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...
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.
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.
Your comment reminds me sports stadiums being built millions spent for rich professional sports teams. I'm not into sports at all it seems unusual to build what to me seems like a church for worshippers of team X.
I'm all for being active but professional sports these days seems like they are a religion.
While nice, that's a pretty disconnected perspective from society. Sports and the industries around them are so big for a reason vs say major league programming.
That’s a great point. It could be seen that way. Though it’s certainly not how it’s usually explained, and I don’t think most people would see that as a satisfying answer. “Sports are profitable because they allow us to charge you more” just doesn’t have the same ring.
I think what's often missing from these discussions is the cost of the professional sports( excluding maybe chess). Football is probably the best example,where clubs spend astronomical amounts of money on players. Right now it's probably cheaper to get NASA to send a few people to the space station than to get 2 full football teams. And this gets more and more expensive with each additional layer before it even reaches the end consumer.
To me, the big sports industry ( F1, Football, Basketball,etc.) is where the film/music industry was 10-15 years ago,when every monkey in the world did Emule and Torrents and then along came Netflix and Amazons of this world and now we pay pennies for it.
Older me now thinks mixing scholastics and athletics is nuts. I remain unclear why tax payers are subsidizing professional sports by funding their farm system. And their stadiums. And their monopolies.
I now favor a european style club system over any intramural sports.
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