Sports & Capitalism

Here's yet another post about how capitalism is ruining (almost) everything. It's gonna be a short one because I feel most of you can imagine for yourself how competitive sports linked to making profits would compromise the sports.

I think you're all aware of the "targets and incentives" used in just about any type of industry or job; workers are promised bonus pay, the incentive, to reach a certain level of sales or productivity, the target. In professional sports, the target, winning, itself is the incentive, for your success and consequently your salary is directly related to how well you do. Thus, in professional sports there's always great temptation to always seek out the very limits of the rules of the game, and to seek out ways to cross over those limits, to constantly test with what you can get away with. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone, as it is also a general rule of the capitalist paradigm itself. Remember the American former professional road racing cyclist, Lance Armstrong? He managed to win the "Tour de France", the world's most famous and arguably hardest road racing cycling event seven times in a row, from 1999 to 2005, before he was finally caught using illegal drugs. And let's not forget how long financiers, insurers and banks were able to ruin the economy for everyone before their whole house of cards collapsed in 2008, dragging the entire world economy down with them.

FIFA, the international governing body of football (or soccer in some countries; it's the sport in which the round ball is kicked with your foot), is often seen as an international criminal organization, with the 2015 FIFA corruption case as the best known example of their money-grubbing ways. How many matches are fake and agreed upon in advance as a result of the world wide betting agencies' influence on the game? No matter which way we look at it, almost every aspect of our lives is negatively influenced by the ideology of making personal gains, by the minority of people for whom making money is the highest goal in life. And this is 100% true for the legal persons that are the big businesses and corporations. With any professional team-sport, we can never know which country has the best team, or which team has the best players; the richest countries and richest teams will in theory (and increasingly in practice) always have the best players, because players are traded for money all over the world. Capitalism and "free" markets simply should have no place here, just like it should have no place in healthcare, housing or food; some things are too important to leave to the whims of markets and intrinsically greedy market players...

Please watch this video about the favorite American sports, like basketball, American Football and baseball, that are in large part supplied by universities, and how the money-making-scheme has ruined these educational institutions and threaten to ruin the sports as well. I promise it'll be an eye-opener. Well, it was for me at least ;-)

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