From The Archives: NET WORTH WEEK 2021!
I'm recycling posts now...
I am traveling this week, but I didn’t want to leave you, dear readers, with nothing to read, so I figured I’d re-share a trio of posts from last August, which I dubbed Net Worth Week. I picked these not because they are necessarily my best work, but because they get at the raison d’etre of this newsletter, which admittedly even I sometimes lose track of.
The goal of Undrafted is to find socialist values in sports, but sometimes it can be a little bit of a stretch. And sometimes the connection is probably clearer in my head than it is to you, the reader. But in Net Worth Week, I tried to get at something very basic, but important. One of the reasons the sports world is such a good illustration of the evils of capitalism is that, in sports, owners don’t do anything at all. In most businesses, people still believe that the owner does something. The so-called brilliance of supposed visionaries like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is accepted by many people. But no sports fans feel that way about their team’s owner. The best you can hope for a from an owner, in sports, is benign indifference, and that is rare. For most fans, owners are a constant source of frustration, mismanaging the team all for the glorification of their massive egos.
And yet, sports ARE a business, and a successful one, so looking at how value is generated by these teams—and who really reaps the benefit of that—is a great way to look at how the capitalist system works to enrich a few at the expense of the many, even in an industry where workers are very well off, like professional sports.
Anyway, here’s what I wrote last August, and I’ll be back with new stuff next week…