The four major sports in America are baseball (MLB), football (NFL), basketball (NBA), and hockey (NHL). The NFL, NBA, and NHL all have equal salary caps for each team. A salary cap is the max amount of money that a team can pay out to its players each season. For instance the NBA salary cap this year is $58.044 million. The salary cap is intended to keep the playing field equal across the whole league, even though some teams make significantly more money than others. This idea of every team being equal is similar to Karl Marx's philosophy for communism. Marx offers up a theory for a country that has no social classes or wealth inequality.
The NBA first implemented the salary cap in the 1940's but it did not last long. The quickly abolished the cap, and allowed teams to spend as much as they wanted until the 1984 season when it was re-introduced. There was a lot of uneven talent distribution within the league and this is why they decided to have a cap once again. The cap makes it so that all of the most talented players cannot be on the same team and make the most money possible. While it is possible for the extremely talented players to take a huge salary cut to all play together, it does not happen often.
There is uneven profits within the league because of the location of some teams. For instance, the New York Knicks make a ton more money because of their location in downtown New York. Companies are more likely to advertise inside their arena and around the arena than in a place like Minnesota. The teams that are in the smaller cities in more remote states are the teams that benefit from the salary cap because they have a chance to get a superstar player since they all can not be in the big cities.
In communism there is a "greatest good" that is trying to be fulfilled by everyone being equal and working together. Granted this is kind of ironic, The greatest good for the NBA and other professional sports having a salary cap is to keep the competition competitive. Competition is what makes people enjoy the games and go to watch them. If one team is destroying everyone year in and year out, not as many people are interested. Competition itself is not the point of communism, but since that is what is best for the NBA, it makes sense to create it as best as possible.
On the contrary, the MLB does not have a salary cap. This is why the New York Yankees are able to have the top names in baseball every year. The Yankees along with the Red Sox and the Tigers have some of the highest payrolls in all of baseball. Many fans dislike this because it gives these teams in larger markets a huge advantage. The beauty in this however is when a team with a low pay roll wins the world series. This was almost the case in 2010 when the Phillies played the Rangers in the Championship series. The Phillies payroll was 4x as large as the Rangers. In the end the Phillies still won, but many people were pulling for the underdog with the lower pay roll.
Personally I think the salary cap is good for sports because I am in favor of competitive games. (However I am not pro-communism in a political aspect) This shows that the theory around communism that consists of equality is good for some things. It keeps the game fair, and allows the low end market teams to have a chance to win a championship.
Darren,
ReplyDeleteDefinitely an interesting application of communism that I would never have thought of before. I think that the salary cap has some faults though, and it is interesting to think about whether those are shared faults with the overall theory of communism. In the NBA for example, even though there is a maximum cap, some smaller market teams do not have the funds to even pay the cap. The gap between small markets and large markets still does make a big difference, and is one of the reasons a team such as the Toronto Raptors has trouble competing with teams from say New York. I think the best example of a fault, as it relates to communism, is the recent addition of loopholes that allow teams to overspend the cap and then pay a fine. Although it is not the same, these privileged teams remind me of the wealthy government officials that lived in the Soviet Union while it was communist. While all teams are supposed to be equal in theory, the most prominent are given priority.
Darren, I am a big NBA junkie and as such I was devastated when the lockout last year deprived of me 2 months of NBA basketball. The lockout was instilled to address exactly what you were talking about in this blog post: the issue of competitiveness in the NBA. But I disagree with your idea of the salary cap being an example of communism.
ReplyDeleteThe salary cap in the NBA is a soft cap; teams who go over the cap pay a luxury tax of a dollar on every extra dollar they spend above the cap. I would argue that this is more like an environmental regulation in a capitalist system than an attempt at communism. The "big market" teams are willing to go over the luxury tax because they want to maintain competitiveness and they are financially able to. In contrast, small market teams have to give up stars in order to stay under the cap because they can't afford to keep them, as evidenced by the Oklahoma City Thunder's trade of Jeff Green and their refusal to resign James Harden to a max contract. Similarly, large corporations are willing to violate environmental codes if it means they are able to make profit on top of losing money to the government. Meanwhile smaller corporations need to comply so they don't lose any revenue to pesky regulations.
This creates exactly the type of class conflict that Marx tried to solve in his Communist Manifesto. Although all team owners are "bourgeosie", they are different levels of bourgeosie. Mikhail Prokhorov,a Russian magnate who owns the Brooklyn Nets, is worth nearly $20 billion. In contrast, the majority owner of the Houston Rockets, Leslie Alexander, is worth $80 million. This past summer, the Prokhorov's Nets recieved a major upgrade by acquiring scoring machine Joe Johnson from the Hawks and resigning defensive stalwart Gerald Wallace and low-post specialist Brook Lopez. Meanwhile, the Dallas Mavericks failed in their multiple attempts to acquire stars Dwight Howard and Deron Williams to max contracts, and had to settle with lower-tier players Darren Collison, O.J. Mayo, Elton Brand and Chris Kaman. As Marx said "The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating." O.J. Mayo is a prime example of this because he was making nearly $5 million in the last year of his multi-year rookie contract but had to settle with a 1-year $4 million contract. The Memphis Grizzlies, his previous team, were unable to resign him to a long-term contract due to their status as a small-market team.
Darren,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading you post and was intrigued at the comparisons you made between communism and salary caps. However, I do not agree with you that a salary cap exemplifies communist values because you still see players taking pay cuts to play for the best teams. Take, for example, the Miami Heat who brought in a slew of stars in 2010 and have dominated the league ever since. There is also the issue of the soft cap, which allows teams to spend past the salary cap if they are willing to pay a luxury tax. For these reasons, I see little parallel.
On the other hand, I was very intrigued at the idea of revenue sharing. The philosophy of revenue sharing calls for the big market, high revenue teams to share their dollars with low-revenue teams. Because only 8 or 9 teams each year make a profit, it is important to maintain competition by spreading the wealth around. In this way, the high revenue owners become sort of a bourgeoisie-like class while the low revenue teams are the proletariat classes. The revenue sharing attempts to ameliorate the problem of class conflict within the NBA. The revenue sharing is what truly allows teams to remain somewhat competitive in the league, not the salary cap. In fact, the cap is only made possible if the revenue is shared between big and small market teams. Revenue sharing attempts to equalize the haves and the have-nots, the NBA’s bourgeoisie and proletariat.
Darren,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your post a lot. As a huge sports fan I have actually considered this before. I however am not in favor of the salary cap. I don't think it actually makes that big of a difference in competitiveness. Consider football. New England (my favorite team) finished their 9th straight year with 10 or more wins last year and are almost certain to continue this streak this year. Of the 12 available playoff spots, 4 of the teams that have already qualified for the playoffs are on at least a 2 year playoff streak. Atlanta is on their 3rd consecutive year and New England is on their 4th. Baltimore has not officially qualified for the playoffs yet, although it seems likely that they will, which would be their 4th consecutive year as well. The Patriots and New York Giants have met in two of the last five Super Bowls. The Patriots have played in five of the last eleven Super Bowls. Even with the salary cap the best, most prestigious franchises dominate the game. On top of this, the teams that do make more money than others, simply pay their management more because the money can't go to the players who earn the money for the team. This reminds me of what Rousseau disliked in civil society: laws that pretend to help the oppressed but really oppress people even further in favor of the extremely rich or powerful. This is a great exaggeration obviously because no professional athlete is hurting for money or oppressed. I just do not believe that the salary cap helps competition, not to mention that we have seen major lockouts in the NFL, NHL (including the current one), and NBA in the last two years.
I agree that this is not a perfect comparison, but I think that it has some similarities to communism. The soft cap is one of the flaws in my logic, but I still believe that most teams try to avoid paying this unless they absolutely have to. As for the reference to the Patriots, they have been good for the past decade or so, but not forever. When you look at the MLB where there is no salary cap, the Yankees have been a powerhouse since the beginning of time. So, while there are teams that have short stints that are clearly better in sports with a salary cap, it is not like baseball where the Yankees have had the advantage for all of history.
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