why you should care about the NFL players’ strike

Michael and I have talked about this a lot in the past few weeks. I get really frustrated and annoyed when I read/hear people bitching about how much money professional athletes make. This may be surprising, since I also regularly call the NFL, NBA, and MLB out on their various damaging attitudes and effects in our culture (generally terrible messaging about women in all ways). I also love watching baseball and football (and sometimes basketball) and my feelings about sports culture and fandom are complex and hard for even me to navigate.

All of that aside, the NFL players union strike and the lock-out (which I haven’t been following terribly closely) have given plenty of blow-hards (including our President) the opportunity to mock the athletes as whiney millionaires. There’s an op-ed in Politico that covers the main points, though it is admittedly a little overwrought. The point is, the situations for players is even worse than I thought.

The editor at Politico throws out some facts sourced from a group called Games Over, which is headed up by ex-Packer Ken Ruettgers. They do peer based mentorship to help retired athletes transition back into real life, and I bet they could increase their numbers served tenfold and still not be anywhere near meeting the needs of the three major leagues. Some hard numbers from their research:

• over 78% of NFL players are divorced, bankrupt, or unemployed TWO YEARS after leaving the game
• 50% of NFL players have careers of just over THREE YEARS or less.

Many ex-players end up with expensive medical conditions that require care for the rest of their lives. Care they can’t afford. The leagues do precious little to support and educate new players on managing and retaining their wealth, especially in football and basketball, where men can be starting their careers as young as 19. Many of these players also don’t leave the league with the skills necessary to build new careers and they simultaneously have to deal with the loss of their major purpose in life. They won’t all be Michael Jordan in retirement, or Larry Bird or Magic Johnson. Not even 5% of them will be.

The country just did a collective double-take at the vicious anti-union actions of the Wisconsin government, but we can’t take 5 minutes to understand or care about a huge labor issue in an industry that we all fund with our viewership, ticket prices, fantasy leagues, and merchandise to the tune of billions of dollars a year. The obvious fact is that football wouldn’t exist without players, and if they don’t see a significant chunk of those billions of dollars, then there is something severely wrong. They break their bodies for our entertainment for a few years, and if they get out of it with a small retirement fund they’re lucky, all while Jerry Jones probably owns a private island off of Trinidad. That’s disgusting.

I guess the bottom line is, stand with the players or shut the fuck up.

As a bonus, a great idea from Matt Taibbi, my journo-crush:

Matt,
The NFL lockout: bigger assholes, players or owners?
Jeff

Jeff,
Definitely the owners. I’m kind of amazed there’s even any controversy here.

Remember how we had replacement players in 1987? Here’s my question: how come we can’t have replacement owners? I realize it’s impossible, but I’d love to see every city do bond issues or IPOs and raise money to create temporary ownership structures… do a new draft, create new teams from every city, get lease deals for functioning local university stadiums, and then strike brand-new TV deals and just kiss the NFL goodbye in favor of a new league, only with all the same players. The thing is, pro football is such a draw, you could make a billion-dollar business overnight even if the games were only broadcast on the Food channel, or, hell, PBS. Again, I realize it’d never happen, but I’d love to see a situation where all the teams were publicly-owned and the players got 80% of all revenues, with the rest of the cash going to pay for road repairs, teachers’ salaries, and so on. Then I’d love to see Jerry Jones or Jerry Richardson and all those assholes strapped to chairs and forced to watch their former profits spent on new school gymnasiums and wheelchair ramps for courthouses and that sort of thing. I would be willing to go without football for a full year – no, make it two years – if at the end of it I could watch a weeping Dan Snyder taken on a tour of a new Public Football League-funded school for the blind.

Amen.