Bastion of Socialism: The NFL (National Football League)
most popular entertainment where individualism reigns most
Obviously, the NFL has nothing to do with socialism. It is, however, very ‘socialistic’ as that word is used these days by American conservatives.
To begin with, (American) football is clearly the most team-centric (group-centric) sport. In other sports featuring teams the payers are encouraged to work together, but in all other sports individuals are at least significantly less dependent on other players for their own successful play than in football. In it, players can and do perform incredible athletic feats, but for one player to have such an opportunity it is invariably the case that other players must ‘do their jobs’ — usually as a group — for that opportunity to present itself. For instance, for a receiver to make a spectacular catch (the most common stunning feat), the quarterback had to have been able to throw the ball, and for the quarterback to have thrown the ball the offensive line — as a unit — had to have done at least a minimally sufficient job of blocking the players on the opposing team trying to tackle the quarterback before he could throw it. So play does consist of efforts of individual people, but success depends on people working together, as a group, every time. The group is clearly more important for success than any individual is.
Consider baseball, which in the first two-thirds of the 1900’s was by far the most popular entertainment in the U.S. It is a procession of performances by individuals. Each segment of play begins with the pitcher holding the ball in his hand then attempting to (ideally) throw it across home plate past the player swinging a bat at it (or not). If the batter doesn’t swing or swings and misses the catcher must catch the ball. If the batter hits it and a fielder can get to it, that player must catch the ball. He might then be required to throw the ball to another player, who has to catch it. For the team to have success individuals must play well, but the performance of each individual usually has nothing to do with another player’s performance.
Another socialistic element in the NFL is the ‘salary cap’. Every team is limited in how much it can pay its players, in total. Teams can divide the money among their players however they want, but there is a limit on how much they can pay all of them as a team. Since the single biggest determinant of a team’s success is how many good players it has, it is a highly socialistic policy to limit how much teams can pay players, effectively putting a limit on the total talent any team can accumulate.
There is also a fair amount of income-redistribution in the NFL. Teams share evenly some forms of revenue, such as the money T.V. networks pay to be allowed to televise the games — despite the fact that some teams are obviously worth more to the networks, as those teams attract more viewers. Teams also have to share, to a lesser extent, money the team derives from its own revenue streams, such as sales of team merchandise.
Finally, the NFL engages in a form of affirmative action. That is manifested in the structure of the draft. The worse a team’s record was the previous year, the better its position is in the draft, where players can be acquired at the cheapest rates (for their talent at their positions). Those ‘poor’ teams hold their preferential positions in every round of the draft. The intent of the NFL in structuring the draft that way is to put those teams in a position to be able to do better. It is important that the only criterion for preferential treatment of that kind is a bad outcome the previous year: it has nothing to do with any notion of fault or blame, bad luck or bad decisions.
So the NFL, by far the most popular entertainment in the U.S., the nation in the world where individualism is most strongly entrenched, is a highly socialistic undertaking. Not only that, but football is particularly favored by people who self-identify as politically conservative (whether of the traditional kind or these newfangled MAGA types). Yet, the NFL as an organization is absolutely dedicated to the proposition that all teams should have as equal of a chance as possible to do well. Does anybody else think all of that is weird?