Are Athletes Commodities Discussion Assignment
Order ID 53563633773 Type Essay Writer Level Masters Style APA Sources/References 4 Perfect Number of Pages to Order 5-10 Pages Description/Paper Instructions
Sources:6
Subject: Other
Topic: M5D1: Are Athletes Commodities?
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Required
Module notes: The Political Economy of Sport
Berman, M. (2000). Saturday Gladiators (Links to an external site.). New York Times Book Review, 41.
Easterbrook, G. (2013, October). How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers (Links to an external site.). The Atlantic 312(3), 44-50.
Feezell, R. M. (2001). The game of life: College sports and educational values; Beer and circus; Intercollegiate athletics and the American university: A university president’s perspective (Links to an external site.). Academe, 87(5), 90-92.
Gerdy, J. R. (2002). Sports: The All-American Addiction (Links to an external site.). Jackson, MS, USA: University Press of Mississippi, pp.144-170.
Kuriloff, A., Preston, D. (2012, September 5). In Stadium Building Spree, U.S. Taxpayers Lose $4 Billion (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-09-05/in-stadium-building-spree-u-s-taxpayers-lose-4-billion). Bloomberg News.Milke, M., & Veldhuis, N. (2010). Subsidizing Professional Sports is the Worst Form of Corporate Welfare (Links to an external site.). Fraser Forum, 30-31.
Nocera, J. (2016, February 13). N. Carolina seeks salvation in Smith’s legacy (Links to an external site.). New York Times, D1.
Sack, A. L. (2003, March 17). College Sports and the Myth of Amateurism (Links to an external site.). Christian Science Monitor, 9.
Vedder, R. (2013, June 17). How Poor Students Subsidize Unworthy College Sports (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2013-06-17/how-poor-students-subsidize-unworthy-college-sports). Bloomberg View.
Wolverton, B. (2016, January 8). 10 Revealing Tidbits We Found in Football Coaches’ Contracts. (Links to an external site.) Chronicle of Higher Education, 62(17), A12-A13.
Wolverton, B., & Kambhampati, S. (2016, January 29). As Sports Programs Get Richer, Few Give Much for Academics. (Links to an external site.)Chronicle of Higher Education, 62(20), 1.
Zimbalist, A. (2010). Circling the bases: Essays on the challenges and prospects of the sports industry (Links to an external site.). Philadelphia, PA, USA: Temple University Press, pp.1-37.
OptionalGuttmann, A. (2012). From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (Links to an external site.). New York: Columbia University Press, pp.57-89.
Moor, L. (2007). Sport and Commodification A Reflection on Key Concepts (Links to an external site.). Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 31(2), 128-142.
Nader, R. (2005, January 9). Green Bay on the Potomac: Why D.C. Should Own the Nationals. (Links to an external site.) Washington Post, B8.
Ross, J. (2014). Explaining exceptionalism: Approaches to the study of American Sports Business History (Links to an external site.). In Riess, S. A. ed. Companion to American Sports History. Somerset, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, pp.523-551.
Scambler, G. (2005). Sport and Society: History, Power and Culture (Links to an external site.). Berkshire, GBR: McGraw-Hill Education, pp.116-137.View or listen:
Required
ABC News. Teaching tools for microeconomics. Stadiums: Government Spending and Jobs. (Links to an external site.) (2006). In Films On Demand. Segment 4 [Video file, 6 mins].
Sports for sale (Links to an external site.). (1991). In Films On Demand. Segments 1 (Links to an external site.), 6-7, (Links to an external site.) 11-17, 22-23 [Video file, 36 mins].
ESPN. UNC Academic Scandal: Whistleblower, Former Athlete Speak Out (https://www.espn.com/radio/play/_/id/10672168). (2014, March 26). [Video file, 4:21 mins].
“Olympics Nightmare,” (Links to an external site.) from England Swings: Discontent in London Over the 2012 Olympics. (2012). In Films On Demand. [Video file, 4:21 mins]
“Publicly Funded Stadiums,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvf27hYX9qc) from Moyers & Company: The collision of sports and politics. (2013). In Films On Demand. [Video file, 2:54 mins]
Discuss:M5D1: Are Athletes Commodities?
When something is subsidized this generally means that the cost of that something enjoyed by only some individual(s) is borne by another party or parties. For example, when a person who cannot afford to buy private health insurance becomes enrolled in a Medicaid program, the broad rank of taxpayers of that state, and often of the specific county of residence, are paying the costs of that individual’s health insurance. As the Easterbrook, Vedder, and Milke and Veldhuis readings note, one of the most prominent issues in addressing the political economy of sports is the extent to which the public subsidizes the incredible expense of sports franchises and facilities. As the authors demonstrate, subsidy occurs even at college as non-athletes pick up the tab of paying for expensive athletics at most schools through increased student fees which are then transferred to athletics departments (Vedder 2013).
At the professional sports level, subsidy often constitutes a direct type of corporate welfare. Not only do private corporate entities enjoy most of the benefits of public subsidy at the professional level, but so too have individuals, as with the famous case of George W. Bush gaining from his “ownership” stake in the Texas Rangers (Links to an external site.) baseball franchise. In this case, a borrowed investment stake in the Rangers led to over $14 million dollars in gains for Mr. Bush, once a new stadium financed through a regressive sales tax imposed on all taxpayers and consumers went through. With the new stadium, the value of the franchise increased massively at the time of sale, and Mr. Bush cashed out and bought his ranch in Texas with the proceeds. Socializing the costs of private wealth gains is widespread in the economy, but with sports entities, the public tends to take greater notice, although this has led to few taxpayer revolts against hometown teams.
The readings and videos of this module highlight important examples of how money spent by fans on professional and college sports (e.g., tickets, concessions, memorabilia etc.) does not necessarily add value to local economies (Links to an external site.), as this money would likely have been spent on some other form of entertainment. The moderate economic activity that can be attributed to sports does not cover the costs of subsidizing sport in many cases, as Chicago White Sox and Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf admitted in the ABC News video. Even in the only potentially lucrative college level of D1 football, Zimbalist noted that in 2008-2009, only 25 of 119 teams had net operating surplus revenue (Zimbalist, 2010, p.31).
The other schools had an average D1 football deficit of $8.1 million dollars (i.e., the average subsidy to D1 college football) to make up from rest of the university system, including heavily-indebted students. The well-worn observation that college football and basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees (Links to an external site.) in 39 of 50 states is accurate enough (Links to an external site.), but more absurd still is the fact that from 2010-2014, public universities paid a collective $250 million dollars to fired coaches in all sports. These wastes of scarce academic resources are part of the ridiculous compensation packages that now attend these “scholastic” administrators’ pay packages (Wolverton, 2016).
Modern day coliseums, or stadiums, where the games are played have exhibited an even more marked increase in public subsidy. Only the Green Bay Packers in professional football and the San Francisco Giants in Major League Baseball can be said to have properly socialized or privatized stadium costs, as the Packers are a publicly-owned franchise, the only one, while the SF Giants’ baseball park was entirely privately-financed. All others cost taxpayers vast sums (Links to an external site.), seemingly in perpetuity. At the time of its demolition, the Giants Stadium in New Jersey still had $110 million in debt that New Jersey taxpayers were obligated to pay (Links to an external site.).
Yet another example is the $750 million price tag of Soldier Field in Chicago, where cost overruns put taxpayers (Links to an external site.) on the hook for millions of dollars. The full costs to society for subsidizing sports are large indeedLinks to an external site. [PDF, 131KB], and one must ask – does public support avoiding the psychological “wounds” to a community if their team was to close up shop or move to another city outweigh the fiscal damage incurred by taxpayers?
Easterbrook, Gerdy, and Kuriloff and Preston provide clear evidence that professional sports have great influence on local and regional political economy, and not for the better. Sports franchises are often portrayed as having a net positive economic impact upon institutions, cities, or the states that sponsor them, yet most of these claims are based upon hopeful projections and “unchallenged myths” about the world of professional sports, and only infrequently are the costs of subsidizing these entities tallied. Kuriloff and Preston note: “tax exemptions on interest paid by municipal bonds that were issued for sports structures cost the US Treasury $146 million a year, while over the life of the $17 billion of exempt debt issued to build stadiums since 1986, the last of which matures in 2047, taxpayer subsidies to bondholders will total $4 billion” (Kuriloff and Preston, 2012).
When cities are confronted with professional sport franchises that threaten to leave if not provided with taxpayer funds to build and maintain stadiums (Links to an external site.), city governments commonly fold, and pass bond measures or sales tax increases on the citizenry to keep professional sports franchises happy. When cities do not do this, the owners often do indeed leave town. We have seen many recent relocations of professional sport franchises — the NBA’s Vancouver, BC Grizzlies to Memphis, Tennessee; the NFL’s Raiders who moved from Oakland, to Los Angeles, and then back to Oakland again, and the relocation of the Seattle Supersonics to Oklahoma City in 2008 (Links to an external site.). These relocations should not come as a surprise.
Professional sport is and always will be a business. Although sports franchise owners argue vociferously that keeping a franchise in a given city is an economic benefit to all parties involved, cities who assume millions in debt to build stadiums often fail to pay off the bonds before the stadiums are destroyed, as with the Seattle “Kingdome.” (Links to an external site.) [Video file, 0:51 minutes] The construction and operation of such stadiums simply do not always provide enough additional economic activity and tax revenue to justify their expense. In similar fashion, professional sports athletes are generally paid high salaries, but maintain residence in states with no income tax, like Florida, avoiding state income taxes in their professional host cities.
While it might be expected that the professional sports world would be infused with the grimy politics of local real estate development and petty public officials all too willing to compromise tax payer monies to showcase their role as sports boosters, universities were once a more pristine field of amateur competition, not unlike the Olympics before “Dream Teams” took over. But, as you have read and seen in this module, universities have largely betrayed their amateur status, and have frankly created professional sports complexes on the campuses of the leading Division 1 schools.
Murray Sperber, the Indiana University English professor who challenged and helped depose legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight, places this degradation in the larger context of the decline of the university system within broader American society. Among his many good arguments in Beer and Circus (2000 (Links to an external site.)) [Video file, 56:34 minutes], Sperber sees students and faculty in a mutual “non-aggression pact,” where faculty don’t pry into student drinking and non-learning so long as faculty can remain focused primarily on their own research, not teaching.
Universities succumb to athletic administration and coaches, plying students with expensive sports spectacles, instead of critical learning environments. The governing bodies above the individual schools, principally the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) become merely the “trade association for coaches and athletic directors,” and not guardians of academic and athletic pre-professional integrity.
Vedder, Sack, and Wolverton and Kambhampati highlight just how professional college sports are and the unrelenting financial costs associated with trying to field winning teams, far too much of which is born by other students as Vedder details. There is very little that remains unprofessional about Division 1 college basketball and football, as the money involved and the academic side of the “student-athlete” experience bely amateur status. The NCAA enforces athletes’ labor for profit, requiring students to sign away their commercial rights when signing their eligibility documents, and coaches unilaterally administer, on no more than an annual basis, the scholarships that athletes require to stay in school (Zimbalist, 2010, p.26).
The NCAA basketball tournament itself has become a multibillion-dollar commercial extravaganza that uses the performance and images of world-famous athletes for tremendous financial gain. UCLA standout, Ed O’Bannon, successfully argued in court that the NCAA’s amateurism clause violates federal antitrust law (Links to an external site.) [Video file, 1:13 minutes], while the union organizing effort of Division 1 football players at Northwestern University (Links to an external site.) [Video file, 2:34 minutes] was shut down in the courts.
The NCAA’s stance that college sport is an “educational enterprise” is appealing to those who like to think that college athletes are students who play sports during their free time, but participation in big-time college sports is “virtually indistinguishable from full-time employment.” Division I athletes regularly train and compete many more hours during a week than they spend in a classroom or studying (Links to an external site.), and athletic scholarships have the trappings of an employment contract, not an academic scholarship. The ceaseless effort to attain profit from college sports, and the pressure upon coaches to win at all costs, causes universities to bend all rules and ethics related to the academy. Of course, these efforts add to the exploitation of student athletes.
As Nocera wrote and Mary Willingham described in the UNC video, in addition to the usual assignment plagiarism and adult course-taking for athletes, the University of North Carolina designed completely fake classes (Links to an external site.) for student athletes that only required the submission of a brief and only marginally literate term paper in order to pass. The grades that UNC athletes attained were always just above the standards for player eligibility. Does this system serve the public good of an educated citizenry, or merely one entertained by mostly unpaid labor? If student athletes in sports without such revenues behind them engaged in similar behavior, would they receive decades of cover up support from athletic and academic officials, let alone the boosters who pay for everything outside of official budget lines?
Business considerations play a central role in the institution sport, whether at the collegiate or professional level, and as a result, the concept of commodification is especially important to understand. In general, commodification (Links to an external site.) refers to the process by which a resource, product, or service becomes a consumable “good” with a market-based price. Because athletes are so recognizable in society, they are natural market commodities, both in and of themselves, but also as symbolic pitch men/women for products and services. When playing, athletes find their market value in contract negotiation, if they are eligible for “free agency,” but after retiring many of them find other levels of commodity reimbursement for their images and society’s lingering value of them (Links to an external site.).
For example, OJ Simpson was a leading corporate front man, and his ads for Hertz rental car helped boost sales at Hertz by over 50% in their first year (Links to an external site.), allowing Hertz to profit from OJ’s sports-fueled celebrity status Getting to “the show” (Links to an external site.) [Video file, 1:32 minutes] is the goal of a professional athlete, but the business of profiting from sport and its players is an ongoing concern of franchise owners and league officials (e.g., sports merchandise, team/player imagery in commercial products etc.). Donald Fehr, the head of the MLB Player’s Union, accurately noted that no one paid money to watch baseball team owners do anything, only the players added the value that made the enterprise work.
Yet, the fans and larger consumers in society are the ones who truly make the commodification of sport and its stars a reality. This then allows commercial organizations, such as financial services firms, to use the images of professional athletes and team logos, demonstrating an intensification of the symbolic properties of would-be mundane goods. For example, purchasing a breakfast cereal, or investing in a retirement fund becomes more important, and more connected to the interest and identity of fans, provided these and countless other products are connected to a professional sports franchise’s imagery. This is “brand extension (Links to an external site.),” a mutually reinforcing process in which the brand of a non-athletic organization is amplified by the brand of a professional sports franchise (Moor, 2007). Does everyone “want to be like Mike,” or does the commodification of athletes and teams raise class implications because people in lower socioeconomic positions have difficulty demonstrating their allegiance to professional sports franchises and stars by purchasing their related products which are often unaffordable?
This discussion is related to Module Outcomes 1 and 2. Your first discussion for module five will ask you to comment on the political economy of professional sport. Of particular interest in this discussion will be the transition from collegiate athletics into professional athletics. As many writers and athletes contend, the transition into professional sport is a wake-up call in which multiple stakeholders have an interest in an athlete’s success on the court or field. In this sense, athletes move from the world of “amateur” sport into one in which sport is a legitimate industry.
Before participating in this discussion, make sure you have completed all video and reading content for the module. Using as many of the module readings and other module learning materials as possible, please respond to the following questions in your post:
• Drawing upon the readings you have done concerning commodification and the murky difference between amateur and professional sport, is it a fair argument that professional athletes are themselves a commodity? Why or why not? Are amateur, college athletes any different? Cite your readings in your response.
• Explain some of the ethical arguments in favor of, and opposed to, paying amateur college student-athletes. For example, is it fair to regard student athletes as employees of the University? Why or why not?Your initial post should be at least 250 words and must substantively integrate the assigned readings with proper APA (Links to an external site.) style formatting.
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