Money Talk Taking Fun Out of Sports

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I was dining in an upscale West Omaha restaurant last
night with a friend. We share a passion for sports.
Usually when we get together, that's much about what we
talk his teams, favorite players in mine. But last night
was different. The conversation was a reflection of I think
a general disappointment these days, how money and the naked
profit motive have now seized control of sports and it's

(00:24):
a bit confusing. It left us with more questions than answers,
like how the University of Michigan can lose forty seven
million dollars in one year on sports they generate over
two hundred and fifty million in athletics related revenue. The
Detroit Free Press published their public expenses after all of
the mandatory bills are paid, what happened to the other
one hundred million? But that forty seven million dollar gap

(00:47):
is peanuts compared to the University of Southern California, the
landing pad for the progeny of California's wealth and celebrated
costs of use and mes eighty thousand a year to
attend USC not in housing. The Trojans have won one
hundred seven NCAA team titles, four hundred and twelve individual
national championships, three hundred and twenty six Olympic medals, had

(01:11):
five hundred and seventy one football players drafted into the NFL,
and yet that school has run budget deficits of three
hundred and fifty eight million over the last two years,
blaming the athletic department, which has revenues like Michigan's. Maybe
it's fuzzy math to show the athletes that we really
don't have much money to share with you, or motivate

(01:32):
their alums and fans to pass the nil hat. Husker Sports,
which has revenues way past two hundred million each year,
says we need to go on a diet cash crunch,
even though seed licenses are up concessions who knows how
much more. Meanwhile, tuition rates at UNL went up five percent.
It used to be the idea in sports was to

(01:53):
light up the scoreboard. Today it's to ring the cash register.
The Tampa Bay Devil Rays, one of the least attended
to teams in baseball, just sold for one point seven
billion dollars even though they don't have a stadium. There's
got hit with a hurricane sold to a Tampa home
builder who didn't become a billionaire by making dumb business moves.
He sees revenue from that club that most of us

(02:15):
must not. The Atlanta Braves, who hosted the All Star Game,
shined a spotlight on their new Truest Field, ten miles
from northwest of Atlanta in Cumberland to Georgia open seven
years ago. Ten years ago, Cumberland wasn't much, but it
had acres and acres of open space. Sixty of those
acres now housed the stadium and Battery Atlanta, a massive

(02:38):
mixed use entertainment district with bars, restaurants, movie theaters, fun
things to do, and high end offices and apartments. The
Braves own all of it. Three million fans came through
Truest Park to watch baseball last year, but six million
came through Battery Atlanta, and none of the money those
folks spent was shared with the players. Tom Ricketts, oma

(03:00):
billionaire brother of the US senator who owns the Cubs,
did the same thing. Bought all of the real estate
around Wrigley Field. The cash flow is so big he
can afford to keep Wriggly a museum first and a
stadium second. John Sherman who owns the Royals, has the
same plan for his proposed new stadium in Kansas City.
The players get a fair piece of all the money

(03:22):
on game days. The owners get all of the money
the rest of the year. Now the players are catching on.
For example, this past month, LSU announced corporate logos may
start appearing on the players football jerseys. In this nil
get it while you can era, we all wondered if
the players care more about the front of the jersey

(03:42):
than the back. Now we know. I'm not naive. Sure
the profit motive is ranked high in the sports ownership class.
For over a century, branch Rickey was hailed as the
great emancipator of baseball when he brought black Jackie Robinson
to the majors. To Ricky, it was about colored folks
and how many more would buy tickets to Brooklyn Dodger

(04:03):
games if a black guy was on the field. There's
nothing wrong with capitalism, and sports is an appropriate factory
for it. But I guess we used to hide it better,
and we sure didn't talk about it as much.