Rise of the American Professional Sports Cartel | Hacker News Reader

Rise of the American Professional Sports Cartel

systemsandus.com

81 pointsjonnyy16 comments

The article mentions competitive parity in the NBA, but that's not true at all. There is no competitive parity now, and has never been. You merely have the same teams passing the title around.

In the last 30 years, only eight teams have won a title. Seven teams combined for 29/30 of those. The same teams are winning over and over and over. So examining the last ten years is meaningless when that is what's happening, you'll get a false sense of parity by seeing it shared among six teams in ten years (as though six different teams win every decade).

The bottom 15 to 20 teams in the NBA can never, and will never win a title under any circumstances. There is zero competitive parity. In 30 years, only one team has won a solo stand-out title, and that's the Dallas Mavericks.

One other problem with this article, they say that U.S. sports gambling has been estimated at $800 billion (it hasn't), and then they link to an article that doesn't say that at all. That number doesn't even come close to passing a common-sense test. The link is referring to world-wide sports gambling.

Because the Miami heat and the San Antonio Spurs were such great teams back in the 80's and 90's? From Wikipedia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NBA_franchise_post-se... "Of the 30 current NBA franchises, 13 have never won the NBA championship. The oldest such franchise is the Suns (46 seasons), while the Royals/Kings and the Hawks have even longer championship droughts (63 and 56 seasons, respectively). Only 7 franchises have never been to the NBA Finals, the oldest of which is the Braves/Clippers (44 seasons), and again the Kings and the Hawks have appearance droughts that are even longer (63 and 56 seasons, respectively). The longest a franchise has gone without appearing in the playoffs at all is 15 seasons: the Braves/Clippers franchise from 1977 to 1991."

Only 7 teams have not been to the finals. That's not awful.

It doesn't change anything about the fact that only eight teams in 30 years have won the title, and seven have taken 29 of those. That's an extreme dynasty system. They clearly have nothing but an illusion of competition in which the radical majority of teams can never win.

Compare it to the NFL of the last 30 years. 16 individual teams have won Super Bowls during that time.

Or compare it to the MLB. 17 teams have won the World Series in 30 years.

That 30 years represents the modern NBA, since the merger, Magic and Bird sent ratings soaring, and Jordan + the rise of global media changed everything about the league.

Now you've got Chris Paul shuttled off to LA in a market-stuffing trade, you've got star players like Melo eager to join up with dynasties like the Heat, and other players like Kevin Love that can't get out of the backwater fast enough. They all know how the league works now.

Also, note that (28/30)^44 is about 0.048. So, if it were decided by a throw of a die, you would expect 1 in 21 teams to have a 44 year drought in reaching the finals.

15 seasons not in the playoffs is bad, though, (14/30)^15 is about 1:100,000.

A model that introduces some correlation between the performance in year X and that in year X+1 without the need of a cartel could easily increase that probability, though.

For example, one could postulate that a team's quality increases with the qualities of its players and with the time they have been playing together ("you cannot buy a winning team")

This article could be applied to the organizers of huge international sporting events like FIFA and Olympic committee. I would love to see the books of those organisations checked.

It's exactly what you'd expect:

"The 2010 World Cup generated $3.66 billion in revenue for FIFA while expenses equaled just $1.30 billion according to their own financial documents. That is a nice little profit of $2.36 billion, up 7.3% from 2006 and 22.8% from 2002."

"If the 2014 World Cup shows a similar rate of increase, FIFA will profit approximately $2.61 billion from the tournament."

http://www.businessinsider.com/fifa-profit-world-cup-2014-6

And pay no tax! Thanks FIFA!

These truly are cartels. The big change that happened years ago was the owners realized that they weren't in competition with each other on the field - the important competition was with other leagues and recipients of entertainment dollars. Then they started to cooperate, collude, exclude entry....

On the other hand, if the competition is with other leagues, where is the cartel?

Maybe the problem is lack of competition in the market. It isn't easy to turn a basketball fan into a football or ice hockey fan, for example.

For all the crap they do, they still deliver a better end product to the fans than what we have here in Greek football. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_league. Just look at the statistics section. Why bother being a sports fan if the outcome is so easily predicted? Parity between teams should be the goal of all league head offices.

Well, I as a longtime NFL fan have become weary of watching live games b/c of the ever increasing volume of advertising. They changed the rules some time back in order to shorten games which were stretching beyond 3 hours. Naturally, playing time was shortened and not ad time. Since my team plays on the east coast and I live on the west coast, I can take advantage of NFL game rewind service and watch Sunday games at 9pm ad-free for 35$ for season. What a steal. Can spend entire Sunday with family.

I would actually argue that professional sports are a great example of a situation where free markets are inferior. Between strong players unions, owner cooperation, and agreements with the cities they play in, professional sports have created and environment with an incredible value for the fans. The players are well compensated and the owners and cities are successful as well.

If anything, professional sports have proven that models outside of pure free market forces can be very successful for everyone involved.

This article defines many of the reasons that I've been disillusioned about American "sports". They are just a money making vehicle at the expense of society. Just recently (like an hour ago) someone from MLS was on ESPN talking about making MLS the best league in the world (seriously?) "so that our fans get ENTERTAINED by the best players in the world". It's football (or soccer), a sport, a passion, a social endeavor, not an entertainment, corporate money making vehicle. No wonder MLS is a laughing stock for the rest of the world. There is nothing wrong in making a profit, but at the expense of society?

P.S: Sounders and Timber fans, you guys rock!!

>> None of these leagues’ playoff tournaments have overlapping dates.

H The NHL doesn't exist? Their playoffs happen alongside the NBA's

They are not scheduled on the same day though.

This also applies to the regular season - again, so as not to split attention from fans, and the other simply logistical (some stadiums - being used for both NBA & NHL - need more prep time to setup the ice rink).

Garbage in garbage out.

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