I get the point you are trying to make, but are you sure that government supported "robber barons" and the business/labor practices of the industrial revolution are the best example of the point you are trying to make?
You talk about the will to perform not being there without competition, without winners or losers. But nobody's proposing some sort of "every team wins half their games!" system. The post you’re replying to just said it can also be destroyed in other conditions, such as monopolistic/oligarchist ones where you don’t appear to matter and aren’t recognized.
Anyone who is part of sports team, professional or otherwise, would be booted from their team if they refuse to produce at their best level out of jealousy because someone is better or makes more than them. Team chemistry can turn on a variety of reason, but pay disparity is not usually one of them. Disparity in pay in sports is not something new. Babe Ruth made more than the rest of the team combined and the Yankees chemistry in the 20s and 30s was just fine. Do you really think the lowest paid Yankees are not going to try their best because Judge makes $40M a year? No, not everyone can be LeBron or Judge or Aaron Rodgers, but these are team games and everyone tries their best to maximize their own benefit regardless of what others are getting. If LeBron was making the same as the last guy on the bench, what is his incentive to play his very best? What is the incentive for the worst player to improve if he already makes the same as Lebron? Communism in sports is as dumb as communism in business.
On the flip side, do you not think there's a reason there's a minimum salary in pro leagues?
That is a simplistic view of those times. People like Ford, Edison, Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Vanderbilt, and the Wright brothers did not innovate and succeed because they were government supported "robber barons".
It is because it is a deviation of capitalism where the workers are demanding more of the capital. Similarly, the salary cap is also a deviation of capitalism where the owners are limiting the inclusion of their capital.
The latter one is especially interesting when you look at which owners are most in favor of revenue sharing, salary caps, max salary limits...
Cause if so, and clearly going back to an amateur model is off the table too...
The Yankees are probably pulling their hair out knowing that they are trailing the Tampa Bay Rays by 6.5 games....and the Rays entire payroll is about equal to Judge's single contract.
To be clear, I was talking specifically about salary and am not advocating for an unlimited NIL structure couple with a complete lack of rules in college sports.
The Rays are the best at what they do, which is maximizing the value of the resources in their organization. The Yankees are one of the worst. As a Yankees fan, I wish they would move away from trying to buy championships and move to model more like the Rays where they consider how they can maximize the return of their assets, even if that means letting some potential stars go. Then, they could then pay Judge $40M but not be saddled with a bunch of bad contracts like they have with Stanton, Hicks, Donaldson, etc.The Yankees are probably pulling their hair out knowing that they are trailing the Tampa Bay Rays by 6.5 games....and the Rays entire payroll is about equal to Judge's single contract.
I know that several of the most productive, high profile Tampa Bay Lightning players signed deals at less than what the market would bear so that the team could pay more to the 3rd and 4th line guys that ultimately determine who wins the title. They wanted to win championships - two Stanley Cups and a Cup final are the result.
The NCAA can reinstate the rule to sit one year after transferring. No court will block that. It already has tampering rules, they just don't bother to enforce them.
I’m going back to this post and saying that I would never equate the two. You said “somewhat” so I won’t derail into semantics, but i don’t think the comparison suggests a clear understanding of at least one of the concepts you’re equating.
I'm not so certain even on that right now. If I'm the NCAA, I don't want to open any doors to any more legal scrutiny at all, since I'm already in potentially hot water. I don't know if they'd lose the case, and I don't think it would've been likely to get that rule overturned before they changed it, but I think once the genie is out of the bottle it could be tricky to put it back in. It would not be hard for a player to make a case that a primary reason it's come back is to limit the amount of compensation they can get. "It's interferring with the contracts the players can get from sponsors who happen to be affiliated with other teams" or some such. Any defense claims about "this rule shouldn't be invalidated just because of speculative ideas about the potential impact on their earnings" are suddenly no longer speculative and very concrete.
I think you are mistaken. The student-athlete signs a contract with the school. The NCAA can establish a rule that its member schools be forced to sit a player a year if they break that contract. The NIL agreements cannot supercede this.
But the validity of contracts made in the current system is the whole dispute. Kavanaugh in particular has made it very clear he sees it as employment (calling the athletes the school's "workers").
Replying separately to this one since it was added after I started my first reply.
I am sorry, but the NCAA can still dictate eligibility to play. Taking your argument to a natural extension, a student athlete could sue the NCAA for forcing him to sit for any reason as that would impact his other contract revenue. That is an absurd position.Replying separately to this one since it was added after I started my first reply.
I think the big difference is that the pro leagues have established a team/player relationship and top-level negotiated agreement that college sports lacks entirely.
Otherwise this example is somewhat similar-but-different to how MLB used their pre-1998 antitrust exemptions to avoid allowing free agency in the Flood case before the Supreme Court. This was eventually curtailed by Congress, saying MLB players had the same rights and protections as other pro athletes, but by then the players had already gotten free agency through arbitration and then new labor contracts anyway.
Namely, the clause in question said the team reserved the rights to the player *even after contract expiration*.
And I haven't seen the wording of all scholarship agreements, but it looks like especially outside of P5 schools, it's common for them to be year-to-year agreements. So if the school can cut you loose after one year, why can't you cut the school loose? So I think that's a interesting example to look at for an example of how even in a more-negotiated-rules-setting, leagues have been ruled to only have so much power to require things in their contracts, and that reserve clause doesn't seem like it would've flied without an antitrust exemption. Ultimately the pro leagues ended up in a place of "you can have multi-year contracts, but you can't keep the rights to the players after that." And that would probably fly in college sports; maybe you'd even have a transfer rule so long as you're still paying the player, if the sides came to agreement on that.
But the NCAA is given a lot *less* leeway right now by the courts, I think in large part because their rules are being set by dictat instead of by negotiation at all.
