When you sit back and assess who in professional sports you choose to root for, it's worth it to take note of how league dynamics do or don't influence the degree in which you choose to participate as a fan.
When I take stock of my own primary rooting interests, I find that I gravitate toward sports that are not amongst the three major US sports. I enjoy the NFL comprehensively as a product, but not as a fan. When you grow up in the Detroit area, geography and a sustained period of winning turn you into a Red Wings fan, but I avoid MLB and the NBA, unless the Pistons are good.
But as I look back over the previous 40 or so years, it's interesting to me to see how the nature of relationship between fan and sport has evolved (or devolved).
The cynic in me will use Major League Baseball as a prime example of this. Once upon a time, Major League Baseball teams depended upon gate revenues and local television and radio contracts for the bulk of their revenues. Under this system, these teams had to make a concerted effort to connect with their local communities in order to drum up business. Certainly, an imbalance of power existed, but that largely waned as the Yankees made a series of bad personnel decisions in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. MLB always had an imbalance of revenue toward larger markets (though I personally love the what if exercise of Vernon Stouffer selling the Indians to George Steinbrenner) but superior scouting and a solid organization could sustainably impact that imbalance.
As television contract values skyrocketed, gate revenue essentially began to take a backseat to television revenue, so much so that Gate Revenue is essentially ancillary to teams like the Marlins, Yankees, Dodgers and Pirates. This allows these teams to treat their fans with utter disregard. Correspondingly, the absence of a quality product (or a reasonable price of entry to a live event) allows the fanbase to treat the teams with utter disregard.
If the fans are thousandaires, the owners are multi-multi millionaires, and the television networks are multi-billionaires, what we have is a system where multi-multi millionaires are making their money at the teat of multi-billionaires who in turn made their money by coming up with a better mousetrap for sucking money out of the wallets of the thousandaires. It's cleaner and easier that way.
But the thousandaires, you and me, still hold sway. And there is a lot of graveyard whistling that takes place across MLB and the NBA. The MLB has it's fair share of house thousandaires, particularly in the major media markets. But there are some harsh realities that they hide from you. The first is that the NFL Pro Bowl, widely regard as a joke, outdrew Game 1 of the 2012 World Series. Second, the MLB is aging in place. Fox may crow about how well the World Series does 12+, but the 18-49 numbers regularly lose to standard network programming.
I gave myself a team in each league growing up, and one of those teams was the Montreal Expos. Say what you will about the fans in Montreal, but they did what every sports fan in every city should do, and that was stop supporting a shitty product. Did it cost them their team? Sure. But the lesson there, as it is in Pittsburgh, is clear. Put a competitive product on the field, and people will fork over the money. Don't, and they won't. The thousandaires of Montreal won a Pyrrhic victory.
The NBA is a model of the unsustainability of this financial model. Lost in the undercurrent of the Jordan 90s was the fact that Michael Jordan only played for one team. The NBA and the 1990s are a great example of how the face of sports fandom in this country transformed itself. The grip that the big four had on the sports fan was pried loose with a wide variety of other pursuits most notably the X Games. Thousandaires stopped buying the hype of what the NBA was selling no matter how high they turned that hype machine up.
The NBA continues to hype it's stars, while teams can't give tickets away.
David Stern is the consummate graveyard whistler, but even he had a difficult time putting a positive face on having to repossess the New Orleans Hornets (which should have been moved to Oklahoma City post Katrina), as his protege, Gary Bettman tries continually to put a positive spin on the league's farcical presence in Phoenix.
The NHL has tried, rather clumsily in the wake of last offseason's ridiculous free agency, to put a system in place that provides some sort of economic parity back into the economics of the game. But the damage in most of the southern markets and Columbus may not prove to be sustainable.
Only the NFL seems to be willing and able to effectively balance the relationship between a product that is perceived to be competitive enough to warrant the direct investment of the thousandaires while still being attractive enough to the multi-billionaires that pay the bulk of the bills. Even still, as in stadium NFL attendance has fallen since peaking in 2007, this has proven to be problematic.
Having endured all of that, you'd probably like me to get to a point. And it's this. As I was watching tonight's Tim Horton's Brier Curling Championship, it occurs to me that the bulk of my sports time is spent actively pursuing those sports that are built on a smaller economic model. Curling. Cricket. Canadian Football. Minor League Baseball. And I think that that is very much the future of our relationship with sports. That we, as sports fans, are actively rejecting the hollowed out model of sports fandom the multi billionaires try to cram down our throats to make a buck. It explains, on some level NASCAR's popularity as well (though it too has paid the price of trying to cram manufactured stars down the fans throats).We connect most personally with those sports that seem the most human to us, or offer us the most consistently competitive product. And these sports succeed where the NBA and MLB fail. And they will pay the price for it, eventually.
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