http://www.salon.com...alize_all_sports/

Thought this might elicit a few chuckles--seems about as likely as the Koch Bros. entering a Nunnery.
The Bread & Circuses Clubs--getting chumps to build them palaces (then extort $More--to get them to stay & play)
--how more-Murican can you get?

Hot sports take: Fire the owners and nationalize all sports!
Full communism is the only solution to dumb owners
ALEX PAREENE

[. . .]


Owners are the worst thing about professional sports. Professional sports team owners, like most of the modern global mega-rich, tend to exhibit most or all of the following traits: General cluelessness about matters unrelated to the immediate field in which they made their fortune; unjustified faith, despite that cluelessness, in their own abilities and intelligence; the related belief that their expertise in money hoarding translates to expertise in all other fields of human endeavor; staggering greed and attendant unscrupulousness. There is no modern football owner who started a team himself and built it into a powerhouse, along the lines of the usual mythic entrepreneurial success story. These are men who made a lot of money and then bought a hobby. They know no more than your typical involved fan. The result is a man like Zygi Wilf, a crooked real estate mogul who seems to have purchased the Minnesota Vikings as part of a scheme to have the city of Minneapolis build him a world-class stadium on their dime. (This depressing story by former Vikings punter Chris Kluwe contains perhaps the only nice thing I’ve ever read about Mr. Wilf.)

And most of these men try their hardest to convince the average fan that it’s the players — you know, the people who actually make up the teams that play the sport — that are overpaid, in an industry in which various people “win” Super Bowl rings merely for being lucky enough to have been born with the last names Mara or Rooney.

This is why we as a country must nationalize all sports.

I’ve long said that a smart politician would become an instant presidential front-runner by promising to push for legislation banning public funding — and the extortionate threats to move that encourage public funding — of arenas for teams in the big four leagues. It’d have to be at a national level, because the threats only work by playing cities and states against each other (which is why Los Angeles has been trying to build a football stadium for their non-existent football team, and why the NFL keeps making strange claims about the feasibility of having team play in London). And such a proposal would be a good start, but it wouldn’t end all the worst practices of owners, from fan-gouging to television blackouts to mistreatment of current and retired players to wholly incompetent hiring and firing decisions. No, the only solution there, as usual, is full socialism.

[. . .]

Love. It.

Bon appètit, sports-fans; youse guys Feed these greed-heads
(and they know that you Will pay whatever, whenever--because yer all Addicts.)
No matter how slimy is the underbelly. Pretty neat Con.