Free Against Football by Steve Almond

Manning—perhaps more if they had greater needs, say, a lot of children or sick parents. Star athletes could still ostensibly earn huge sums in endorsement deals from private industry, though the league would have to decide whether these payments violated its Marxist tenets. Commissioner Goodell would not receive a compensation package of $42.2 million, as he did in 2012, nor would his deputies earn millions.
    In fact, one of the most fascinating questions that arises from a truly Marxist NFL would be the question of what to do with the staggering profits, which would no longer be divvied up by a cabal of geriatric magnates or funneled to a pack of vainglorious athletes. We can safely assume thatits operating costs would be a fraction of the nearly $10 billion the NFL is projected to earn this season. The balance—$9.5 billion?—would be available for redistribution to societal needs such as early education, medical and renewable energy research, intervention for at-risk populations. Fans would be in the strange position of justifying their support of pro football by pointing to all these good works.
    A Marxist NFL, in which salaries were no longer grossly inflated by our blessed free market, might spur other felicitous outcomes as well. Players could choose to join clubs in the cities or states where they actually grew up. With obscene economic incentives removed, players and fans might experience the sport as a purer form of meritocracy. As with the NCAA basketball tournament, competition would hinge on team and regional pride rather than individual earning power. There would be no more parasitic entourages or predatory agents. And almost certainly, athletes would make more sensible decisions regarding their own health.
    Do I realize this will never
ever
happen? That lawyers would descend from their penthouse aeries to sue the bejesus out of all parties? That the players themselves would flee the NFL in droves to join for-profit leagues, or form their own? That Rush Limbaugh’s head would explode as he tried to process the concept of a “socially-conscious blood sport.”
    Yes. Which is my point.
    The NFL is the opposite of Marxist. It is the epitome ofcrony capitalism, a corporate oligarchy that has absorbed or crushed all potential competitors, that routinely extorts municipal and state governments, and openly flouts its tax obligations while remaining, in the words of
The Atlantic
’s Gregg Easterbrook, “walled off behind a moat of antitrust exemptions.”
    The league’s players are among the most specialized employees on earth. Every aspect of their job performance is filmed, analyzed, measured, and submitted to public scrutiny. Minute differences in efficiency translate into mindboggling pay discrepancies. It is this ruthless workplace that compels so many players to play through pain, shoot up steroids, etc.
    Much is made of the communal virtues imparted by football: sportsmanship, teamwork, self-sacrifice. But a genuine Marxist would note that these qualities are placed in the service of contests whose outcomes are irrelevant to the fate of the worker. Football is the ultimate bourgeois indulgence. Its civic function is to distract the proletariat from the aims of the revolution and to serve as a means of indoctrination into thought systems that are individualistic and materialist.
    Think about it, folks. Last season, the Minnesota Vikings paid a man named Jared Allen more than a million dollars
per game
to maul opposing quarterbacks. The “market”—meaning us, the fans—has determined that Allen’s value is roughly $18.5 million per year. The State of Minnesota pays an elementary school teacher an average of $38,000 per year. Paramedics make $42,000; cops, $28,000. That makes onequarterback mauler worth 474 elementary school teachers. Or 440 paramedics. Or 661 police officers.
    Let us pause in astonishment and torment.
    The closer you look, the worse it