[MUSIC] Let's look this time at the role of money in professional sports. And the obvious thing that you see has been these dynamics of what can be called hypercommercialization of professional sports. And by this I mean that the level of money involved in professional sports and in sports in general has exponentially increased in recent decades. I was looking just as an example at the average salary of a major league baseball player in the United States in the 1920s. It was about $10,000 a year the average salary. A big star like Babe Ruth made $80,000. Now the average salary is a couple million, $2, $3 million a year, so even adjusting for inflation this is an enormous growth in the salaries that are paid. And this is true in just about all top professional sports, this huge rise in salaries. And you see the same thing in the value of franchises. A number of teams around the world, Manchester United, Real Madrid, the New York Yankees, these are all franchises that are now worth more than a billion dollars, more than a billion dollars. Where again, 50 years ago they would have been worth a million at most or whatever, but exponential growth in the money around sports. And you have around sports these new industries and these ways that money is getting transacted. Video games, sports owners who are mega billionaires who have their pots in all kinds of global financial pies. The sports apparel business, the sports agent business. So money is a big, big driving factor in professional sports now. One factor in why sports have gotten so commercialized has to do with the grand sweep of world history, and in particular with the end of the Cold War. In 1989 the Berlin Wall comes down, as I'm sure you know. Capitalism is triumphant and the world is joined into a single global capitalist system. Even in China, where you still have a communist government, the economy becomes full throttle capitalist with Deng Xiaoping's reforms. And with capitalism you get everything up for sale. You get hypercompetitiveness, you get big money, you get these gigantic divides between the 1% and the rest. Karl Marx said in 1848, he predicted that capitalism would batter down the Great Wall of China. He was predicting that capitalism will enter into China and everywhere else around the world and will turn the world into a capitalist system where money and the search for profit is a governing factor in our lives. And Marx was right. Now he was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right that capitalism would become this world dominant force. And, although he couldn't have anticipated this, that it would have as one of its effects a contributing to this hypercommercialization of sports in the Post-Cold War, some call it the neoliberal era. So what are some of the consequences of the hypercommercialization of sport? One of them is what I would call the Nascarization of sports. NASCAR is the American stock car racing circuit. Stock cars being supposedly regular cars that are tricked out or fixed up to race as against Formula 1 cars which are race cars, they were never intended to be passenger cars that people race. So NASCAR is this American invention and NASCAR many years ago developed this idea of selling everything about the race and the car and the driver to corporations. So then and now if you look at a NASCAR car, it's just there's no empty paint, everything is a billboard. The US is a logo, the US Army and Nabisco and Advance Auto Parts and, you name it, every, Haviland Oil, each car is plastered with billboards. These are rolling commercial billboards. And it's the same with the suits of the drivers, they're covered with these corporate sponsorship names and logos. And back when NASCAR started doing this 20 of 30 years ago, a lot of people thought, that's kind of tacky isn't it? Sort of messing with the purity of the sport. They've sold themselves out to capitalism. Well, the fact is that NASCAR really had the last laugh. NASCAR really set the template for what all sports, or at least most sports teams are doing all across the world now. In the sense that if you look now at soccer uniforms, Manchester United, Barcelona, Real Madrid, whatever. They have the names and traditional colors of the team, but they almost always have a corporate logo, there was Aon, the insurance consulting giant, has been on the Manchester United jersey. The Qatar Foundation, this multi billion dollar Middle Eastern foundation profit making enterprise sponsoring Barcelona and so forth. Stadiums now are no longer often just named after some famous person or athlete or politician. They're very often the Qualcomm Stadium, the Minute Maid Park, they're named after corporations. Naming rights are a huge thing. Golf tournaments now, it used to be, oh there's the Houston Open and the Southern California Classic or whatever. Now it's the AT&T Classic and the Zurich this, and the whatever. Everything in this kind of new capitalist world post-1989 is up for sale, is corporatized, and is NASCARrized in the sense that corporate branding is happening everywhere in sports. So this is a first thing, even golf now, this country club staged sport, look at a lot of golfers, they look like NASCAR drivers now. They've got logos on their caps and their shirts, they've become walking billboards too. So this is the first thing that one can talk about in relationship to the hypercommercialization of sports is the NASCARization of global sports. [COUGH] Now a second thing that's been going on is clearly the power of television in all of this. And I don't mean the power of just the television, but broadcasting in general, showing stuff on TV but also streaming rights and all the ways that we get sports on screens today. And in this hyper commercial age what you see is that television is a kinda master in the sports world. It's really in the 60s and 70s, as we've talked about, as television becomes a global force to be reckoned with, that sports grows to. Television helps to grow sports into a big money enterprise, cuz people wanna watch sports so people turn into sports so broadcast networks can sell advertising space and get eyeballs to their programs. And this drives a lot of them, the money growth in sports. So television helps to grow sports into a big time commercial enterprise in the first place, and now television really in some ways creates and dictates the terms on which sports are played. So in particular, most obviously, you have actually sports that are made for television sports, or sporting events. The X Games, there's both the winter and the summer X Games, were invented. Extreme sports, where competitions invented by ESPN to draw viewers and to sell advertising. The World Series of Poker too, nobody really thought you could broadcast a bunch of guys and gals playing poker for money. But ESPN created it as this made for television event. Is Poker a sport or not, that's another question. But definitely television is creating made for TV sports. And it's also doing things like dictating when games will be played and what games will be broadcast. A lot of people are really into the New York Yankees versus Boston Red Sox rivalry. So now, they only used to let those teams play a few series a year. Now for television, they play each other more, and those games are always on TV, because people want to watch those as the mainline games on the networks. And to use one other example from baseball, [COUGH] baseball now, when it's broadcasting the World Series, the games start quite late often, around 9 PM. And the reason that they're doing that is because they want the games to be still in primetime on the West Coast, which is three hours behind. So if the game starts at 9 in New York, it will start at 6 in San Francisco. And that way the game is being broadcast everywhere in the US sometime between 6 and 12 PM in that big primetime slot. Well, great, except the problem is that that means that often World Series games don't end till close to midnight on the East Coast. And little kids who once would watch the World Series, they have to go to bed and they miss all of this. So they can watch the recordings or whatever. The point is that television is even dictating when games are gonna be broadcast. So television and broadcast rights, this central cornucopia of money, this gorilla in the closet of the modern sports world. And I'll look at the second part in the second part of this lecture at a couple of other factors that go along with the hypercommercialization of sports. [MUSIC]
