I pay little attention to the NFL, but I know that they are throwing fans away for no good reason. Has it ever occurred to the players who refuse to stand for the national anthem that with fewer fans, they will be paid less? The issue of the fans at games is a big one in soccer. The women’s leagues that have come and gone show how easily an entire league can fold if there aren’t enough fans. You don’t throw away (that is, alienate) your fans, if you can help it. Soccer back in the 1970s did all kinds of things simply to get people into the stadiums, and lots of them were stupid. For example, they thought that it would help attract fans if they eliminated what is allowed everywhere else: games ending in a tie. This was done because Americans supposedly don’t like tie games. The number of people who would decide on that basis alone to show up at a soccer game must have been vanishingly small because if someone refused to go to a soccer game because they didn’t like tie games, they almost certainly didn’t like other aspects of soccer, too, and were going to stay away even if tie games were eliminated. So, we purists had to put up with this nonsense for the sake of getting a tiny number of people into the stadium who otherwise wouldn’t have shown up. Sheesh.
Anyway, football has not had to worry about alienating fans in my lifetime, so perhaps the football powers-that-be got complacent about these things. But someone needs to sit these players down and explain to them the economic facts of life about running a team.
Incidentally, the same thing needs to be done to women soccer players, who seem to think they deserve pay equal to that of the men simply because it’s wrong for men to get paid more. But the men get paid more because they bring in more fans. Tough luck, but there it is. I have said again and again that the women’s leagues need to have cheaper prices for their tickets and to throw in free parking as well until they can build up enough numbers that they can count on raising ticket prices. They never listen, and the leagues always fold.
I doubt the players who protest bother to connect the dots between fan loyalty and paycheck, primarily because there is not a direct correlation between their increasing million dollar paychecks and the number of filled seats in the stands.
As long as the owners and league executives provide placid approval of player protest loss of fan base will continue.
I wouldn't expect to see any change in league behavior until the television networks demand their broadcast contracts be renegotiated to compensate for lost revenue.
The big question is how many fans have to abandon the game for that financial reckoning to occur?
Posted by: John | 11/27/2017 at 08:07 AM