Taken over by greed

Sports according to television ratings are better than ever. Nielsen estimated 123.7 million viewers tuned in for Super Bowl LVIII this past February, between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. In total, year-over-year viewership was up 7.4% from 2023.

It’s not just football, an estimated 18.9 million viewers watched the NCAA Women’s Basketball National Championship matchup between the South Carolina Gamecocks and the Iowa Hawkeyes. 

But the sport industry as a whole is being ruined by greed and poor management. Here’s a few of the issues I think are causing problems: 

—Betting the farm. Sports used to keep an arms distance from gambling, but those days are long gone. In the U.S., football and hockey now have major league teams in Las Vegas, the betting capital of the world, and casinos and gambling sites now regularly advertise in many stadiums across the country. Betting is most certainly in bed with professional sports. I’m not blind, I get that sports and betting go hand-in-hand. Gambling on sports is now legal in 38 states, but I sill have my reservations. The day when some major betting scandals brings the curtain down and highlights how big of problem exists is just around the corner. Case in point, the National Basketball Association in April issued a lifetime ban to Jontay Porter, a rarely-used backup forward for the Toronto Raptors, for wagering money on his own team to lose, pretended to be hurt and shared confidential information with gamblers. I suspect this will not be the last we hear about betting and sports stars.

—The name of the game is money, money, money. Many professional owners say one thing, but do something altogether different. They pump up their home base, talking about how wonderful their fans are, helping increase ticket sales, but as soon as they get their chance with public officials they talk about the need for public dollars to make costly improvements that will bring in more corporate dollars and freeze out those same run-of-the-mill fans. The Kansas City Chiefs were the most recent sports team to do this, but it’s happened all around the world from American Football to International Soccer, Baseball to Hockey.

—Stars that flame out. The move by youth sports and travel teams to encourage kids to focus on specialization on one sport to help their chances of one day going professional. Nearly eight million students currently participate in high school athletics in the U.S.  Approximately 530,000 compete as NCAA athletes, and just a select few move on to compete at the professional or Olympic level. But yet, many parents push and prod their kids to try to get them to the elite professional level, in the process taking away the fun for the kids. Sports can produce an unhealthy level of stress in a child, particularly a child who is pushed to excel and who feels failure with every loss.

—Bad calls. The number of bad referee and official calls in the collegiate and professional levels has gotten out of control. It can be debated whether the bad calls have increased or if television gives us greater access, but either way, it’s still a problem that’s out of control. Major League Baseball has umpires who officiate like they’re bigger than the game. (It got so bad recently that New York Yankees Manager Aaron Boone was ejected from a game and replays clearly show he never said anything to the umpire.) American football has rules that favor one side of the ball and take the fun out of the game. Basketball has referees who love the sound of their whistles and take the ball out of the players hands in key situations. It’s happening in every sport and is a real shame, because it impacts wins and losses and takes the fun out of the game. 

—Manners begin at home. The behavior of many parents and fans at some sports games has gotten out of control. You see it regularly now on social media. Some parent contests a call that a volunteer umpire made and the next thing you know, the parent is confronting the ump and a fight breaks out. Whatever happened to “playing the game the right way” and promoting teamwork and sportsmanship.

As much as I worry about the future of sports, though, I still hold out hope. Sport is a lot like life. You get what you put into it. Tennis champion Martina Navratilova said it it best, saying: “The mark of great sportsmen is not how good they are at their best, but how good they are at their worst.”

Yes, there’s still hope!