Regressive Taxation in Sports: Players & Fans Pay, and COVID-19 Could Make it Worse
On Monday, April 6th, the NFL announced that their annual draft would still be held between April 23-25th, albeit virtually. Two days later, the league announced that the draft would serve as a fundraiser for 6 charities, chosen by the NFL Foundation, providing COVID-19 relief efforts. As per the announcement, the “Draft-A-Thon” would “pay tribute to healthcare workers and first responders in a variety of ways;” Commissioner Roger Goodell added that the fundraiser “will deliver much-needed funding.” Meanwhile, in the NBA world, superstar Steph Curry recently hosted an informative Instagram Live Q&A with Dr. Anthony Fauci that over 50,000 people tuned in to. Fellow NBA All-Star Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers joined Curry in doing good, donating $500k to local communities and to 76ers employees.
Undoubtedly, the collective $43mil already donated by the wider ‘NFL family’ as of the week of the Draft-A-Thon’s announcement is nothing to scoff at, and NBA superstars’ contributions should be celebrated. Yet the question remains: why is the NFL asking fans to donate? Similarly, why does the burden of supporting relief efforts fall on NBA athletes as opposed to their franchises’ billionaire owners?
The Forbes Billionaires List for 2020 was published 2.5 weeks prior to the announcement of the NFL’s Draft-A-Thon. Sixteen NFL franchise owners--over half the owners in the league, as Green Bay is a publicly held nonprofit--found themselves on the list, with networths totalling a combined $87.5 billion. (This total does not even account for the wealth of other owners from families with holdings in the billions, owners in control of deceased relatives’ multi-billion dollar trusts, or owners who featued on previous iterations of Forbes’ list; these categories include at least another half-dozen owners.)
The problem with a league that generated ~$15 billion in 2019, with goals of reaching $25 billion by 2027 & populated by team owners with collective wealth pushing twelve digits, asking for fans to add to the league’s contribution, is obvious: as of April 30th, jobless claims have surged past 30 million, with numerous NFL fans surely amongst the newly unemployed (Update: as of May 8th, the unemployment rate hit 14.7%, a rate unseen since the Great Depression). The issue in the NBA is just as clear. Within an hour of Embiid announcing his donation, the 76ers ownership backtracked on their intention of reducing lower-level employees’ pay.
As Dave Zirin puts it, the “admirable use of Curry’s cultural capital,” as well as Embiid’s “fame-to-shame,” or charitable act that shamed his team’s ownership into changing their course of action, stand in stark contrast to league owners’ shirking of responsibility. And on one hand, Zirin’s point can be taken at face value--these athletes should give us hope as they demonstrate that they can effectively raise awareness, share their struggles, leverage their social media platforms, or embarrass their billionaire employers into taking action.
On the other hand, as Zirin himself points out in an interview concerning COVID-19’s impact on the future of American sports, times of crisis represent the possibility of significant change, and with regard to the NFL’s ask of its fans, we must be skeptical that these changes will be positive. The NFL’s Draft-A-Thon is tone-deaf, audacious attempt to cover itself in glory: the league is attempting to associate its annual draft with fighting the pandemic, but is doing so through the wallets of its millions of struggling fans. Supporting relief efforts is an act that individuals may choose to engage in, especially for those with the financial ability to do so--but being nudged to do so by an organization controlled by billionaires is heinous.
Both the NFL burdening its fans, and the NBA allowing its players, not its owners, to lead by example, are forms of regressive taxation. What Zirin misses is that this “regressive taxation” in which “athletes and workers are forced to pay for the crisis” is not a hypothetical for the future--it is the current situation. Zirin uses regressive taxation to describe how future salaries will plummet while owners protect their share of the spoils, but in describing Joel Embiid’s act of charity, he addresses the same concept in the current moment of crisis. Embiid is forced to pay for the crisis; the Sixers ownership retroactively saving face does not change the fact that Embiid needed to lead the way with his own capital.
The point is not to get cynical, or to quell the hope offered by NBA players’ positive impacts, as described by Dave Zirin. Rather, the point is to take Zirin’s illumination of the moment seriously. We must not want a return to the status quo--or a continuation of norms that permit the NFL to ask its fans to donate their financial capital in a way that so transparently serves the reputation of the NFL. We must celebrate the generosity and leadership of athletes in the short term, while recognizing that the very need for their contributions represents a failing of American institutions and sports leagues alike to provide a safety net and equitable share for all.
The connection to the political here is undeniable & evokes a recent op-ed by Vox Senior Reporter Teddy Schleifer, who argues that the tech billionaires on the philanthropic forefront of the COVID-19 crisis can be doing good whilst also entrenching their power & influence in the longhaul. We are unable to juggle appreciating the short-term impact of megarich philanthropists’ capital with an understanding that a global crisis should not require privatized relief to compensate for weak institutions. As Schleifer puts it, we would rather have “[Bill]
Gates deploying his billions” at his own discretion than have him pay higher taxes that will simply get “lost in the federal bureaucracy.” This is the pivotal problem: can we as Americans juggle two competing truths? Can we accept & appreciate aid from billionaire overlords, or generous athletes, in the short-term, while recognizing that this crisis should lead to structural change making their contributions unnecessary next time?
Schleifer and Zirin analyze the tech and sporting world’s role in the crisis, but both point to the fundamental point this crisis represents an opportunity, a possibility for power to work differently in the future. Schleifers is wary that ‘Big Tech’ companies will use “redemptive, headline-grabbing donations” to “charity wash” themselves, decreasing scrutiny over long-controversial themes like corporate consolidation & the mistreatment of low-level employees. The sports world’s plutocrats, in contrast, do not even need a full “charity wash;” they can survive off of a light dusting or rinse. When ownership groups respond to stars like Joel Embiid’s “fame to shame” donations, they do not absolve themselves of criticism. Transparently, they are doing just-barely-enough, just-barely-in-time, letting athletes like Embiid contribute significantly to relief efforts while benefitting from how this entrenches not Embiid’s influence, à la those philanthropic tech CEOs, but the power of the owners themselves, whose relative lack of leadership perpetuates the regressive taxation cycle of athletes paying. The NFL’s reputation-boosting philanthropy achieves a similar charity wash-lite: even though the Draft-A-Thon is about raising money from everyday NFL fans, the league can rest assured that its efforts to merely coordinate these donations will associate their brand with charitable efforts. League executives can count on positive headlines lauding the NFL for orchestrating such efforts, without fear of negative headlines instead calling for high-paid execs and franchise owners to do more themselves.
Unfortunately, this surface level charity washing is enough when the ‘sports as a sacred apolitical space’ argument remains so central to Americans’ understanding of our beloved pasttimes. These sports owners do not need to “charity wash” to mitigate concern over questions of economic & racial inequality in their leagues (analogous to the corporate consolidation or employee mistreatment questions plaguing Big Tech) because the American sporting landscape’s equivalent questions are actively not asked by a plurality of American sports fans, journalists and athletes themselves. They do not need to obscure their presence whilst already hiding behind a facade of the ‘apolitical.’ Paradoxically & poignantly, their pitiful response to the “fame to shame” of athletes like Embiid feels like more than fans and athletes might have hoped for.
To return to Zirin’s hopeful tune, however, we simply must expand the scope of his arguments. We must celebrate the short-term generosity and impact that athletes like Steph Curry and Joel Embiid are having during this crisis, recognizing that their wherewithal to get things done can
truly supplement larger relief efforts. However, as we celebrate these individual athletes, we must do so with a newfound resolve to envision sports leagues with stronger player collective bargaining agreements and unions, with more equitable distributions of revenue, in which provisions for low level employees are guaranteed not by star athletes, but by much richer franchise owners. We must swear to never again let the elites of the sporting world bask in their athletes’ shadows, insulated against structural critique because of the good faith generated by those athletes on the owners and leagues’ behalf.
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Trump’s Bread & Circuses: American Elites’ Double-Edged Relationship to Sports Amidst Crisis
Admist ever-shifting projections and a constant barrage of updates on COVID-19’s rampage through the U.S. and the world, several American sports leagues have replicated the virus’s constant chaos in their decision-making: Major League Baseball (MLB) has announced multiple iterations of its restart plans, with proposals including relocating all teams to Arizona, or to Arizona & Florida, and shifting its entire divisional structure. Eireann Dolan and her husband, Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle, strongly criticized the Arizona plan for its ethics. It would require isolating over 4,000 people in Arizona for 4-5 months and separating non-athlete laborers from their families. Dolan called it “incredibly dehumanizing,” noting how it “essentializes a person to their job.”
On the other hand, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and commissioner Adam Silver have offered a more positive example of institutional transparency in response to crisis. The NBA was the first major league to suspend its season, and Silver has been nothing but honest since. In comments to the media, he has stressed that he is listening to public health experts, and that a safe date for returning to play remains “unknown to [him].” Rather than boldly throw out multiple versions of flawed (and logistically unreasonable) return plans, Silver has maintained a steadfast policy of honesty & transparency. He doesn’t claim to have all of the answers; he is not willing to add to the chaos by suggesting something that gets walked back or rendered impossible mere days later.
The Donald Trump administration’s chaotic response to the COVID-19 crisis, and reckless engagement witht the sports world as a small part of that larger response, is much closer to MLB’s style of response than that of Silver’s NBA. Historically, Trump has always liked to have it both ways with the politicization of sports. In 2017, Trump notoriously sent a message of ‘shut up & play’ to Colin Kaepernick & fellow NFL athletes engaging in silent protest against police brutality and racial inequality. In doing so, he made a “wrong place, wrong time, wrong means” argument, a classic adage used to silence political discussion in sport. As described in a succinct essay in the European Journal for Sport and Society addressing whether sports can be ‘un-political,’ this type of argument presents itself as neutral, but in fact relegates political discussions about the necessity of change (whether inside or outside of sport) to an “undefined space and time.” Thus, Trump’s dismissal of the protests serves the political agenda of those profiting from sport who fear that political debate will affect their bottom line. Positions like Trump’s may masquerade as neutral, but in reality, they unsurprisingly support the establishment.
On contrary, Trump likes to make sport political when it will benefit himself--simply put, he likes having it both ways. Trump issued a mid-April announcement of an advisory board that he intends to consult on reopening the economy amidst COVID-19. The advisory board members he announced included the commissioners of the NBA, NFL and NHL, franchise owners from the NBA & NFL, and even the heads of the UFC & WWE. Trump clearly emphasized the centrality of sports to his reopening plan, saying that “we have to get our sports back,” and that he was tired of “watching baseball games that are 14 years old.”
Trump’s understanding of the political power of sports is clear. He will tell athletes themselves to keep their opinions out of the spectacle when those opinions contradict his & his support base’s worldview, but when the American public’s increasing frustration with his leadership during crisis is reflected in plummeting approval ratings, his own politicization of their sports as a bread and circuses distraction for the masses (and himself, apparently) is not only permissible, but advantageous.
Even for those taking much more seriously the public health ramifications of sports resuming too quickly, Trump’s desire to see them in action again might be forgiven. During quarantine, many Americans would love nothing more than to cheer on their teams or watch tightly contested playoff matchups. Yet it must be stressed that Trump is not merely calling for sports to reopen, but offering plutocratic franchise owners and league executives the chance to make sure that reopening plans are to their liking (read: to the benefit of their wallets). This is best illustrated by the reality that “nobody from the major sports unions” and no people of color are included amongst the sports leaders on the advisory board. Trump cares more about quid-pro-quos with his financial elite peers and distracting the frustrated masses than he cares about maintaining the health and safety of athletes and others involved with the actual staging of those sporting events.
That Trump is self-interested here is not shocking. What must be understood from his response, however, is the inherent political character of American sports. Trump may very well succeed in reopening sports leagues to the benefit of approval ratings & elites’ bottom lines, but he must not succeed in doing so while getting away with robbing athletes of their own political voice under the false, hypocritical pretense of “wrong place, wrong time, wrong means.” Trump cannot have it both ways.
Fans do not even have to feign anger at the return of sports leagues to understand this. Fans may remain cautiously optimistic about the return of primetime live entertainment, though hopefully while remaining concerned about the health of athletes, officials, sporting staff & their families; fans are justified in being excited about the return of sports. Crucially, however, this excitement must exist in equal part to critique of Trump’s ‘have it both ways’ relationship to sports. We may be privately happy, elated, even, about the return of sports--but we must simultaneously
recognize & call out Trump’s abuse of sports to placate us, politicizing sport only when the ball is in his court. We can be excited for the return of sports while increasing in our understanding of how sports are used for political gain only when it is expedient for elites.
Donald Trump’s relationship to sports during COVID-19 is not the only example of elites benefitting from crisis--the NFL’s pursuit of its own self-interest in the wake of disasters reflects a similar dynamic. Then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue fought hard to keep the New Orleans Saints in Louisiana in 2006 a year after Hurricane Katrina under the nostalgic guise of keeping the franchise in its original home, though analysis by economists found the impact of sports investment on economic recovery to be “dubious aside from serving as a symbol that the city remains vital.” A bond issue for $294 million to refurbish the Saints’ Superdome stadium passed with “little resistance,” bankrolled by the city of New Orleans and the NFL, despite the clear need for priorititizing expenditure on “levees, housing, middle class amenities, infrastructure for nonresident businesses,” respectively, before focusing on sports. The analysis suggested that investment in infrastructure for the NFL & other mega-events “may actually undermine longer-term [economic] recovery” in favor of the short term cultural & reputational capital gain for NFL executives & owners alike.
The league’s decision to incentivize the Saints to stay, allegedly to serve as a symbol of hope, clearly prioritized reputational gain over Louisiana’s economic recovery, and tragically, the league’s decision was fruitful: countless retrospectives covering the Saints’ role in revitalizing the region have been published in the years since Hurricane Katrina, with many of the pieces even coming from the NFL’s own writers. This remembrance of an NFL franchise as instrumental to disaster relief not only obscures the economic inequality that continues to plague those worst affected by disasters, but covers the league in glory, cementing into the public consciousness the bond between the NFL & acts for the public good.
Both Donald Trump’s response to COVID-19 and the NFL’s dealings with the Saints during Hurricane Katrina point out the glaringly obvious reality that the sports world engages with the political only when doing so benefits elites, whether financial elites at the top of sports leagues or political elites in a presidential administration, and conspicuously recedes from political discourse about real, fundamental change in all other contexts. The point of illuminating how Trump and the NFL leverage conditions of crisis to benefit themselves is not to preach cynicism or to attack our beloved sports. The New Orleans Saints undoubtedly meant a lot to many fans in the aftermath of Katrina, just as the return of live sports will certainly raise the spirits of a beleaguered American public. Nevertheless, we must remain steadfast in our ability to celebrate and enjoy sports while simultaneously holding those in power accountable for their abuse of these very same sports to serve their own interests. American sports fans love an underdog. Perhaps it would be prudent to frame our relationship to sports as fans and athletes constituting a
society-wide underdog, with the political and financial elites in control of sporting institutions representing the big, bad, uber-wealthy perpetual champion. Maybe then we will come to understand how our love for sports might be leveraged as meaningful pressure on the squad of elites.
— Conor Smyth
Conor is a Political Studies & Media Studies double major. He hopes to write a thesis exploring the political lessons offered by the organizations of soccer clubs outside the United States. He loves sports, but hopes to continue to write about how fans like himself can enjoy their beloved past-times while simultaneously thinking critically about how those leagues, teams and financiers should operate. He believes any answer to the latter line of questioning other than “in service of athletes and fans” deserves revisiting.