Over the past few days I have been mulling over the relationship between business and sports, particularly travel soccer. This was spurred, oddly, by the mere accident of me being present when officials were paid (cash) at a recent game. 14 bucks an hour. This is not a lot, from some perspectives, but if you consider that a first year private first class in the US military earns about 9.43 an hour it isn't bad for trotting around outside especially if a "bad day" is constituted merely by some verbal sparring with parents.
So: on the one hand, travel soccer is a game. As such it is governed by certain ancient ideals: fairness, sportsmanship, integrity, teamwork, loyalty and so on. The girls supposedly play for the love of the game and learn these important values from the game. On the other hand, travel soccer is a quite robust and rather strange industry or business. It employs many (albeit no one gets particularly rich) and as a "business" it is governed by many of the rules of business: for example, the customer is always right, if you don't please the consumer the market will cease to exist and so on.
The tension comes because these two visions (game v. business) of sport are seemingly contradictory. Travel soccer can't simultaneously be a game and a business. If we treat soccer as a business then consumers, i.e., parents, will have too much say. Who would pay a ref or coach when they consider the service poor? The game would break down completely if those that run travel soccer were treated, for example, the way we treat our lawn service companies. If we treat soccer purely as a game, though, we end up feeling pretty silly. There is nothing magical about the ideals of sports. No coach or referee adheres to those values with any greater intensity than any player or parent. Without some customer demand, in other words, pressuring people to do their jobs, the quality of all programs would collapse rather quickly.
The contradiction should be reconciled, it seems. Choose, we are tempted to say: travel soccer is either a game or a business.
These issues are addressed most publicly these days by the NCAA and its current director, my old boss at U. of Connecticut, then Provost, Mark Emmert. Emmert was once the highest paid public university president in the country so he knows something about the tension between collective ideals ("the public university") and hard core business. The question posed routinely to him: Are college athletes amateurs and thus governed by the ideals of sport? or are they workers who generate considerable income for their employers for whom they make mucho dollars? As such, they would deserve money, not condemnation for taking 600 bucks for a suit.
The problem, it is important to point out in the context of soccer, is peculiarly American. Most countries don't understand our contrived hybrid -- the "student-athlete" -- that seeks to mask the irresolvable tension. There are sports and there are schools. Most places don't try as hard as we do to reconcile the "amateur ideal" with the "professional." Indeed, at the recent Force Golf Outing several of my friends with no connection to soccer were stunned to learn that many of their co-golfers were paid coaches. That said, once I explained the business part of this -- "well, you want a better product than rec soccer [dad coached little league baseball to them ] can provide but that isn't available in the schools anymore because people like you won't pay higher taxes [the last a political shot that one can only make to childhood friends]" -- the structure made more sense to them.
David Brooks, one the NY Times "conservative" columnists (he is a wacky leftist by Oakland County standards -- my apologies), brings much clarity to the issue. His argument today was that the tension between the two visions of sports is good. The contradiction between "game" and "business" does not need to be solved, but embraced. He riffs specifically off a new book by Mark Branch that argues college athletes should be paid:
"Branch concludes that it is time to give up on the amateur code entirely. Pay the players and get over it. At this late date, he may be right, but there are two concerns.
The first is practical. How exactly would you pay them? Would the stars get millions while the rest get hardly nothing? Would you pay the wrestling team, or any of the female athletes? Only 7 percent of Division I athletic programs make money, according to the N.C.A.A.; where would the salary dollars come from?
The other is moral and cultural. A competitive society requires a set of social institutions that restrain naked self-interest and shortsighted greed. The amateur ideal, though faded and worn, still imposes some restraints. It forces athletes, seduced by Michael Jordan fantasies, to at least think of themselves partially as students. It forces coaches, an obsessively competitive group, to pay homage to academic pursuits. College basketball is more thrilling than pro basketball because the game is still animated by amateur passions, not coldly calculating professional interests.
The commercial spirit is strong these days. But people seem to do best when they have to wrestle between commercial interests and value systems that counteract them. The lingering vestiges of the amateur ideal are worth preserving."
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