Slashdot Mirror
Senators Threaten To Rescind NFL Antitrust Exemption
An anonymous reader writes In response to the FCC's discontinuation of rules that support the NFL's blackout policies, the NFL issued a statement indicating that it would nevertheless continue to enforce its blackout policies through its private contract negotiations with local networks. On Wednesday, however, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) announced a bill that would rescind the antitrust exemption that enables the NFL to demand blackouts in the first place and formally warned the NFL to abandon blackouts altogether. The antitrust exemption gives sports leagues "legal permission to conduct television-broadcast negotiations in a way that otherwise would have been price collusion" and further allowed the formation of the NFL from two separate leagues. Meanwhile, the NFL enjoys a specialized tax status and direct monetary support from taxpayers to build arenas and stadiums.
The NFL also gets nonprofit status on top of this. Could we do more to support them?
I dunno. Let's rename them to the Israeli Football League and see what happens.
The point of the blackouts is to extort money from the fans for an overpriced live experience. If they really wanted to sell out every game, they should study basic economics and drop prices. They'll still make ridiculous amounts of money.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You charge too much for tickets/parking/hot dogs/beer, people don't go see your games. Threatening to not allow fans who won't bend over and lube up see the game is IMHO seriously bad business practice. Want to entice fans to games? Don't charge $500 per game for a family to go.
// prefer watching it on TV
/// except for the damned commercials
//// then again, when I went to the game they had "commercial timeouts".
/ haven't been to a game in 15 years
Don't confuse "nonprofit" with "charity". While virtually all charities are nonprofits, not all nonprofits are charities.
The NFL being nonprofit is simply a reflection of how the league is organized and equity and earnings are allocated. In this case, most of the equity in the NFL is held by individual teams and the teams' billionaire owners, and all the earnings are targeted to those same teams. The league acts as just a vehicle for the teams to coordinate functions like marketing, scheduling, and league matters. So when the league gets $10 billion in TV contracts, all the profit is distributed to the teams, which then pay taxes on it. Being structured as a nonprofit, the NFL league has trustees and beneficiaries. It could reincorporate as a for-profit, in which case it would have owners and shareholders. In that case, each team owner could be granted one share. If that were to happen, Paul Allen instead of receiving one tax bill for $100 million for the Seahawks, would get two tax bills for $70 million (for the Seahawks) and $30 million (for the NFL share). From the taxman's point of view, it's pretty much the same.
There's nothing sneaky about the NFL being a nonprofit. It's just reflects how the league was originally set up.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell would be a fool to step down.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Stadium revenue isn't even 5% of the teams earnings anymore. It's so ridiculously small in fact that it's the entire reason cited by the FCC for abolishing the blackout restriction. They could literally give the tickets away and it wouldn't impact earnings in any significant manner.
The reason they don't cheapen the tickets is that by keeping prices high the owners can use the tickets like money. Court-side tickets are so expensive when they hand the mayor a season's worth of tickets he's bound to whatever the owner wants because they've given him the equivalent of $100K. But because they set the pricing on the seats they can declare the tickets worth less than $5. Those high priced tickets are essentially their own untraceable money that they can print at will.