An aggressive push to reopen the sports world is coming from a variety of avenues.
First are the fans who desire some semblance of normalcy amid the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. They know that forthcoming sporting events may happen in front of empty stadiums or in hermetically sealed bubbles, yet they still thirst for sports as they crawl parched through the entertainment desert.
This collection of white, male plutocrats will be telling their disproportionately brown and black workforce when it is time for them to hit the playing field, no matter the consequences.
Another source of pressure is coming from the world of sports media, including sports radio and the twenty-four-hour sports networks. Even the greatest talkers among them can’t keep bantering about the sports that aren’t happening.
But the greatest push to reopen is coming from the sports commissioners and team owners. For them, this isn’t about normalcy or relief. It’s about cold, hard cash. They need games to be played to keep the money coming in. They don’t get their billions of dollars in television money without them.
In the world of sports, fans are scenery. They are present to cheer and add a sense of excitement and anticipation to every critical moment. But fans comprise only a small amount of the actual revenue that ends up in the pockets of owners and players.
The “real money,” as one sports economist said to me, comes from two revenue streams: The first is cable and broadcast television deals, which generate the lion’s share of the manna in the sports world. The second is publicly funded stadiums, which are best understood as monuments to corporate greed—neoliberal Trojan Horses which take public tax money and magically transform it into private wealth.
These publicly funded stadiums can’t generate revenue without the workers who play and the fans who watch. At present, they are husks of dead capital. In some cities, owners must pay off bond debts on these stadiums. These payments are due whether there are games or not. Thus the head honchos are doing everything they can to keep the games going.
All the major sports commissioners, as well as NFL and NBA owners Robert Kraft, Jerry Jones, and Mark Cuban, are actually on President Donald Trump’s committee that will make the decision about when to reopen. They are joined by Vince McMahon, the founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, and Dana White, president of Ultimate Fighting Championship.
The sports group of the committee, as appointed, includes no union leaders or women, and all of the men are white and exceptionally wealthy. Several have shown in the past that they do not have the best interests of players at heart. The NFL’s history of covering up the effects of concussions and the horrific history of death and injury—and, not coincidentally, anti-unionism—in World Wrestling Entertainment and Ultimate Fighting Championship speaks for itself.
This collection of white, male plutocrats will be telling their disproportionately brown and black workforce when it is time for them to hit the playing field, no matter the consequences.
This is madness, reminiscent of the dystopian, futuristic games of popular culture where people must play or die. The only question is whether the unions will mount any kind of resistance to rushing the players back before it is safe.
As for the players themselves, I can say anecdotally from speaking to several, that they are eager to get back to playing. These are people with only a limited amount of time before their careers are over, ending their ability to excel and earn.
It is easy to imagine that the weight of this collective pressure will result in players getting back to playing before it is safe to do so. And if the pros come back, we can expect mounting pressure to see college sports, high school sports, and Amateur Athletic Union sports come back as well.
As Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has said time and again: It should be the status of the virus, and not the wishes of humans, that sets the dates for reopening. He says that may mean not having sports at all this year. But the people in charge do not seem to be listening.