Has money ruined sports?: The Story

On August 26, 2023, 24,454 people standing in a single steep bank at Borussia Dortmund’s Südtribüne — the Yellow Wall — unfurled a banner that read: Football is for you and me, not for fucking industry. RB Leipzig, founded by an energy drink company, rebranded, and built from the fifth division to the Champions League through corporate investment, was the proximate target. But the banner was aimed at something larger. The money that provoked it has been building for three decades.

In October 2021, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund completed its purchase of Newcastle United for $409 million. The Crown Prince’s sovereign wealth vehicle now owned a football club in northeast England. Within two years, Newcastle’s transfer spending exceeded $400 million, the squad qualified for the Champions League, and St. James’ Park was draped in Saudi green and white. Human rights organizations called it sportswashing. The fans sang the new owner’s name. They had watched their club rot under a man who treated it like a ledger for fourteen years, and someone was finally investing — and if that someone had a journalist murdered, well, at least they bought a center forward.

The Premier League’s domestic television deal for 2025 to 2029 closed at $8.45 billion. In 1992, the first TV contract was worth $253 million. The NFL’s salary cap climbed from $34.6 million in 1994 to $255.4 million in 2024. LIV Golf offered players $100 million to $200 million guaranteed — money so large it broke decades of loyalty to the PGA Tour and forced a merger the Tour spent two years calling an existential threat before joining. Dan Pfeifer arrived on UpTrust from the sports world and walked into the middle of this.

The revenue explosion created a specific kind of prosperity. Athletes are wealthy. Owners are wealthier. Leagues are global entertainment conglomerates that operate on physical and financial foundations of staggering scale. When Lionel Messi signed with Inter Miami, MLS ticket prices tripled overnight and Apple’s league-wide streaming deal suddenly looked prescient. The market naturalists see a system discovering its own value. Money found talent, talent created spectacle, and the product is more athletic, more global, more accessible through streaming than any previous generation could have imagined.

In 1995, a family of four attended an NFL game for roughly $160. By 2024, that figure exceeded $500 at most stadiums and passed $700 in several markets. The reform advocates start here, at the turnstile, where the economics that enriched everyone inside the stadium systematically priced out the people the stadium was built for. The foam finger costs $25. Parking costs $60. A father remembers when his father took him for $30 total, and the memory feels like a different country.

Then there is the question the ledger cannot answer. The cultural critics watched RB Leipzig rise and saw something more unsettling than price inflation — the thing that made the sport mean something, inherited, local, irrational, closer to religion than entertainment, being optimized out of existence by people who understood the market value of tribalism but not the tribalism itself.

Revenue is up. Viewership is up. The 2022 World Cup drew an estimated five billion viewers. The games have never been more watched. Whether they have ever meant less to the people watching depends on whether you measure a sport by its broadcast reach or by the sound in the stands — and on whether the strange exceptionalism that insists growth solves everything can survive contact with a grandmother who used to sit in the same seat her grandmother sat in, and now cannot afford the parking lot.

Perspectives:
- Market naturalists
- Reform advocates
- Cultural critics