1. Professional sports survives on unhealthy food and audience manipulation.
Would a professional sports team remain profitable if the only sources of revenue allowed the team consisted of the ticket sales and pay-per-view television? Would this result in a spiral by which the salary structure of each league would fall to a point where many talented athletes at the lowest rungs of the pay scale would find more lucrative work in other fields? What a great irony it is for the demonstration of great human achievement only makes financial sense when people eat large amounts of food that lead to degraded human health.
Our other alternative, and the one that perhaps leads to a greater ratcheting up of the industry value, comes in the form of manipulative advertising. What relationship is there between the driving of a car and the shooting of a basketball? Only that a willing audience of sports enthusiasts will watch a commercial for that car while waiting for their game to come back on. The sports fan's basic human desire to belong to something greater than themselves gets turned into a source of profit for those who own sports franchises and a way to sell product to manufacturers.
Without either of these revenue sources unrelated to, and in some ways contradictory to, the reason for sport, what would the modern team sport industry look like?
2. The sports-industrial complex rivals that of the military-industrial complex
As a parent of teenagers, and a willing participant in the S-I complex as a coach and parent, I constantly find amazement in the lack of economic sense placed on decisions related to children participating in sports. Parents spend significant amounts of money on equipment, league fees, camps, training, and uniforms with no hope of seeing any return on that investment. Of the hundreds of thousands of young people participating in sports each year (and whose parents spend large amounts of money to do so), tens of thousands of them will continue to play beyond the age of 14, only thousands of them will continue past the age of 18, and each year maybe one thousand of them will participate in a professional team sport making a salary that justifies the years of effort. Certainly, many work within the sports industry encouraging and supporting the next generation of athletes, but do we want 1/40th of our national worth to be dedicated to the sports industry as it sits now. Can we obtain the health and (tenuous) discipline benefits from a better expenditure of resources? Especially given the pain caused by a small but damaging percentage of the participants in major college and professional sports, is the value worth it?
3. The more we know, the more we risk
In the days of loosely-wound baseballs, wooden bats, leather helmets, and water/banana rehydration/nutrition we saw injuries of all kinds, but not on the scale we see now. At the forefront, we have a burgeoning field of research into the effects of concussions from major sports (most notably American football), and especially the repetitive, non-concussive impacts that occur every day in sporting activities. Add to that the knee and ankle pains of American football, international football (soccer), and basketball, and we see a potential crisis as a generation of people that grew up playing these sports for the better part of two decades reaching the age where their impacts create the greatest strain on the health system. When kids would go out and play sports on their own in pickup games for fun, they would get the health benefit without the repetitive contact and intensity found in team sports participation and training. Like the impact of concussions on professional players of American football, we will not know for some time whether our obsession with sports at a young age has positive or negative long-term effects.
4. Do we really have the energy for sports?
We really do not have a definitive analysis of the total energy impact of sporting activities, but the combination of electrical energy use in outdoor arenas, combined with the total energy use of indoor arenas, plus all of the vehicular energy required to transport spectators from home to stadium and back provides a significant foundation for a finalized analysis. Add to this all the energy required to transport budding athletic scholarship recipients to and from their various sporting activities, and we have a gold mine of emissions reduction opportunities. When I was a kid, we biked or walked to every practice, and piled into the coach's wagon whenever we had a "road game". We did not have a procession of minivans and SUV getting us from place to place. On the stadium front, Fenway, Wrigley, Yankee, and Comisky have great access to public transportation, but the norm is a stadium surrounded by field and fields of empty parking lots that do nothing for 75-95% of the year. We can do better.
I enjoy watching people excel both intellectually and physically, so I absolutely love sports. My children and I have enjoyed the experience (despite the occasional lesson in decorum), and I hope we all continue to include team competition as a part of the cultural foundation of our society. Within this positive connection, I recognize that we can go too far. Making sports such a huge part of our economic system, and placing such an importance on it relative to other areas (science, mathematics, agriculture), we threaten the long-term development of our society.
Perhaps if we had more than one day off from professional sports, we might get a better chance to reflect and decide.
UPDATE: 7/14/2014...2:00 PM Totally forgot to include energy use and transportation.
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