The XFL Shows a Path to Socialism
It’s XFL season! Now, you may be wondering: The XFL? What year is this? Am I having a stroke? But do not be alarmed! This is merely the latest effort to revive the league that first popped up back in 2001, when Vince McMahon tried to leverage his wrestling empire into an NFL competitor. It did not work, as was documented in a 30 for 30 documentary in 2017:
Shortly after that movie came out, McMahon tried to revive the league. This time, the plan was to ditch most of the wrestling-adjacent elements of the original league, like the goofy jersey names or the opening scramble to determine possession; instead, the idea seemed to be that the XFL would be some kind of anti-woke alternative to the NFL. Any political statements by players were banned,* and the league undid the changes the NFL made to kickoffs recently, in the name of player safety.
*The league never really defined what counted as a “political statement” but was pretty explicitly targeting any anthem protests of the sort Colin Kaepernick engaged in and inspired.
But the inaugural season was disrupted by the pandemic, and the league filed for bankruptcy in the spring of 2020. It was purchased by a consortium led by Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock, who, of course, began his career while working for McMahon’s WWE), who mostly dropped the MAGA branding. Instead, the new XFL is simply the latest in a string of recent attempts to fill America’s seemingly insatiable appetite for football by starting a spring football league. The USFL returned (also under different ownership) last year, and before that came the Alliance of American Football, which failed to get through a full season in 2019.
The problem facing all these leagues is the same problem that the XFL faced in 2001: The football is just not very good. No matter what sort of branding you put around these leagues, it’s hard to escape the fact that the quality of play is just very mediocre, and so the only people watching are the die-hard fans going through football withdrawal after the Super Bowl.
There is, however, one crucial way in which the XFL, at least for now, differs from the NFL: There are no owners! As of right now, the XFL is a single-entity league, meaning that all teams are owned by Alpha, the Rock-led consortium that bought the whole league. All the players and coaches are employees of Alpha, meaning they don’t have to deal with 32 different owners, who all function as petty tyrants, running their teams according to their own whims, and designed for the gratification of their own egos.
Now, this isn’t exactly socialism, and many would argue it’s no MORE socialist than the NFL, since both leagues are privately owned, for-profit businesses. If anything, the XFL players are in a worse position because, unlike NFL players, they don’t have a union. But in general, anything that gets rid of owners, even if it just shrinks the raw number of owners, is good.
It has never made sense to me why someone can own a single team. In the past, I’ve likened it to an amusement park where the roller coasters were owned by a different entity than the bumper cars. But even that would make more sense, since the rides are at least experienced individually. If I don’t like bumper cars, why should they get any of my money? But a pro sports team isn’t like that. Even if I only like the Denver Broncos, they have to play someone else. Without a league to play in, the Broncos can’t really offer much of a product.
The fact that teams can be owned individually is really a historical quirk, a relic from a time when there were multiple competing leagues in every major sport, and teams could move from one league to another, or play independently from those leagues and market games directly to fans. This is still true to some extent in other countries, but in the United States every major sport is dominated by one league.
And in some sense, this evolution of sports teams, from independently run entities amid a wild west of competing leagues into interconnected franchises that are subordinate to a single, centralized bureaucracy, mirrors the evolution of industrial capitalism. After all, pro sports is far from the only industry that has become dominated by massive, international organizations that function essentially as monopolies.
For a certain strand of non-socialist progressive, people like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Matt Stoller, this is terrible. You will often hear people like this lament the lack of competition in the marketplace, and the size of these behemoth companies. Just last week, Sen. Warren was tweeting about how the real problem with the military-industrial complex is that there aren’t enough defense contractors:
And, look, I get the impulse to bash large corporations like Raytheon and Amazon. They’re evil!
But the NFL shows why this kind of thinking is misguided. After all, a world with a lot of little owners can be just as corrupt as a one with one big one, if not moreso (case in point: Dan Snyder). The problem is not how many private owners there are, but the fact of private ownership itself.
And a single-entity league like XFL actually shows a path out of this predicament. The Rock and his friends reportedly paid ~$15 million for the XFL; at that price, what is stopping the NFL Players Association from buying it and running it as a union-owned minor league? Or, more to the point, simply use it as a trial run for cutting the owners out altogether? After all, if we can get rid of MOST owners, then why can’t we get rid of ALL of them?
When socialism skeptics are confronted with visions of a socialist future, they react in disbelief at the idea that a workplace could function without private owners. If the business owner isn’t breathing down your neck, people think, then who will work? It’ll be chaos! Like infants running the daycare! But the truth is that most workers in the US ALREADY work for large bureaucracies; it’s just that those bureaucracies are accountable to private owners or shareholders, and not the workers or the customers or the public at large.
In the NFL, this means hiring coaches because of who the owner is friends with or persistent cultures of rampant sexual harassment. In the real world, it means roughly the same thing, with even bigger stakes. Private owners do not add value; they are parasites, and we don’t NEED them. The XFL figured that out; why can’t the rest of us?