Yes, millions of people direct their money towards sports... that doesn't prove they're useful. If only those 'soaring revenues' were directed towards something useful, like improving the lives of people who are lacking materially.
Sports are a form of entertainment....entertainment can and does drive spending.... and spending can contribute to more jobs and more tax revenue. Seems fair that sports are, in turn, a public concern.
That isn't to say that building a stadium or hosting the Olympics is inherently a profitable affair.
I find all professional sports to be an incredible waste of time and resources.
The only benefit of professional sports is the enrichment of people who are already rich, the owners. Some athletes make money, but the vast majority don't really benefit, especially when considering the damage their bodies absorb.
Some people would argue that professional sports has entertainment value, but knowing the that ultimate goal is the enrichment of the owners at the expense of the health and well being of the players is not something I find entertaining.
This is an absurd argument (Stop spending money on sports and rather spend it on real education)
rather, we should spend less money on things like policing the rest of the world/inflating the defense sector's wallets and channel THAT money into education/infrastructure/healthcare/many other things
Organized sports pull a lot of profit from the general populace and from companies that want to advertise to them, not just the 1%. Not to mention things like taxpayer-funded stadiums...
Your points are what they are, but I have to say that I find major sports to be the about the least empathetic target you could have chosen. Even college sports in the US are awash in money and we somehow end up using public money to build stadiums for teams of deca-millionaires owned by billionaires.
I get that there are plenty of working stiffs who put it all together, but I think they'd be better off asking the bosses for more of a share than admonishing the anonymous masses who just want to watch a game once in awhile.
Why would you think that I don't follow my own beliefs?
I never said I want the 'sports industries money redistributed'. That amount of resources shouldn't be devoted to a complete waste of time for society in the first place.
Anyway, I believe people should focus on helping each other survive and thrive, rather than spending billions of dollars on mindless entertainment. The idea that people woold argue with me and pick on me personally over this is nothing new - sports are popular and opposing them is unpopular, which as far as I could tell is the entire topic of this article.
I don't follow sports, but at least those people are doing actual, physically comparable things with clear connections to revenue (more like music artists than CEOs).
Maybe that analogy is more apt than you intended though, in that the valuations are made for shallow human/society reasons that are quite decoupled from reality.
A lot of the professional athletes from my school use their positions to help fund (and/or run) nonprofits across the state of California. Some of them run nonprofits that benefit refugees in Africa. Others fund medical clinics in Southeast Asia. More than a few have helped raise millions for the cancer research you love so dearly.
You know what they all have in common? Their job is to be an athlete. It says nothing about their ability to give back to society.
Indeed, I would argue that the average professional athlete gives back more to society and creates more value than a hacker who wants to give the world Yet Another Useless Social Platform/iApp/SaaS That No One Will Ever Use.
In my opinion, merely creating a startup is not something of value to society--you actually have to create something of value.
If they can't make money to pay athletes, maybe they do not deserve to survive. We don't subsidise aspiring people in most other fields, why should sports be any different.
And yet sports fans around the world complain about companies turning their favorite sports past time into a soulless business opportunity where everything including the fans themselves counts as a commodity, has a price and a number.
Everybody is in it for the money.... especially companies.
We do. There are only a few hundred professional athletes making millions a year. Look at all the tech millionaires. Compare that to the hundreds of thousands lower league athletes who make shit. Or just in less popular sports where you might get a few thousand a year in sponsor support.
Yeah, I was struck by that as well. It's true that a lot of money is riding on the outcome of sporting events, but the fact that that's so, and that society (or at least the Mercury News) has placed that in the category of "important" is... pretty sad, IMO.
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