Football is Business
If you watch NFL football there’s a good chance you’ve seen one of these commercials:
A clever, concise and easily marketable phrase. And as the fanatics most of us are, we whole hardly agree. Football is Family. The connection between the team, the fans and the community is certainly real when done correctly. It even brings generations of families together. Looking at the recent parades for the NBA Champion Cleveland Cavaliers and World Series Champion Chicago Cubs is proof of that. However, that is simply the relationship at it’s absolute best. Things can go sour very quickly. All of a sudden, business gets involved and all the talk of family becomes an afterthought.
The NFL is on the verge of relocating three teams in the span of a year. The city of St. Louis lost their team as the Rams returned to Los Angeles after a two-decade absence. The city of Oakland is already losing the Golden State Warriors, but now it’s looking like they’ll lose the Raiders as well. The city of San Diego voted down a ballot measure that would’ve given the Chargers tax money to build a new stadium. With that, it looks like they’ll be losing their team as well. It’s all well in good to say ‘Football is Family’ when a city supports a team for over 50 years (20 in the case of St. Louis), but fans have to remember that the love they have for their team is strictly one way. This is business. These sports leagues don’t love you. They do however love your money.
For years the rule of thumb in the NFL has been public funds for stadiums. Ignore the fact that the NFL has billionaires and all of their owners are well off. Let the taxpayers figure out how to foot the bill. If they refuse? Put the squeeze on them. Tell them we’ll put their team in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, London, Toronto, or even the moon. Whatever it takes to get that dollar. Now to be fair, there are owners out there who can, will and did foot the bill for their own stadiums. Rams owner Stan Kroenke actually turned down public money in St. Louis to build what is being referred to as the Shangri-La of NFL stadiums in Inglewood. A true rarity among the sports ownership business for sure. But remember, he had to stab his own hometown in the back to get there and make his money in the nation’s second largest market. Tell me something, is football still family in St. Louis with their displaced fan base?
San Diego has decided they’re not going to play ball with the NFL. Their reward will be watching the team they supported for over 50 years head up the interstate to a city they consider a rival city. Say what you want about sports fans in San Diego, but they actually exist and they actually hate Los Angeles sports teams like Red Sox fans hate the Yankees. So once the Chargers are gone, is football still family there? Oakland already lost the Raiders once and even supported them through years of futility. Now they’re good again and now they’re about to leave. Why? Because the city of Oakland doesn’t want to help pay for a stadium. Will football still be family there once the Raiders are gone again?
I could go on about the NFL’s hypocrisy all day. They care about player health while their policy doesn’t match, concussion issues and so on. I just wanted to focus on the fans in three cities that have or are about to lose their teams because they refused to play balL (or deemed unworthy in the case of St. Louis). In times like this we have to remind ourselves of the truth. I have a favorite team, I enjoy the game of football, but football isn’t family. Football is a business. And at any time your city refuses to play ball, the NFL will surely remind you.
