by Andrés Martinez
In a tribute to the National Football League’s nostalgia-tinged, size-doesn’t-matter, redistributive genius, Super Bowl XLV will pit the nation’s 152nd largest metropolitan area against its 22nd largest. Green Bay defeated Chicago yesterday to clinch the National Football Conference; Pittsburgh prevailed against the New York Jets in the AFC Championship.
Think about that. In what other contexts could Pittsburgh and New York – not to mention Green Bay and Chicago! – compete on a level playing field? Certainly not in baseball, America’s supposed pastime. In the unlikely scenario the Pittsburgh Pirates met the New York Yankees in a World Series, the Yankees’ payroll would exceed the Pirates’ payroll by a 6-to-1 margin ($206 million vs. $35 million), reflecting the relative size and economic prowess of their home markets.
But yesterday’s NFL championships were no David-versus-Goliath showdowns. That’s because the NFL, a club of billionaires peddling a game that glamorizes merciless hitting, practices a form of redistributive socialism that would make even European lefties blanche. All NFL teams, regardless of the size of their home markets, share national TV revenues equally and operate under the same salary caps. To further promote equality, the NFL has last-place teams draft first from the collegiate ranks, with the Super Bowl champions getting the last pick each spring.
The NFL’s socialistic revenue-sharing arrangement, which treats all franchises alike and thus helps shine an outsized spotlight on communities like Green Bay and Buffalo, is made possible by a half-century-old law that exempts sports leagues from antitrust laws when negotiating their TV contracts. The NFL, Congress decided, should be considered a “single entity” rather than a collusion of franchises and their owners, at least when making deals with TV networks.
Count me among the ranks of those long dumbfounded by the irony of professional football – American football! – practicing such socialism. But watching this weekend’s championship games made me realize – and there is plenty of ruminating going on when you hit what seems like the hundredth wireless-carrier commercial of the afternoon – that there may be something more at play here than the NFL’s obsession with parity.
The league is also in the preservation business, exploiting our collective need for shared ancestral traditions, for deeper roots. The NFL is much less concerned about whether a city like Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area, ever gets back in the game than it is about how to preserve franchises in lesser cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Green Bay. These cities have declined in the real world, but, as an embodiment of certain ideals, they have never been more valuable to the NFL brand.
Football’s ethos, after all, was shaped by cold, broad-shouldered cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland – cities that loom large in our narrative of shared origins. This isn’t only a question of geography, but also of values. In our elegiac imaginations, America’s fading industrial cities embody a back-to-basics work ethic and a determination to overcome adversity. (It’s no accident that Steeler and Packer jerseys are reliably among the top-selling NFL gear nationwide.)
That’s why fans all across Southern California routinely cram into Packer and Steeler bars, as they did again yesterday, to watch the games. Whether these California-based Steeler and Packer fans have personal links to Western Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or not, they have an aspirational link. It’s about yearning for a shared tradition and a grittier three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust version of life—not to mention single-digit temperatures in which you can see your own breath. These are spectacles best witnessed from a bar in L.A., of course, but spectacles that nonetheless link us to our past, and to one another.
Unfortunately, the NFL and its players’ union are currently in a stalemate over a new collective bargaining agreement, opening the possibility of a player lockout and strike commencing as early as this spring. This would be a serious blow not only to America’s best-run sports league, but also to the league’s city-preserving egalitarianism. That’s because some union sympathizers are now pressing Congress to further narrow or eliminate – rather than expand – the NFL’s anti-trust exemption. Such a change would bring the days of a nostalgic league that sustains the competitiveness of a place like Green Bay to a swift end. And we’d lose a lot more than a business model.
Andrés Martinez is Editorial Director of Zócalo Public Square and Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program at the New America Foundation.
*Photo courtesy of andy_emcee.
Excellent post. I was in LA when we had the Raiders here and most people were still more interested in other teams, the ones they had grown up with or followed for another reason. I grew up in Boston where there really isn’t a choice. You cheer for the home team and that’s that. I think part of the magic of L.A. is that there are Steelers bars and Packers bars. Los Angeles is a city that doesn’t require you to give up your prior allegiances. I still would like Los Angeles to have its own team though.
i thought your ideas were on point, but I do think the NFL still wants to come back to LA for the celeb factor. I write for the Studio City Patch on line publication, and I did a piece about the heyday of LA Ram support in our town. I wrote about my kid days when I would ride on a bus with my Dad from Pucci’s restaurant in Encino to the Ram game in south LA. People would have a high ball or two on the bus. Norm Van Brooklin would come over to the the bar/restaurant after the game, and sometimes duke it out with a fan. LA is the king of the movie industry, music, and television. Just like people go nuts for the Jets in the Big Apple, they would go nuts for a new LA NFL team, and all the other fans in historic cities like Pittsburg and Philadelphia will learn to hate the “LA Celebs football team. The NFL needs a team in Los Angeles.
While I had also noticed the NFL kept its blue collar roots in rust belt cities other sports long ago abandoned, it had never occurred to me that decision was either a conscious one or that it might be a smart business decision. All excellent points. But that still does not negate a different type of fan base developing in an increasingly urban LA – nor does it rule out the need for teams which can be nationally loved – or hated – for different reasons to complete the existing business model.
You forgot to mention one of the more blatant socialistic aspects of the Green Bay Packers — the team is owned collectively by its community members as a non-profit entity. This is truly a unique model of a city “owning” its franchise.
This model offers the obvious benefit of a small city like Green Bay not having to worry about a rapacious owner playing it against other cities in a quest to secure the most advantageous deal for stadium costs, tax rebates, etc. The Packers is not just symbolically “Green Bay’s team”, it literally is. As a born and bred-Wisconsinite living in L.A., that is one of the things that I love best about the team. Just don’t tell any politicians that it looks a lot like modified socialism at its best.
Seeing how well this model has worked for Green Bay, and knowing that L.A. has been abandoned by multiple NFL franchises (Chargers, Raiders, Rams) over the years, it would be great to see civic leaders here try to dust off this collective model for team ownership. That would be a team Los Angeles could finally embrace as its own.
One of the great disappointments in life was when the CCHS boosters decided to treat the high school football team to a NFL football game. “Oh No!!, we’re going to Pittsburgh , not Clevaland” was our collective groan.
So off we went, after early Mass, on our 40 mile trip from Steubenville, OH, to Old Forbes Field, to watch John Henry Johnson, Big Daddy Lipscomb, Bobby Lane.
Forbes field was so small you could actually see into the huddle as a team would scratch plays in the dirt part of the baseball infield.
ANd many houses in the streets surrounding the “stadium” had converted garages into homemade “Pittsburgh” sandwich shops. You milled about the streets and row houses next to Forbes Field, chatting with the fans, trying to hold a dripping keilbasa sausage sandwich, a cup of soda (or Iron City. beer)
We left the stadium after another Steelers loss, kicking swirling programs under or feet, ticket stubs, discarded beer cups that carpeted the concrete steps,the aisleways and exit ramps.
Times have changed.
I certainly hope that the NFL owners don’t ruin a great thing. There is a reason why the NFL is the most popular sports league in the country. It’s because every team, regardless of market size, has a chance.
Long ago the NFL adopted rules that prohibit the Green Bay Packers’ community-owned concept from being used elsewhere.
I love football, c’mon guys please don’t let this happen!