Behind the Bleachers
This article appears in the February 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Read more from the issue.
Of the top 20 most-watched television broadcasts in American history, 19 of them are Super Bowls. Last year’s record-setting edition peaked at 135.7 million viewers, only 20 million less than the total number of votes in the 2024 presidential election. Even outside the big game, Americans watch 300 million hours of live sports or shows about sports per day; there are more national sports networks on cable than news networks. To many, sports are more than a pastime, they’re a religion: 21 percent of U.S. adults attend church once a week, but 56 percent watch a sporting event that regularly.
Sports may be the last thing we do together as Americans. It’s the one subject you can bring up at any bar in the country to spur engaged conversation, instead of blank stares or seething anger. We argue about sports without being argumentative; we hate each other’s teams without being hateful; we disagree about players and coaches while being able to point to scoreboards and statistics and common facts.
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Sports connects across generations, geography, and cultures. In a society without much to call civic life, sports is what we have left. Why does it generate this kind of pull? Maybe because it encapsulates the ideals we all like to think America stands for.
There’s the spirit of competition, the idea that everyone has a shot when the game starts. We appreciate upsets and underdogs who triumph over long odds. We thrill to see hard work beat out talent that takes itself for granted. And there’s fairness. Player drafts and salary caps are structured to give bad teams and smaller markets a chance to improve and win. Rulebooks are teeming with procedures and regulations. Referees and umpires watch over the games, and instant replay double-checks their work. Missed calls are remembered for years, and cheaters are branded and defamed; the 1919 Chicago Black Sox are synonymous with game-fixing more than a century later.
On the field, on the court, on the ice, on the pitch, things still work this way. There’s a morality that hangs over sports, something that we, as fans, internalize. The stereotype is that sports fans are meatheads and philistines, but ask them to explain the infield fly rule or a lopsided trade and you’ll hear the precision of a scientist. Regardless of how we manage our lives, regardless of the cynicism with which we view the world, when watching sports we become fastidious sticklers for detail and believers in meritocracy.
Yet outside the lines, the business of sports has separated from what we love about the games. As our economy has been defined by soaring inequality, the rising cost of living, the suppression of workers, and the financialization of everything over the last half-century, those same extractive and exploitative practices have crept their way onto the field of play. It wearies fans, stresses family budgets, shortchanges players, and generates a backlash reminiscent of politics rather than athletics. If America bounces back from this dark period of cronyism and oligarchy, it might actually start with our collective rage against the corruption of sports.
HERE’S A CASE in point.
The state of Kansas, locked in an intense economic development war with neighboring Missouri for decades, just lured the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, one of the sport’s elite franchises and winners of three Super Bowls since 2020, across the border to a proposed domed stadium. For this privilege, the Sunflower State will supply a record $1.8 billion in public funding, plus nearly $1 billion in additional money for a mixed-use development that includes team headquarters, a practice facility, retail, housing, and office space. Add in the fact that the state will own the stadium, meaning the Chiefs won’t have to pay any property taxes, and Kansas will be devoting over $3 billion to move the team 23 miles for eight or nine regular-season games per year.
The Chiefs will be responsible for annual rent payments starting at $7 million, but that money can be used to hire stadium staff, which the team would have to do anyway. Despite being a tenant, the Chiefs will retain all revenue from tickets, parking, concessions, stadium naming rights, in-stadium sponsorships, and “personal seat licenses,” where fans pay thousands of dollars for the mere right to buy season tickets down the road. Even if the stadium hosts a concert or something other than a football game, the Chiefs get the revenue.
Kansas hopes to recoup its investment through sales taxes within a loosely defined “stadium district.” What else does the state get, outside of the psychological benefit of feeling like a world-class location for big-league sports? Exactly one suite inside the stadium, though state officials must pay for their own food.
If America bounces back from this dark period of cronyism and oligarchy, it might start with our collective rage against the corruption of sports.
The main beneficiary of this deal is one of the wealthiest families in America. Lamar Hunt Sr., the late Chiefs owner whose four children now run the team, tried to corner the silver market with his brothers in the 1970s, but he made his fortune the old-fashioned way: inheriting oil wealth from his dad H.L., the model for J.R. Ewing of Dallas fame. The family still runs Hunt Oil, and a different Hunt scion founded a key logistics partner to Walmart. Lamar veered into sports, and in addition to the Chiefs, his heirs control a major league soccer team in Dallas and a minority stake in the NBA’s Chicago Bulls. Forbes estimated the family’s total wealth in 2024 at $24.8 billion.
It’s perhaps counterintuitive that the Hunt family will install about 10,000 fewer seats in their new publicly funded palace than at Arrowhead Stadium, the Chiefs’ longtime home in Missouri. But this is part of a trend of decreasing seating for ordinary fans, and adding more luxury suites, skyboxes, and premium club seating that maximizes revenue. The floor plan of a stadium or arena mirrors America’s legacy of inequality, with the harvesters of great wealth locked away behind glass, and the rabble exposed to the elements and enduring escalating, dynamically priced tickets to watch their heroes.
Welcome to sports in the 21st century.
IN 2003, AUTHOR MICHAEL LEWIS profiled the rise of data and analytics in baseball in his best-seller Moneyball. In a sport that had long relied on the hunches and superstitions of tobacco-chewing scouts, a new generation of young, whip-smart Ivy League grads used complex modeling and exploited market inefficiencies to revolutionize how players were evaluated and teams were constructed. The revolution spread: The NBA, MLB, and the NFL have all been transformed by advanced analytics.
But the revolution didn’t stop on the field. The same Big Data number crunchers and efficiency experts came for the business side of sports. McKinsey is now a strategic adviser to seven of the ten largest sports leagues in the world, and famously advised the Houston Astros during a run that included two World Series championships and a massive cheating scandal. Boston boasted a “Bain mafia,” with alumni steering the Patriots, Red Sox, and Celtics.
They brought with them the cutthroat practices and euphemistic terms honed over decades of gutting companies and fleecing consumers. Revenue management, not attendance or championships, became the hallmark of success for many franchises. Ticket prices have spiked out of control, with airline-style dynamic pricing becoming more of the norm. Team real estate holdings, gambling partnerships, and media licensing deals have become profit centers just as important as the product on the field.
Today, 20 percent of all billionaires own a controlling stake in a professional sports franchise, according to a JPMorgan Chase survey. Sports have now become an asset class, where ownership stakes are traded like corporate bonds. A new rule instituted last December allows a single investment firm to buy stakes in up to eight NBA teams. One private equity firm, Arctos, owns a piece of the Washington Wizards, Memphis Grizzlies, Philadelphia 76ers, Utah Jazz, Sacramento Kings, and Golden State Warriors. Arctos has a share of teams in every major U.S. men’s league, and investments in Formula 1, NASCAR, the English Premier League, and more. And it’s about to get bought out by legendary U.S. private equity leviathan KKR.
This financialization isn’t limited to marquee sports. Forty-three percent of Minor League Baseball teams have private equity ownership investments, with 48 teams owned by a single firm, Diamond Baseball Holdings. The big money pots from college sports media deals and newly paid players have attracted an assortment of money-hungry financiers. And youth sports, a $40 billion per year business that in past generations was sustained by nonprofit sponsorships from the corner hardware store, has become the latest private equity target.
Sports have always been a playground for the rich, but the local tycoons who owned the teams knew enough to make games broadly accessible to expand the fan base. You could listen on the radio or watch on TV for free; the get-in price of attending in person was reasonable. This bred a connection between fans, teams, and their cities, a civic pride that doesn’t show up in many other forms.
Today, the investor-driven mindset collides with the long-standing impulses in sports toward fairness and competition. And people are frustrated. Over 80 percent of Americans surveyed last year believed sporting events are too expensive for them to attend. Meanwhile, the men and women responsible for all the value—the players—struggle for their share of record profits and enormous team valuations. Antitrust lawsuits by players and their representatives have alleged unlawful market power in the last couple of years in mixed martial arts, NASCAR, tennis, and even chess.
When some NFL owners openly encouraged one another, according to a secret arbitrator’s report, to reduce long-term contracts and limit guaranteed money, nobody was very surprised. That the NFL urged owners to do so, and that the players’ union assisted in covering it up, shows that this corporate belief system has infected all levels of sports, including its allegedly neutral arbiters.
The profiteering continues outside the stadium. One company called Fanatics describes itself as “the Amazon of sports,” controlling long-term licenses for most major league apparel and merchandise, along with collectibles, trading cards, and even a loyalty program. Fanatics is one of a handful of companies profiting from an enormous influx in live sports betting, which employs the tactics of surveillance inherent in most tech platforms to addict compulsive gamblers and drive them into ruin.
Even recreational activities are structured to benefit corporate conglomerates. Two private equity firms have driven up the cost of skiing, and investment firms now dominate skateboarding. A company called The Picklr has rolled up practically all pickleball leagues and brands, while closing series B funding at a $59 million valuation.
If this sounds astonishingly similar to the state of American commerce and governance in the year 2026, keep in mind that the current president once owned a football franchise.
THIS SPECIAL ISSUE WILL PROVIDE a tour of the business of sports. We’ll detail the ways average fans are being priced out of the arena, and how parents are struggling to give their kids the Little League experience they had growing up. We’ll look at how leagues have invited gambling apps to manipulate our willpower and take our money, and how this is threatening the integrity of the game. We’ll examine how big money tempts players into rotten financial deals, and how college athletes finally getting paid has triggered an outcry—from the people who used to reap all the cash.
We’ll study the role of unions in rebalancing the power structure between players and management. And we’ll take stock of the historical money pit associated with hosting international sports spectacles, and how the Trump administration’s brutal immigration enforcement might make that even worse.
It may seem a little odd to longtime readers to have an entire Prospect issue based on sports. But the truth is that sports have always been political, have always been bound up with who has power in America, and have almost always led and not followed our movements for progress.
In 1936, Jesse Owens’s feats in Berlin put the lie to Hitler’s theories of Aryan superiority; America fought a war to prevent those beliefs from global domination. Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947 was just the most prominent of a number of similar milestones, from Kenny Washington and Woody Strode in the NFL a year earlier to the 1966 Texas Western men’s basketball team, the first all-Black starting five to win the NCAA national championship. As civil rights channeled into Black power, an enduring image of the era is the raised fists of John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
Other icons enabled progress on the business side of sports, big and small. Marvin Miller’s Major League Baseball Players Association in 1966 generated the first-ever collective-bargaining agreement in pro sports, giving players long-sought leverage over their financial futures. In 1978, a San Francisco Giants fan named Ron Gordon objected to the windfall profits associated with a five-cent upcharge in the price of hot dogs and beer at Candlestick Park, and after a year-long crusade, he got the hot dog markup rescinded.
Across U.S. politics, we see anger at runaway wealth inequality, a soaring cost of living, and struggles to afford not just the bare necessities but a little leisure time in reserve. The public approves of unions at the highest level in decades and abhors corruption enabling the rich to get richer without accountability. The moment is ripe for overturning the political and economic establishment, dismantling corporate consolidation, and rebalancing power in America. These causes are rooted in the ideals of fairness and competition that are endemic to playing sports. It’s only natural that fans, players, and people around the game would want the same principles to apply to the business side.
“The public has done a lot to support these leagues,” said Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA), a Pittsburgh-area congressman and sports fan who is working on legislation around the financialization of sports. “There’s a lot of civic pride and we want the teams to do well. But the other side of the bargain, they have to treat people fairly, so everyone can be able to enjoy something that’s part of the city and our lives.”
Fans understand the business of sports in ways that do not apply to other industries. They can tell when they’re being screwed, when the ownership class is exploiting their love of the game for profit. Their anger, channeled correctly, can be a vehicle for change. And as our last remaining monoculture, these fights around sports can give life to issues that may otherwise recede into the background.
In these pages, you will recognize the same patterns that have infected modern capitalism and the same solutions that can bring them to heel. If the business of sports reflects how America works today and who it works for, the common fans who make sports so valuable really can signal a way out of our political mess.
The post Behind the Bleachers appeared first on The American Prospect.