As it is, professional football is seriously corrupted by big money and big corporate bucks. Good night, they have commercials at every first down--sometimes, after even one play! The Super Bowl lasted four hours! (And they say baseball is boring--at least in baseball they wait until the inning is over to go to commercial.)
Yet, as if they weren't already rich enough, the owners are threatening lockout, and putting at risk, by their own estimate, 150,000 jobs. Hey Detroit, how's that work for you? Hey, St. Louis, up to losing some more jobs? AFL-CIO:
The owners’ lockout threat came after they opted out of the collective bargaining agreement with the NFLPA two years before it was due to expire, saying it isn’t working for them. But they refuse to provide audited financial information to explain what is wrong in a business that generated $9 billion in 2009 during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
And that doesn't count the $4 billion the owners get from CBS next year even if not a single football game gets played.
The owners want the players to give back $1 billion and play two more games a year. They'd go from a 16 game regular season to 18 games. This would, of course, generate more injuries, but massive amounts of revenue.
Football started as a very good game. It is no longer a game, but has become big-bucks "sports entertainment." Can you imagine what Knute Rockne would have thought about the spectacle of the Super Bowl?
Why should football teams even have owners? The people of Green Bay own their team, one which has been rather successful, by the way. If the fans owned the teams, we'd have lower salaries, low ticket prices, lower priced concessions, lower priced parking. (We'd still have the same swell stadium because most of us paid for that anyway.)
When an autoworker or a cop can get a ticket to the Super Bowl and Brad Pitt cannot, that would be a good sign--nothing against Brad Pitt, but football should be a game that includes its fans, and not merely to pick their pocket.
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