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The Super Bowl May Stand as the US' Most Visible Symbol of Plutocratic Excess
As corporate executives get to write off the billions they shell out for NFL game luxury suites as legitimate business entertainment expenses, average taxpayers don’t get to sit in those suites.
Feb 09, 2025
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.
Between 1997 and 2015, NFL owners opened up 20 new stadiums “with the help of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds.”
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 contrast between the dawn of the Super Bowl era and today for NFL team owners rates as even starker.
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%.
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.
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.
Average taxpayers don’t get to sit in those suites. They essentially don’t get to sit anywhere in NFL stadiums. In the 2024 season, the average cost for a family of four to attend an NFL game ran $808.
At Super Bowl time, ticket costs soar considerably higher. The face-value price on a single Super Bowl ticket for this year’s game ranges from $950 to $7,500. But no face-value tickets ever go on sale to the general public. The only way for anyone in that public to see the Super Bowl in person? Buy a seat on the secondary market. For Super Bowl LIX, secondary-market tickets are averaging $8,000 each.
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, MarketWatchnoted last month, the NFL’s cumulative franchise values rose 1,108%.
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NCAA 'Cravenly Caves' to Trump, Banning Trans Women From Female Sports
"Great fucking job, NCAA. You're now a part of Donald Trump's anti-trans hate machine seeking to push trans people out of public life and make their lives as difficult as possible," said one critic.
Feb 06, 2025
The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced Thursday that its board of governors voted to update the NCAA's participation policy for transgender student-athletes in response to Republican U.S. President Donald Trump signing an executive order intended to ban trans girls and women from competing on female sports teams
The NCAA is a nonprofit that regulates sports for 1,100 colleges and universities that collectively enroll more than 530,000 student-athletes. Its new policy says that "regardless of sex assigned at birth or gender identity, a student-athlete may participate (practice and compete) with a men's team, assuming they meet all other NCAA eligibility requirements."
However, the policy says, student-athletes who were assigned male at birth or assigned female at birth and have begun hormone therapy such as testosterone can continue to practice with women's teams but cannot compete with them.
According to The Hill, "Previously, the NCAA policy said transgender participation in each sport depended on guidelines set by the sport’s national or international governing body." NCAA president Charlie Baker, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts, recently told Congress that fewer than 10 trans athletes competed across the organization's three divisions.
Baker claimed in a Thursday statement that "President Trump's order provides a clear, national standard," and the organization's new policy "follows through on the NCAA's constitutional commitment to deliver intercollegiate athletics competition and to protect, support, and enhance the mental and physical health of student-athletes."
While Trump celebrated the policy update on social media Thursday, advocates for LGBTQ+ rights have forcefully criticized both the NCAA and the Republican president.
Responding to the NCAA's decision on the social media site Bluesky, Law Dork's Chris Geidner decried the "unbelievable depths of spinelessness with such cruel, unnecessary ramifications."
"Great fucking job, NCAA. You're now a part of Donald Trump's anti-trans hate machine seeking to push trans people out of public life and make their lives as difficult as possible," he added. "Charlie Baker, this is on you."
Jack Turban said on Bluesky that he was resigning from the NCAA Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports. The doctor told The Hill that he and other panel members were not notified of the board's vote before the public statement.
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— Jack Turban MD ( @turban.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 4:31 PM
"Trump and Republicans are picking out a tiny portion of the population, vilifying them, and stoking fear. That's dangerous and has real consequences,"
said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) on social media Thursday afternoon. "I want to be clear: Americans do have concerns about fairness in sports, and it's important that we have those conversations and educate people about the facts. But actions like Trump's are not the answer."
"We should be focusing on the real obstacles that female athletes face, like a lack of financial resources and vulnerability to abuse. Instead, Republicans are attacking a group that represents less than a fraction of 1% of student-athletes," said Jayapal, who has a
trans daughter. "This is a manufactured crisis—one that serves to distract you from the fact that Trump and Republicans ran on raising wages and lowering costs, but have no real solutions to help you build a better life."
"They are trying to get you to look the other way. Don't," she added. "And to the trans community—I know this is all incredibly difficult. I'm so sorry that you have to go through this, but please know that I see you, I stand with you, and I will NEVER stop fighting for you. That's a promise."
The NCAA cravenly caves.
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— Nathan Kalman-Lamb ( @nkalamb.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 7:42 PM
The president's order is already having an impact beyond the NCAA policy change. As The Washington Postreported Thursday:
Trump's executive order directs the Department of Education to inform schools they will be violating Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in schools, if they allow transgender athletes to compete in girls' or women's sports. Under the law, schools that discriminate based on sex are not eligible for federal funding.
In response, the Department of Education earlier Thursday announced investigations into the University of Pennsylvania, San José State University, and a Massachusetts high school athletic association over reported Title IX violations. Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association are targeted for allowing transgender students to play on a women's swimming team and girls' high school basketball team, respectively. Several opponents of the San José State women's volleyball team forfeited games this fall because the Spartans purportedly had a transgender athlete on its roster.
The newspaper noted that the NCAA's decision came two days after former teammates of swimmer Lia Thomas filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court claiming Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Ivy League, and the NCAA violated Title IX by allowing Thomas to compete in 2022 championships.
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Trump’s Latest Anti-Trans Executive Order Shows That Sports Are Never Just Sports
The steady flow of anti-trans bigotry in sport was the gateway to full-throttle demonization under Trump.
Feb 06, 2025
The first two weeks of Trump 2.0 have been a whirling swirl of venomous prejudice, but one neon throughline of the discombobulating frenzy is an attack on the transgender community. The Trump administration is brazenly attempting to drive trans people out of existence through the denial of education, the ability to get medical care, to travel on a passport, to serve in the military. Trump even cooked up an executive order denying federal funds to schools that allow trans athletes to participate in girls’ and women’s sports. This is nothing short of an attempt to evict trans people from civic life. This is what banishment looks like.
Sport has played a pivotal role in this grim persecution. Howls of alleged unfairness in the sphere of sport swiftly transmogrified into the unabashed hate that simmers just beneath the legalese in Trump’s executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The executive order drips with fear and hyperbole. “The erasure of sex in language and policy,” it claims, “has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.” (If only it were that easy!) The order narrowly defines sex in a way that nixes trans and nonbinary people out of existence.
U.S.-based trans journalist Sydney Bauer told us, “For these political leaders, the goal is to create a segment of society where our civil rights are not needed to be protected so they can advance it to all other areas, despite court rulings increasingly affirming all aspects of trans people’s lives are protected by the 14th Amendment.” She added, “If my gender identity is challenged when I step on a sports field, the goal is for it to be challenged—and forcibly detransitioned—in public life.”
Just as sport was a space for test-driving and spreading anti-trans messaging and policies, it doubles as a platform for fightback against the ongoing horror show.
Athletes and sports administrators set the stage for this confected moral panic. Long before Trump’s executive orders, they engaged in blatant fearmongering, painting trans women athletes as cheaters and even predators. NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines has made transphobia an integral part of her brand. Even tennis icon Martina Navratilova has long viewed trans women athletes as “cheats.” The anodyne-sounding “Protect Women’s Sports” has become the right-wing dog whistle for trans exclusion. The haters’ transphobia even extended to athletes who were not in fact trans. During the Paris 2024 Olympics, a slew of celebrities—from JK Rowling to Elon Musk—mislabeled the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif as trans, ginning up malicious attacks against her.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued a seemingly inclusive framework for trans athletes in 2021. But the IOC punted ultimate responsibility to international sports federations, many of which chose to exclude athletes, despite a lack of scientific evidence. Next month, the IOC will select a new president. One frontrunner, Lord Sebastian Coe, has openly opined that trans athletes threaten sport. Other candidates have adopted equally, if not more draconian stances.
Taken together, this steady flow of anti-trans bigotry in sport was the gateway to full-throttle demonization under Trump.
Let’s be clear: The endgame of trans demonization is death. Not only social death, but actual death. The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed legislation banning transgender girls and women from participating in sports. If this bill becomes a law, it will cost human lives. Recent research found that state-level anti-transgender laws increased the rates of suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth.
Sport was the Trojan Horse used to attack trans people in all walks of life. But the machine is still revving, scanning for targets. Just as the right-wing hate machine didn’t stop with “Protecting Women’s Sports,” transphobia will hurt cisgender women who don’t conform to a narrow, Eurocentric version of womanhood. The Trump administration’s attempt to distill the meaning of “woman” into chromosomes or hormone levels echoes the sexism of the past. Sports have long used sex to control, steamrolling the diversity among women deemed “too masculine.” Ultimately, attacks on transgender people harm all women, especially women of color. Just ask Caster Semenya. Or Dutee Chand. Now the Trump administration is widening the onslaught.
Sadie Shreiner, a trans athlete currently competing in the NCAA, pointed out to us that the Trump administration’s decision to squelch research about transgender individuals is meant “to eradicate our historical and scientific existence.” She added, “This was never about trans athletics, science, or ‘fairness’, it has always been about oppression. They’ll attack me all the same whether I’m on or off the track.”
Across the world, hate mongers are reading Trump’s anti-trans cue card. Travers, a sociologist specializing in trans inclusion at Simon Fraser University, told us, “The anti-trans moral panic that has been fostered in the United States and the United Kingdom has definitely breathed life into anti-trans initiatives in Canada.” Anti-trans groups purporting to “protect women” have also emerged in recent years in Japan. They not only deny trans people their rights, but also their very existence through a discourse directly imported from U.S. politics.
Sports are never just sports. The ongoing moral panic around trans people explodes the erroneous notion that sports and politics are separate endeavors. Just as sport was a space for test-driving and spreading anti-trans messaging and policies, it doubles as a platform for fightback against the ongoing horror show.
Chris Mosier, the first trans athlete to represent Team USA (in duathlon and triathlon), posted on Bluesky: “We will fight. We will take care of each other. We will continue to exist, long after this administration is done.” Harrison Browne, the first transgender professional hockey player, appearing on Dave Zirin’s Edge of Sports podcast, urged for “debunking these myths of trans women and their participation.” Trans-rights advocacy groups are kicking into gear. Travers, the sociologist, said that the moment demands “Immediate resistance, legal resistance, public resistance, refusal to go along. But I also think it’s really important to play the long game,” building bona fide solidarity in the nooks and crannies of society.
There’s no question that when it comes to the possibility of trans banishment, we’re experiencing a five-alarm-fire, all-hands-on-deck moment. We have a fight on our hands. It’s time to link elbows and stand together on the right side of history.
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