I'm a big sports fan (or at least I was) but this weekend I didn't watch a minute of a single game although the Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics were all playing. That would have been unfathomable before 2020. Last night I was in a sports bar and it wasn't until the third inning was in progress that someone requested the Red Sox be put on the TV's. There's a big reckoning coming for sports revenue because people have learned that they can live without it.
Strangely, you can survive if your fans hate you. Hate is a strong emotion and it means that they're still emotionally engaged. You can't survive if nobody cares.
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A former manager of mine had a similar opinion about love and hate. Paraphrasing: Hate is not the opposite of love; it's just a small step to the left. Whether you love or hate, you're still invested. The opposite of love, the REAL opposite of love, is apathy.
She was referencing her ex-husband, but the gist is the same. Baseball fans, for example, may love the Yankees, or hate the Yankees. Both will watch the Yankees play -- the former will root for Yankees' success, the latter for failure -- but the League's revenues are the same either way.
What happens, though, when nobody cares -- when apathy takes over? What happens when the Yankees play and nobody's rooting for success OR failure?
I'll be happy when the last professional sport team is sold at auction, and the reprobates they've been paying are in the unemployment line.
Well said, nobody cares.
What a gang of posturing millionaire socialist mountebanks.
In the case of "professional" sports, the actions and behaviors of the "professionals" - disrespect for the country, uniforms with politically objectionable phrases, etc - drove away a LOT of the fans.
Without fans in the stands (COVID), and without fans willing to watch the games (see above), the team's earnings - meaning "tv ad revenue" - dry up.
Without earnings, "professional" salaries come under immediate attack by both the fans ("being paid THIS MUCH to play a kid's game?") and team management ("we have to PAY them and can't do ANYTHING when their behavior offends the fans?").
No, "professional" sports doesn't have a captive audience because COVID has closed arenas and forcibly dispersed crowds, whether masked or not. The opposite is true: with government-mandated isolation, people are finding OTHER things to do. And some of those "other things" don't include spending hours in front of a TV watching team sport competitions take place in empty arenas where "crowd sounds" are pumped into the broadcast.
I can live very well without "professional" sports. And it seems I'm not the only one.
I stopped caring right around their strike in the 1980s, and football attention of any stripe ended whenteams didn't cashier wholesale everyone taking a knee on the field.
Movies survive (barely) because they're both bankrolled by and shot for anti-Americans, here and abroad.
I doubt that sports catering to (Some) Black Lives Matter and the other useful idiots and anarcho-Communist front groups can survive on ticket sales to people who'd rather loot their affiliated merchandise than buy it retail.
When football and baseball become so low-paying that athletes need off-season jobs again (as they all did until the 1970s), and ticket prices bottom to an hour's worth of minimum wage labor, maybe the people will give a damn again.
Until then, listening to under-educated dancing monkeys shriek and watching them fling their poo, on topics far beyond their grasp, is about as fun as root canal surgery without anesthetic, and about as likely as me growing a second set of legs.
Good riddance to the whiny crybabies, and may they die impoverished and in ignominy, as they so richly deserve. The time gained not wasting it on their shenanigans, OTOH, is valuable beyond measure for far healthier and more worthwhile pursuits.
Let them virtue signal to themselves in empty stadiums, a fitting monument to their idiotic opinions and vacuous sophomoric philosophizing.
One of the MLB game scores?
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