MORE BUZZ-KILL FROM SAM PIZZIGATI.

He could have left well enough alone.

About three score years ago, on a January Sunday afternoon in 1967, some of us gathered in college dorm basement lounges to watch pro football’s historic first “Super Bowl.” A good bit has changed since then—in football and America.

The changes in pro football could hardly be more striking. Today’s players dwarf the size and strength of players back then. National Football League linemen here in the 2020s, for instance, weigh on average well over 300 pounds and stand almost six-and-a-half feet tall. Pro football players of that size simply “didn’t exist” before 1980.

Contemporary players earn much more as well. The first NFL collective bargaining agreement, signed a year after that initial Super Bowl in 1967, set a $10,000 minimum annual salary for veteran players, the equivalent of some $90,000 today. In 2024, NFL players averaged $3.2 million, with a median base pay of $860,000.

But pro football players these days pay a steep price for their paychecks. The average player career now lasts only a little over three years. But the much longer careers of players in positions that don’t face much physical contact distort that average. Running backs regularly last no more than two years.

Pro football player lives, more significantly, often run markedly shorter than the lives of their generational peers. Those shorter lifespans reflect both the violence of the collisions between today’s much bigger and stronger players and the much longer length of today’s NFL season. Players participating in that first 1967 Super Bowl only competed in 16 games. Players on the 2025 Super Bowl’s Philadelphia Eagles squad will have competed in 21 games once this season’s competition ends.

The Packer and Chief players of that first NFL-AFL Championship Game had to start their off-season jobs, such as Jimmy Taylor's wreck-diving work in the Gulf, two weeks later than previously.

Had he simply ended his column there, Mr Pizzigati would have noted the political economy of pro football's labor market.  He did not.

We need a little history here for context. A century ago, in the NFL’s earliest days, ownership of NFL franchises came at a price that even the modestly affluent could easily afford. Tim Mara, a horse-racing bookkeeper, bought the New York Giants in 1925 for $500, the equivalent of less than $9,000 today. In 1933, Art Rooney bought a Pittsburgh NFL franchise for $2,500, about $60,000 today.

By the 1960s, those early owners were sitting pretty, and much richer Americans, like the oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, wanted in on the pro football action. These rich ended up establishing their own pro circuit, the American Football League, and then, in 1966, cut a deal with NFL owners to merge their two leagues. The first fruit of that merger would be the inaugural “Super Bowl” in 1967.

Back in those mid-20th-century years, the United States overall rated as a much equal place than the nation had been during the NFL’s early years in the 1920s. One key reason: The tax rate on income in the top federal tax bracket had jumped from 25% in 1925 to 91%.

So it often is with startups. Had I paid more attention to that "Microsoft Basic" in my 1984 Model 100 laptop ...

But Sammy is so obsessed with peddling his populist propaganda that he misses the risk the elder Mara took in buying the Giants, about the same time that George Halas advanced Earl Lambeau some money in order to ensure that his Decatur Staleys would be able to offer a full slate of games.  I don't know, but maybe that consumer society of the American High had something to do with it.

Only a relatively few of America’s deep pockets—like the oilmen H.L. Hunt and Bud Adams, another of the AFL’s original franchise owners—could manage to end run those stiff top rates, thanks to generous tax loopholes like the infamous oil-depletion allowance.

But by the early 1980s, with the Reagan Revolution’s onset, the distribution of America’s income and wealth was sliding rapidly back to the top-heavy levels of the 1920s. Tax rates on top-bracket income would bottom out at a mere 28% by Reagan’s last full White House year in 1988, and the United States would soon be experiencing an explosive growth in billionaire fortunes.

The number of U.S. billionaires—only 13 in the first Forbes 400 count in 1982—jumped to 66 in 1990 and 298 in 2000 and then all the way up to 404 in 2010 and 614 in 2020.

All these billionaires desperately needed new high-profile playthings. Many found them in NFL franchises. In quick order, teams that had been selling in the tens of millions began going for hundreds of millions and then billions. In 2018, the hedge funder David Tepper spent $2.2 of those billions buying the Carolina Panthers. Four years later, Robson Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, led an ownership group that shelled out $4.65 billion to take possession of the Denver Broncos.

For all the good that oil depletion money did for the Dallas Texans.  We now know them as the Kansas City Chiefs.  That move took place before holding the taxpayers up for a new stadium became a thing, which is why the Baltimore Colts are in Indianapolis, the original Cleveland Browns are the Baltimore Ravens, and the Houston Oilers are the Tennessee Titans.

Maybe the best thing for the government to do is to go away.

Do these sorts of outlays amount to just an innocent deep-pocket hobby? Not given the impact on average taxpayers.

Billions of average taxpayer dollars, a CNN analysis has shown, are “subsidizing the wildly profitable National Football League.” Between 1997 and 2015, NFL owners opened up 20 new stadiums “with the help of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds.” Owners have saved billions more by financing stadium construction with tax-free municipal bonds, a tax-runaround “originally created by Congress to help fund roads and schools.”

U.S. corporate executives, meanwhile, get to write off the billions they shell out for NFL game luxury suites as legitimate business entertainment expenses.

Stadium subsidies are among the least productive of government expenditures, which is saying a lot given what government wastes money on.  But if you are a Common Dreams propagandist, caterwauling about the nomenklatura making deals in the sky-boxes is more fun.

Our Super Bowl may now stand, in effect, as our nation’s most visible symbol of plutocratic excess, or, as the sportswriter Sally Jenkins once put it, a “divorced-from-reality debauch.” We still don’t know, Jenkins added, where the “pain threshold of the average NFL fan” sits.

“Thirty-two owners digging relentlessly in our pockets,” she observed some years back, “haven’t found the bottom yet.”

Those billionaire owners still haven’t—and their upside remains enormous. Just between 2020 and 2023 alone, MarketWatch noted last month, the NFL’s cumulative franchise values rose 1,108%.

Well, Sally Jenkins.  And as long as Arlington Heights city officials seem willing to fleece their tax base, or perhaps to get the Combine to kick in some money Springfield doesn't have to help build those new skyboxes, the beat will go on.  Franchise value is a derived demand, and perhaps some of it stems from, horribile dictu if you're an old school fan, people buying streaming services or pay-per view from their cable providers.

Today's econ problem: square rising subscription and ticket prices with a vanishing middle class.