Over the past twenty years, the National Football League (NFL) has seen its product grow and blossom into America’s premier fan viewing sport. The NFL currently has 31 franchises in cities located throughout the United States. Some teams are located in major markets like New York and Chicago, while some teams are have put down their roots in smaller markets like Kansas City and Indianapolis. No matter how big the market or how poor the teams performance is on the field, one thing is constant, the NFL, the NFL owner, and the NFL players are making millions upon millions of dollars playing a game. The NFL is a money making machine. The kind we all wish we could operate or own. Every week the NFL rakes in the profits. Wherever there is money to be made, rest assured there is greed rearing its ugly little head. This project focuses on the 2011 NFL Lockout and the negotiations that eventually led to a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that was signed in July of 2011. (ESPN website, n.d.)…
Professional sports, like most of our popular culture, can be understood only partly by through its exiting plays and tremendous athletes. Baseball and football most of all are not only games anymore but also hardcore businesses. As businesses, sports leagues can be as conniving, deceitful, and manipulative as any other businesses in the world. No matter what the circumstances are, it seems that Politicians are always some how right around the corner from the world of sports. These Politicians look to exploit both the cultural and the economic dimensions of the sports for their own purposes. This is what is known in the sports industry as "playing the field".…
The impact of corporations on sports culture and ideology of competitive neoliberalism corporatism has led to the belief and practice of the “trickle down sport economics”, that modern day sport is a “reflection and celebration of the profit-driven and competitive corporate structures that dominate all aspects of neoliberal society” (Newman, 2013, p. 22). Furthermore, this belief has led to the trend of publicity funded sports stadiums in modern day America. Both city and team officials have public support for stadium funding in elections through the seemingly, rather transparent promises for an economic flourish in that given city. The Marlin’s Park deal falls along the lines of the impact of American society’s growing belief and acceptance…
I chose to write about a couple of stadiums that are/were used by one team. At the conclusion of the 2008 Major League Baseball season, the old Yankee stadium in New York completed its 88th and final year of hosting the Yankees. The new Yankees Stadium in New York just wrapped up their second regular season of hosting the Yankees, after they moved from their old ballpark across the street. In this paper I hope to compare some differences and similarities between the two stadiums. Specifically the cost of the stadiums, the amenities each one provides, and the differences a spectator may experience from visiting the new stadium compared to the old one.…
The 1960s were filled with events like the Vietnam war and the assassination of Kennedy so sports were very important to the United States because they provided something for the American people to get away from the stress of their lives. And sports were in rapid change in the 1960s with the NFL and AFL merger in 1966 and the first super bowl in 1967. The NBA stayed the same through much of the 60s with the Celtics dominating the NBA for 9 titles in 10 years. And college football had its usual powerhouses playing each other in classic games like the game of the century between Texas and Arkansas in 1969.…
My interest in the topic of publicly funded stadiums and arenas for private sports franchises has been fueled by the situation in my hometown of Sacramento, and the building of a new downtown arena for our beloved Sacramento Kings. The city is going to be picking up most of the tab for the new arena, and the deal comes after years and years of other failed attempts to publicly fund a much needed modern arena. The Kings arena saga also includes many attempts to relocate the team to other cities willing to hand out public funds and build a new stadium for the privately owned franchise. All of this public money being thrown around raises controversy on whether or not public funds should be spent to help fund private arenas for rich owners. The threat of relocating a pro sports franchise is a way for leagues to hold cities hostage and demand public money or else they'll go to a city willing to pay. This is exactly the situation Sacramento found itself in this year with the Kings threatening to move to Seattle. In the end, Sacramento responded by giving out more public funds then Seattle and saved its team from moving. But is it worth it? Examining this situation will highlight both the negative and positive impact of publicly funded sports facilities.…
Sports are an intimate part of many people’s lives. Without it, many of us would not share certain relationships or bonds with people who like it as much as we do. Football is indeed my favorite sport to watch. From the touchdown dances to seeing a favorite player break a record, football is intense, exciting, and amusing to watch. Football teams can define the character of certain regions and places (Sports and Recreation, 2004). In good old Minnesota, we “bleed purple” and love our Minnesota Vikings. Although the Vikings have never won the Super Bowl, we still love them regardless because of their hard work and dedication to the sport and to the fans. The whole organization behaves in a manner that keeps the fans coming back for more, as do other National Football League teams around the United States. The National Football League and its teams need to have spot-on organizational skills. If there is not proper organizational…
Varda Burstyn provides great insight on hypermasculinity and modern sport in her book, The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics and the Culture of Sports. In this book, Burstyn asserts that performance enhancing drugs have become institutionalized as part of the “hypermasculinization” in sports and society. Athletes use performance-enhancing drugs to receive an energy boost as a means of playing through the pain endured during a sporting event. Especially in modern sports, competition has increased dramatically and athletes are willing to do anything they can to gain a competitive advantage. Monetary and materialistic incentives that are attached to winning in modern sports have catalyzed a need to attain even the smallest advantage. The source of athletes’ mentality of gaining a smallest advantage over competitors can be traced back from the time they were young to the time they reach the professional stage. The pressure to perform at a high-level consistently throughout his life has influenced the athlete to rely on drugs and has normalized the use of drugs in modern sports. However, using performance enhancing drugs comes with its fair share of disadvantages as well. Athletes who use steroids tend to have mood swings,…
In “A People’s History of Sports in the United States,” David Zirin asserts that “...one can hardly say that sports exist in a world separate from politics.” In other words, politics are often intertwined in the inner workings of sports, and sports figures often address and reflect issues seen in politics. The idea that sports and politics are separate and unrelated entities is an overly simplistic and superficial analysis of the complex relationship between sports and politics. Muhammad Ali was an image breaker in the the midst of the age of conformity, where black men had limited options on their public image. He was simply more than a polite and well spoken gentleman such as Patterson, and even more disliked than the public image of the…
But when we go to the games the see what else technology can do to help us, and they help us building modern stadiums capable of holding thousands and thousands of people and able to have huge televisions bigger than houses everywhere so even people in the nosebleed section can see what’s going on in the game. As you know these stadiums come as a price a very expensive one and even though the changes in stadiums make football more available to people and able to hold more people to see the game, owners decide to up the price in everything so as the stadiums get more expensive to build, everything else gets more expensive from the tickets and food to the five dollar or more water you buy at the game and as people line up to the concession stands they see the prices and even if things are overpriced they still pay but inside the fans are shaking their heads at the prices and as Dan Zirin says “Sports fans are fed up”. Fans are fed up because while there to support their favorite team their wallets are getting smaller and smaller from the tickets they buy and the food plus merchandise is also expensive while some people want to wear their favorite players jersey, they can if they are willing to pay eighty to one hundred dollars for a simple jersey with the players name on it. But I and the fans don’t see the prices anytime soon since people are willing to pay for it even if it is…
Ross, S. (2003). Antitrust, professional sports, and the public interest. Journal of Sports Economics, 4(4), 318-331. Retrieved fromhttp://jse.sagepub.com/content/4/4/318.full.pdf html (Ross, 2003)…
The book illustrates the structural functionalist theory of how strong political influence is in sport. For example, the people of Odessa loved George Bush because he was native to the area. Bush came to visit for a campaign stop, but no one cared about his speech. They valued that he was from Texas, and would protect their interests. Bush states that he believes he is, “on the side of the American people and the state of Texas in terms of values.” They…
The seriousness of sports-related concussions will have harsh repercussions where the impact of being hit forcibly repeatedly can lead to severe bodily harm where quality of life is affected. Although the topic of concussions related to sport injuries has garnered much attention in today’s era where safety is promoted to protect the athlete’s health. However; this was not the case in the early 20th Century for athletes who suffered brain damage from the result of playing football. (Harrision, 2014) stated “years before the first medical study of football injury was published, it was obvious that this new American game was dangerous. Even though the players and public knew of the dangers of football, unfortunately; some athletes did not report…
Sport is entrenched in the sociocultural foundations of New Zealand. It has a dominant place in society; belonging in the same category as family, economy, media, politics, education, and religion (Donnelly, 1996). Like many of the aforementioned spheres of our lives, sport is a social construction, providing a window into the sociocultural context of which we live (Allport, 1985). Being a “social construction” we must attempt to understand sport by approaching it as a social fact, therefore sociologically, as opposed to how we would with objects or events in the biophysical world – through science and numbers. Understanding sociology as “the study of social relations undertaken from the point of view of people who operate within those social…
All sports can cause injuries but high impact sports cause the most. The article “Hard Knocks” talks about injuries from high impact sports. Long term health effects from high impact sports are CTE which cause suicidal thoughts and concussions which lead to brain injuries.…