Sports Fan Coalition
Oct 12, 2010 11:41:44 GMT -6
Post by kropotkin on Oct 12, 2010 11:41:44 GMT -6
Greetings Flames Fans!
Sports are political... they shape our culture and have huge economic ramifications. Now, sports fans are coming from both the left and the right in the Sports Fan Coalition. (People who served in both the Clinton and the Bush administrations are on the board of directors.)
I just wanted to pass this on to folks.
Here's the web site:
Sports Fan Coalition
SFC on Facebook
Right now, the coalition's main issues include more fairly financed stadiums, ensuring fans ability to view games on television, and instituting a college football playoff system.
I trace the roots of this group back to the Heartland Institute's 1998 position paper called Sport Stadium Madness: Why it started, How to stop it
The Heartland Institute is a conservative, free-market think tank based in Chicago. At the end of the piece, the author brings up the idea of the fan ownership option, similar to the Green Bay Packers, where the team and the money stay in the community. Basically, with the current system of ownership, team owners can threaten to leave to more accommodating cities (read: the public financing of stadiums for private profit). This is a constant threat and makes many cities give up a lot of potential revenue in order to keep their teams.
More recently, on the left, Dave Zirin has addressed this issue in his book Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love. He is a big advocate of community-owned franchises. Zirin was the first to bring up the idea of the city of Seattle buying the SuperSonics before the OKC group did and moved them, leaving Seattle with nothing but an empty arena which they had financed.
What really made become an active supporter of this group was watching Roger Goodell respond to a fan's question at the NFL Kickoff Fan Forum in New Orleans at the beginning of this season. This is from the transcript of the exchange:
Fan: Would you ever consider allowing other cities to purchase part of the team thereby allowing the team to remain in that city for us, the fans?
Commissioner Goodell: Well, what really keeps the team in Green Bay is not the public ownership of the team. It's the policies of the NFL. What it is is that we share our television revenue equally. So we give every team an equal opportunity to have the revenue needed to be competitive.
It's one of the reasons you saw the Saints and the Indianapolis Colts, two small market teams, in the Super Bowl last year. So it's not the public ownership that keeps the team in the community; it's actually the system.
And our system of revenue sharing, where we share close to 80 percent of our revenue has been very successful in the NFL. And why I believe we're the most competitive league. Because we're out there, every team has the hope of winning the Super Bowl this year. I know who your hope is. But I can promise you.
Sure, the NFL does deserve credit for revenue-sharing which has kept a competitive balance and helped private owners in smaller markets turn a profit, but that's not the question the fan was asking.
Basically, the answer to the fan's question is that there can no longer be public ownership of franchises, UNLESS there is a change in the NFL bylaws. Here's the rub.... in the 1980s, the NFL changed it's bylaws to say that a franchise can have no more than 32 owners and one of them has to have at least a 30% stake. (The Packers have 112,158 stockholders!) Green Bay was grandfathered in. So now there needs to be a change in the NFL bylaws for there even to be another community-owned team. I'm looking into the bylaws of the franchise as well as into how the bylaws of the NFL are changed...
Anyway... I find this interesting, I think it bridges sports fans across ideological lines, and I would love to talk to other fans who are interested in such a coalition and the issues that they raise.
Sports are political... they shape our culture and have huge economic ramifications. Now, sports fans are coming from both the left and the right in the Sports Fan Coalition. (People who served in both the Clinton and the Bush administrations are on the board of directors.)
I just wanted to pass this on to folks.
Here's the web site:
Sports Fan Coalition
SFC on Facebook
Right now, the coalition's main issues include more fairly financed stadiums, ensuring fans ability to view games on television, and instituting a college football playoff system.
I trace the roots of this group back to the Heartland Institute's 1998 position paper called Sport Stadium Madness: Why it started, How to stop it
The Heartland Institute is a conservative, free-market think tank based in Chicago. At the end of the piece, the author brings up the idea of the fan ownership option, similar to the Green Bay Packers, where the team and the money stay in the community. Basically, with the current system of ownership, team owners can threaten to leave to more accommodating cities (read: the public financing of stadiums for private profit). This is a constant threat and makes many cities give up a lot of potential revenue in order to keep their teams.
More recently, on the left, Dave Zirin has addressed this issue in his book Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love. He is a big advocate of community-owned franchises. Zirin was the first to bring up the idea of the city of Seattle buying the SuperSonics before the OKC group did and moved them, leaving Seattle with nothing but an empty arena which they had financed.
What really made become an active supporter of this group was watching Roger Goodell respond to a fan's question at the NFL Kickoff Fan Forum in New Orleans at the beginning of this season. This is from the transcript of the exchange:
Fan: Would you ever consider allowing other cities to purchase part of the team thereby allowing the team to remain in that city for us, the fans?
Commissioner Goodell: Well, what really keeps the team in Green Bay is not the public ownership of the team. It's the policies of the NFL. What it is is that we share our television revenue equally. So we give every team an equal opportunity to have the revenue needed to be competitive.
It's one of the reasons you saw the Saints and the Indianapolis Colts, two small market teams, in the Super Bowl last year. So it's not the public ownership that keeps the team in the community; it's actually the system.
And our system of revenue sharing, where we share close to 80 percent of our revenue has been very successful in the NFL. And why I believe we're the most competitive league. Because we're out there, every team has the hope of winning the Super Bowl this year. I know who your hope is. But I can promise you.
Sure, the NFL does deserve credit for revenue-sharing which has kept a competitive balance and helped private owners in smaller markets turn a profit, but that's not the question the fan was asking.
Basically, the answer to the fan's question is that there can no longer be public ownership of franchises, UNLESS there is a change in the NFL bylaws. Here's the rub.... in the 1980s, the NFL changed it's bylaws to say that a franchise can have no more than 32 owners and one of them has to have at least a 30% stake. (The Packers have 112,158 stockholders!) Green Bay was grandfathered in. So now there needs to be a change in the NFL bylaws for there even to be another community-owned team. I'm looking into the bylaws of the franchise as well as into how the bylaws of the NFL are changed...
Anyway... I find this interesting, I think it bridges sports fans across ideological lines, and I would love to talk to other fans who are interested in such a coalition and the issues that they raise.
? Come on, this is America, team ownership is by those who can afford to do it. Takes money, and risk, to own a sports team. Gimme a break...... Municipalities are and have been absolutely ridiculous in paying for stadiums and arenas for teams without some guarantees, contracts of committments or responsibilies by the teams., but it's their stupidity and greed that got them into the mess. How about "just saying NO!!!!!! If all municipalities did this and gave the owners no reason or opportunity to "screw" the city, they'd have to figure something else out. 