ROME'S GLADIATORS WERE NOT CITIZENS. FOOTBALL PLAYERS ARE.

The 2020 National Football League season got under way Thursday evening.  No preseason games, just the Chiefs back to their old tricks of letting the opponents score first then going on a run.

Before kickoff, Rush Limbaugh, in the course of lamenting the in-your-face wokeness that he views as antagonizing the fans, recognized that without players, there's no game.  "[T]hey have destroyed the connection that a majority of their fans had with the teams. They’ve just destroyed it with all of this politicized social justice protesting — and the teams, the franchises have kind of been forced into it because without their players, they don’t have games."  Exactly, and if the labor pool is not the same labor pool as the general population, that's a problem.

The formalities before the game included some nods to the civil rights movements, past and present.  Those formalities did not sit well with some of the fans, Kansas City allowing parties of six to attend in their own clusters.

The booing means that some fans are sick of players displaying anything but their athletic skills during game time and just before. Players should have the right to try to do so, at least before the games starts, but fans have a right to show the players what they think of it.

The booing showed that. It probably presages a decline in NFL viewership if the players keep expressing themselves about the state of America.

In Friday's commentary, Rush Limbaugh again noted the political economy of the pro football labor market.

[Fans] want to watch greatness transpire before their eyes. They want their teams to win. They want their fantasy teams to excel. They don’t care about the politicization. They actively oppose it. How hard this to understand? And yet National Football League teams themselves — forget the sponsors for a moment. The National Football League teams themselves don’t seem to understand this.

Or if they do understand it, they have decided that it’s worth the risk because they’ve got a problem. Their players are 75% African-American, and without the players there is no National Football League, and so they’ve gotta keep the players happy. And if the players think that politicizing the game is something that has to happen or else they’re not gonna play, then the owners are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.

So they have to make it look like they support what the players support. And they have to do it but hopefully in a way that’s gonna be as least damaging to their business as possible. But I don’t even see that taking place. I just… I’m literally amazed that the people in charge of understanding who the fan base is, who’s the audience…

This is the United States. Big Time Sports has to offer terms of employment that are acceptable to the players, and a level of play that is acceptable to the fans. There is no Scipio Africanus to bring fresh captives back from the latest pacification campaign in the territories.

Whether anyone in the sports establishment or sports policy recognizes that a better environment in the neighborhoods where the players grow up is the ultimate objective (the harsh policing of the slums being a symptom, not a cause, of the currently lousy environment) and that fans, players, and politically minded people of almost all persuasions might be able to come to some sort of understanding of what that environment might look like and how best to bring it about remains to be seen.  Successful athletes understand how to pass up a shot because a team-mate has a better look, or how not to jump off-side on a hard count.  That sort of self-discipline is something they learn, as are the same sorts of self discipline required for success in other ventures.