Conservative Sports Fans Don't Hate Athletes
A 9-0 SCOTUS ruling reminds us that most smart people of any ideology think athletes should get paid what they are worth
If you follow left wing sports discourse on Twitter or online, you will find there’s a great desire to portray the sports world in the same ideological terms as the rest of the world. In this telling, left wing sports fans stand up for the rights of Black athletes, supporting their right to get paid what they are worth, while right-wing fans hypocritically oppose the free market, routinely side with owners, and support the exploitation of athletes. You can see how believing this makes a lot of folks feel really good about what is essentially the frivolous pursuit of being a sports fan. (Note- that doesn’t make being a sports fan bad. We humans need frivolous pursuits. It’s just that, when you are rooting for the Seahawks, you aren’t changing the world. And when you are rooting for the U.S. Women’s Soccer team or Allyson Felix, you also aren’t changing the world.)
The problem is, there’s no evidence that it is true. In fact, conservative sports fans tend to be just like liberal sports fans- they like athletes, not owners or administrators. We saw that on display in yesterday’s 9-0 U.S. Supreme Court opinion rebuking the NCAA for its restrictions on athlete compensation, with conservative Brett Kavanaugh going farther and implying that the entire edifice of NCAA amateurism is illegal (and saying it does great harm to Black athletes).
The truth is while sometimes people (of any ideology) make semi-rational, skeptical arguments against positions taken by athletes in particular situations (e.g., MLB Players Union President Donald Fehr was criticized for being soft on the issue of steroids, and a few people defend the NCAA’s system as necessary to produce the college football that they love), nobody who likes sports consistently roots for the owners, and certainly nobody roots for college administrators. At least owners have some appeal to some people, as they often succeeded in other lines of business before buying a team. But who roots for a college administrator making half a mil a year simply because the money has to go somewhere and can’t go to the athletes whose labor produces it?
And so, the NCAA is actually without allies. Indeed, in many ways, what the NCAA is trying to do shows you that even conservatives have limits when it comes to antitrust situations. They may be more willing to allow some sort of merger that they think attains some corporate synergistic benefits, but when the only purpose of the monopoly is to avoid paying your workers, well, you aren’t going to have any friends of any ideology. And especially when the people you are screwing over are folks a lot of people across the spectrum admire and pay to see.
I would assume that this is going to go on a few more years before the NCAA finally gets the message and figures out a system to pay its athletes. It is, as Upton Sinclair said, hard to do the right thing when your salary is dependent on doing the wrong thing. But the fact of the matter is that in the end, money has to flow to the folks who people are paying to see. The market system has many failures, but that principle seems fundamentally sound.