On the Collective Football Plantation

Quasi-socialism is one of the reasons that American football has not spread to the entire planet, as soccer did.

Most professional sports leagues in the U.S. are quasi-socialist enterprises within capitalist corporate America. Outwardly, the NFL looks like a successful corporation, but from within, this corporation has implemented principles of doing business that are alien to America.

Sooner or later, the conflict between the quasi-socialist paradise inside the NFL and its capitalist encirclement was bound to happen. For too long, this smoldering conflict between serf gladiators and free citizens was in the shadows. Sports organizations have managed to introduce as many socialist ideas into the sport as they could, but now this genie has jumped out of the bottle: on Sunday, Sept. 24, players staged an anti-American demarche and did not stand with their hands over their heart for the national anthem.

All NFL teams are formally independent and have their own owners, as it should under capitalism. However, the profits of these supposedly independent organizations depend not so much on the quality of the game as on the collective agreement with advertisers. If there is a superstar on one of the teams who scores a lot, then all the teams become winners. The profit from advertising is distributed evenly between the teams regardless of the quality of the game and the place in the championship. The league champion earns only slightly more than the worst team.

Leveling is practiced in most professional sports leagues. That is, the worst team gets the best league’s players at the end of the season. The worse the team plays, the better its composition becomes. I hope that the cornerstone of Marxism, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is well-known to everyone. Let me remind you that in the Soviet Union state investments were received only by the lagging collective plantations (collective farms). As an argument, it was said that “weak farms should be helped.” Thus, everything happened in the USSR in accordance with Churchill's words that socialism’s “inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Socialist Obama, like the NFL, also adheres to the principle of the uniform “spreading of wealth.”

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