English Football Has The Commercialism Of American Sports Without Their Equality Football

In response, many have pointed out that pundits like Neville owe their livelihood to the Americanisation of English football: without the influence of America’s example, the entire samba of the modern Premier League – as a business built around huge TV deals, as endlessly mediated the spectacle, as a hegemonic cultural form – would not exist. Proposals like Boehly’s are aimed at promoting the commercialization of English football. This is not “divergent thinking”, but the very essence of the sport as it has developed over the last three decades. But there is a further irony here, and it is one that requires closer examination as European football travels deeper into the suicidal spiral of wage inflation, bailouts, spending and debt. Despite the merits of gimmick games like Boehly’s projected north-south matchup, the American model of professional sports — in which spending is limited by salary caps, player acquisition is tamed by preseason drafts, and commercialization must be contested with a form of collectivity. – offers a way for leagues to live up to their potential while ensuring even competition. Beginning in the middle of the last century, America—the most intensely capitalist society on earth—developed egalitarian structures in professional sports, even as its leagues ruthlessly seized every opportunity to turn the spectacle of athletic competition into profit. England – at least in football – went in a different direction, embracing commercialism without incorporating American-style restrictions to ensure equality of competition at the sport’s highest levels. Out of this divergence have come some pretty spectacular cultural reversals. America – the land of 24-hour duty, caloric overload and the ten-thousand-dollar emergency room visit – is now a paradise of sports equality, a land that has seen 12 different winners in the last 15 Super Bowls. In the same period England – cradle of socialized medicine, the local pub and the village green – became a footballing oligarchy, with only five different clubs winning the Premier League. If competitive balance is essential to maintaining the ‘pyramid and fabric’ of English and European football, as it surely must be, the Old World can learn a lot from the New – a point UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin made. a consistent if unsuccessful advocate for pan-European wage caps, he has acknowledged. How have these two sports cultures diverged so sharply in recent decades? The answer is rooted in timing and the very particular evolution, in each country, of the relationship between labor and capital. The three biggest professional sports in America are all subject to equalizing constraints: the NBA and NFL both have salary caps, baseball’s majors spend through a luxury tax, and all three have a draft to ensure an even distribution of young talent throughout. the championship. It’s one of the laziest clichés in American sports writing to refer to it as a form of “socialism.” In fact, these structures emerged during the second half of the 20th century as an expression of a distinctly American form of capitalism. Professional American sports as we know them today owe as much to strikes, lockouts, and collective bargaining as they do to sponsorships, merchandising, naming rights, or any other transactional machinations commonly thought to symbolize the corrupting influence of money in sports. . Labor unions in professional sports began to emerge after World War II: the National Basketball Players Association was first established in 1954, and football and baseball established similar bodies in 1956 and 1966 respectively. Sports unionism emerged in America during the heyday of the postwar accord between organized labor and business, when union representation was high and it was widely accepted that the economy would function better when the rights of workers and the interests of owners were reconciled. The relationship between the players’ bodies and team owners was unduly adversarial from the start: “This is going to be an adversarial relationship,” Marvin Miller, the first head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, announced to the players. “A union is not a social club. A union is a restriction on what an employer can do otherwise. If you expect the owners to like me, to praise me, to compliment me, you will be disappointed.” Although overall union participation across American society declined in the decades after 1980, the power and influence of unions in sports did not—and the fundamental organizational structure of American professional sports, as a joint business venture formed through negotiations between players and owners, it remained intact. . The introduction of salary caps in both the NBA (in 1983) and the NFL (in 1993) was the result of direct negotiations between owners and unions. Collective bargaining remains a key feature of all major sports in America today, and the relationship is just as competitive now as it was in its beginnings. Trade unionism has played an important historical role in English football – the PFA, led by Jimmy Hill, famously secured the abolition of the wage cap in 1961 – but in general, players’ unions in Europe and England enjoy nothing like the institutional centrality position of their American peers. Unionization in the US major leagues emerged at a time when all the big issues in modern sports – player mobility, revenue generation and TV rights, salary sustainability and talent distribution – were at the same time. In the years following the war, television rights were seen – as they still are today – as the key to the long-term financial viability of professional sport. American television in the 1950s and 1960s was largely controlled but dominated by three independent private broadcasters (CBS, NBC and ABC) – another point of distinction from the UK, where ITV was the only commercial network until the early of the 1980s. In the early 1960s, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle negotiated an exclusive two-year, $9.3 million deal with CBS to televise regular and postseason games. That was an extraordinary amount of money for its time, but the true genius of the deal lay in its collectiveness: where previously teams had individually negotiated deals for their rights, with wildly uneven results (prior to the CBS deal the New York Giants received $350,000 a year for their television rights, while the Green Bay Packers received just one-tenth of that amount), Rozelle convinced everyone to secure a single network deal and distribute the windfall evenly among all NFL teams. This, more than any other, was the deal that launched professional sports in America into the modern era, enshrining the collective good as the primary goal of American sports administration. But money – serious money, the kind that was possible only in a large, comparatively competitive television market like postwar America – also brought a security to American sports that affected negotiations for other brands at the bargaining table. The carrot of TV money sweetened the stick of salary caps and drafts, giving player-owner negotiations a kind of simultaneous relevance – the character of a competition for everything – that was less evident in English and European football. By the time negotiations began with ITV and BSkyB in the early 1990s to form the ultimate Premier League, for example, issues such as transfer mobility and wage capping had already been largely settled in favor of the players and there was no strong American history of player-owner negotiation styles to draw upon. The American experience was different. All these issues were resolved immediately, not piecemeal like in the UK. In 1983, NBA players agreed to a salary cap in exchange for a majority share of television revenue. In 1993, after a series of grueling work stoppages and lockouts, the NFL introduced a salary cap, giving players the freedom of intercollegiate movement that had long been denied them. Those landmark deals, along with the commitment to league-wide parity secured by Rozelle’s sale of CBS, have set the tone for the administration of professional sports in America in the decades since. As Los Angeles Lakers president Jeanie Buss said in 2011, commenting on a new NBA-wide revenue-sharing agreement, “We want a league with teams that are financially viable so that every team has a chance to compete. It creates a healthier league.” America’s judiciary has done everything it could to uphold these collectivist principles. Several of the first major television agreements and collective bargaining agreements, particularly those that introduced salary caps and drafts, were challenged in court on the grounds that they were anticompetitive. American antitrust law, with its roots in Progressive Era crusades to destroy monopolies, has long held that restraints of trade are permissible where they are necessary to the success of a common enterprise. Courts have upheld the legality of structures such as the draft and salary cap on the basis that the product of professional sports is competition itself. In 2010, the Supreme Court noted that restrictions on the NFL may be justified when motivated by the need to ensure the league’s overall success or “competitive balance.” Competition law has also been applied to English football, notably in 1963,…