Opinion | On Super Bowl Sunday, Can the NFL Be More Than a Playground for Billionaires?

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What would democracy in pro sports look like?

Kim and his pals, former players from Manchester United’s illustrious class of 1992, have chosen the trendy crypto notion of the “decentralized autonomous organization” — or DAO for short — as the building block for their new sports “democracy.”

In a real pro sports democracy, loyal fans who live and die by the outcomes of the games their teams play would have a significant say in how their teams operate on an ongoing basis. They might elect their team’s board of directors, for instance, or have the right to veto a pro franchise’s move to abandon one city for greener — and more profitable — pastures elsewhere.

That conception hardly seems to match what most sports fans would see as “what democracy looks like.”hatdemocracy in pro sports look like? Maybe something like the Green Bay Packers, the only franchise in the NFL without a billionaire principal owner. The Packers operate as a community-owned nonprofit corporation. The team last year had 361,300 shareholders, with no single shareholder — under the team’s bylaws — holding over 4 percent of the club’s shares.

“Why do we allow our precious sports clubs to be the playthings of a bunch of wealthy degenerates?” Wasserman asks, “It’s time to use the Packer green and gold as a starter model for all franchise ownership.” Could the Green Bay model ever scale up to an entire nation’s pro sports structure? To some extent, that’s already happened — in Germany. Until 1998, nonprofit “members’ associations” ran all German football teams. The new model that emerged that yearprivate ownership in Germany’s top football league, the Bundesliga, but limited commercial investors to a 49 percent stake in any one club.

The Labour reforms would have, among other provisions, given nonprofit “supporters trusts” representation on club boards of directors and enabled these trusts to buy shares when clubs change ownership hands.

 

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