It’s football season again and, for me, that means it’s the time of year when I pick the football team I follow in order to appease my modern-gladiatorial-game-watching friends. I’m completely astonished by the attendance and attention sports garner as a whole and believe that sports are a leech on society. From the simple waste of cash flow on basic coliseum-style entertainment, to doing the opposite of its assumed job of relaxing and calming people.
A perfect example of this is the massive waste of resources the NFL alone is on society. The Quarterly Journal of Economics’ David Card and Gordon Dahl provided a massive database on NFL games that showed significantly increased rates of domestic violence that occurs when a hometown’s team loses a football game. The flat rate of increase in domestic violence is ten percent while doubling at the loss against a rival and surging further than that if the team loses during a playoff game.
Card and Dahl assure in an interview with the Times’ Alice Park that this doesn’t mean that the behavior cannot be corrected. The increase in violence is simply the fan of the losing team needing to learn how to handle lack of control of a situation. In other words fans of a losing team that is guaranteed to be filled with extreme talent, beauty and entertainment still require sensitivity training to accept the fact that there’s nothing they could do to control the fate of their favorite team. This fact alone is more than enough to prove the uselessness of the NFL.
There is one other major problem with the NFL, though, and that is the significant amount of its bill footed by state and local tax funding. According to the Times, the NFL could now receive up to almost 11 billion dollars a year from the taxpayers. This doesn’t include tax breaks the NFL is provided with its nonprofit status or allowing luxury booth seats to be sold as “business entertainment expenses” by business owners. This 11 billion dollars could be put towards multiple things, including almost single handedly eradicating the entire debt of Detroit in one year or pay for 20,000 students’ higher education.
Once you begin to realize the price of the NFL, from game tickets to the amount of money corporations pump into an NFL team instead of the actual market, and the fact that tax-payer money is being used to pump up a sport proven to increase domestic violence, it isn’t hard to see that the NFL is a leech on society and a waste of space and time.
