees from other franchises and sets salary structures. A new league would need no such exemption, and indeed neither the XFL nor USFL did. It’s all about how the business is structured.
The NFL is actually something like a trade association. It is made up of 32 independent businesses. Such businesses normally wouldn’t be allowed to claim the right to hire a certain employee to the exclusion of the other businesses.
Minimum salaries in the NFL are mandated to go up with experience. In other businesses, that would be related to productivity, but in pro sports skills generally decline with age. Older marginal players are forced out because it costs less to sign younger players with similar skill level.
You are correct in that it how the business is structured. Pro sports could look very different but still exist.
The draft is a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, but is made legal by the collective bargaining agreement with the players union.
No, the draft is not a violation of the antitrust act. And it predates them (or any other sports league) having a union. The simple fact is businesses that run under the franchise model ALL have rules about which franchise a prospective employee goes to. All franchise structured businesses have a vested interest in keeping the whole on par and not letting one franchise crush another, and part of that is always the divvying up of employees.
That’s fine. You don’t think they should be regulated. Then you should be against the status quo, because, unlike book publishers, record companies, and movie studios, the NFL currently IS regulated. They’re regulated by anti-trust laws that are already on the books. Educate yourself. Don’t be offended. Nothing personal. You simply don’t have the facts.
Check this link out. The NFL has been dealing with these kinds of legal challenges for as long as they’ve been in existence. The agreements between the NFL and the players have never been an issue settled just between themselves. The courts have been involved since day one.
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