David Stairs
The new chest shield for superheroes
Babble of the talking heads has it that last week Josh Allen, the quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, signed a six-year extension for $330,000,000. Allen was a 7th round pick in 2018 who has since worked wonders for his team. Although he hasn’t yet gotten them into the Superbowl— the Bills lost three consecutive chances in the early 1990s— Allen did win the league MVP honors for the ’24-’25 season, and has propelled the Bills into several post-regular season playoff games during his career.
Allen’s contract is unique only by virtue of being the current highest in league history. It wasn’t too many years ago that Matthew Stafford signed a $127,000,000 deal with the Los Angeles Rams, which seemed excessive at the time but for the fact that he then proceeded to lead the Rams to victory over the Bengals in Superbowl LVI. Big contracts don’t a Superbowl victory guarantee, but they certainly can be a performance enhancing incentive.
As NFL, NBA, and MLB contracts climb ever higher, the quality of sport has not necessarily improved. While it can be argued that high-performing athletes deserve equivalent compensation for the physical risks they take, watching super-exceptional physical specimens go through the motions as they “act out” their bloated contracts provides small pleasure, except maybe to those attempting to generate a living through FanDuel. Although athletes are given the best of care while under contract, it’s rare for a player to spend his whole career with one team, and many of the most gifted bounce around through free agency searching for the highest bidder while their skills remain marketable. The college game, which is really just a training camp for the pros, has been compromised by the similar effect of the transfer portal. Loyalty to an “alma mater” has disappeared while young athletes hop around in pursuit of what they hope will eventually be a lucrative professional offer and the endorsements that accompany it. But the odds are against it.
The NCAA claims over 400,000 college athletes under its auspices. All professional leagues put together don’t account for more than a fraction of that number. In fact, the ten largest pro leagues in North America employ a total of 6288 players. This covers football (NFL, UFL and CFL), basketball (NBA and WNBA), baseball (MLB), lacrosse, hockey (NHL), and soccer (men and women). I suppose you could throw 5000 more players in for the baseball farm system, but much of that is only semi-pro.
NFL: 1600 on rosters
MLB: 1200 on rosters
NBA: 550 on rosters
MLS: 375 on rosters
UFL: 400 on rosters
WNBA: 144 on rosters
NWSL: 336 on rosters
PLL: 200 on rosters
NHL: 1078 on rosters
CFL: 405 on rosters
Where does the money come from to underwrite $330,000,000 five-year contracts? Certainly not from ticket sales. Not from advertising either. The Superbowl ($800million), March Madness($1billion), MLB seasonal endorsements ($1.9billion), NBA endorsements ($1.6billion), and NFL seasonal endorsements ($2.3billion) are a teardrop when compared to the $187billion world video game market.
American sports betting might be one answer, up to $13 billion in 2024. But there is also much more activity generated by “sports talk.” The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are over 45,000 people working as “analysts, journalists, and reporters.” While no one tracks how many of these jobs are for sports analysts, Audacy, a major player in the sports podcasting space, boasts over 600 sports podcasts, 31 all-sports stations, 80 BetQL Network affiliates, and 160 sports streaming channels via the Audacy app. This blather substitutes for defunct sports periodicals, and the former sports section of the once-upon-a-time daily newspaper. But that’s still a whole lot of yadda yadda.
Whatever anyone tells you, the amount of money and effort spent on viewing, performing, sponsoring, analyzing, and wagering on professional sports in America is definitely a most annoying type of cultural insanity. Like the Roman “bread and circuses,” it more than provides a diversion from the many things we cannot get straight— our social mores, our politics, our environmental protection, and anything to do with a non-capitalistic approach to life. In that sense, America’s sports obsession is really just more of the same ol’ shite, or how to succeed at commercializing every last possible human effort and idea.
I call it insanity.
David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.
