Do Sports make you more Capitalist?
Speculative thought of the day: Does playing or watching sports make you more likely to be pro-market?
I started thinking about this the other day regarding the recent NBA protests, which has given attention to the intersection of sports and politics (something I often think about). There is a lot of attention on how various sports leagues have different political ideologies: the NBA tends to be liberal, college football tends to be conservative. Common sense would argue that some of this has to do more with social demographics: college football fandom centers in more rural, southern, and western parts of the nation. NBA fandom tends to center in more urban centers, generally on the coasts. In the Trump-era, social issues drive political conversation: immigration, race, religion, topics that correlate very closely with the geography of sports, explaining these variables quite well.
But American politics also has another dimension: Economics, and specifically, your orientation around markets and the welfare state. It is less clear that these issues have a geographic basis. And on its face, there seemingly is a logic to the idea that athletes would be more right on economic issues. After all, professional athletes and coaches are entrepreneurial winners of the most hyper-capitalist spectators in society. Competition is central to the ethos of sports, as it is to free-markets. Teams pay your salary based on the market value of your production, a standard generally accepted in the sports world. Even sports fans are a kind of amateur capitalist: many fans love to think of themselves as a General Manager, evaluating players based on whether they are worth their contract. Fans generally have no qualms asking a player to be traded or cut if they underperform, and conversely, are often eager to embrace a superstar even if he is a mercenary who has defected from another team.
One could extend this further: stereotypically, professions, where athletes tend to be overrepresented, tend to be sectors that are more competitive (business, finance, law, tech startups, even medicine) and generally thought to be economically more right-leaning (again, thinking in terms of markets, not social issues). On the flip side, professions that stereotypically do not draw heavily from ex-athletes (think designers, art, literature, college professors) tend to be more economically liberal. My friend Brandon recently alerted me to the existence of blaseball, a highly online anti-sport, which is also proudly anti-capitalist. Of course, I am painting with a broad brush here, but I suspect there is some kernel of truth here.
One can even see sports bleeding into the philosophical debates: the archetypical discussion of economic philosophy is between John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls believed in a classic economically left fairness: you should design a society with relatively equal outcomes in mind because you do not know whether you will be born with a privileged starting place or not. One can image Rawls citing sports as a paradigmatic example: why should athletes get paid millions of dollars, when their genetic makeup was such a significant factor in their success?
On the flip side, Nozick made more the free-market case that individuals should be entitled to the rewards of their labor. He famous cited Wilt Chamberlain as his example for this: fans want to pay money to see Wilt play basketball because of his immense talent. Wilt thus makes a lot of money in the process. Everyone is better off. Therefore, as long as athletes have made their money off of mutually beneficial transactions, who is harmed? Why should Wilt (or Tiger Woods or Lebron James) not be able to make millions off of their talent? Who cares that some portion came from their genes; after all, they still also had to work hard to get where they are!
None of this is a causal argument that sports make you more prone to free-market sympathies. At most, it is an interesting potential correlation. And of course, its worth mentioning that at least in American professional sports, there also exists a fair amount of wealth redistribution. This redistribution mostly benefits the owners: poorly performing teams get revenue shared from better performing teams, and they often get advantages through having a better draft position to get the best young talent. But player unions often make sure that player contracts also involve redistribution: for instance, the NBA has a maximum salary that ensures that role players get overpaid, while superstars get underpaid. And this is to say nothing of how rookie contracts redistribute from young to old players (similar to how the American welfare state redistributes!). This economic culture stands in sharp contrast to European soccer, who, despite a continental culture which is more left economically, has a sports culture that is far more capitalistic.
Maybe the lesson is one that many economists agree with: the best form of capitalism is one that also includes a welfare state to keep the losers reasonably happy with the dynamism of a free-market system. One could also argue that sports show we should favor free and open global labor markets as a good thing; otherwise, we would have no Giannis, and American baseball would be dying. So maybe the conclusion we can draw is that sports are neoliberal, a fusion of a globalist perspective with a right-wing belief in market efficiency, and the left-wing belief in a welfare state.