Someone's About to Get Screwed
The line between players and owners in professional sports is blurring fast — and that's both the most exciting and most unsettling thing happening in the business of sports right now.
Professional sports are entering a strange new era.
For decades, the relationship between players and owners was clear. Players generated the value. Owners controlled the teams and the appreciating assets. Collective bargaining was adversarial, but everyone understood which side they were on.
That clarity is disappearing.
More former players than ever are becoming investors, media executives, franchise stakeholders, venture capital participants, and members of ownership groups themselves. For the first time in a major American league (NBA), even active players can now hold indirect ownership stakes in franchises.
That is real progress. Players gaining access to the appreciating asset matters. But it raises a hard question: What happens to solidarity and collective action when the aspiration for many superstar players is to become ownership--not negotiate with ownership?
My friend Byron Auguste once described a phenomenon he calls "above the verticals." Some people eventually move beyond the categories the rest of us inhabit. They are no longer simply labor or management, athlete or owner, operator or investor. They move above those "vertical" lanes to transact across industries and professional networks simultaneously, unencumbered. Money and opportunities flow differently around them and their friends.
That elite room is expanding rapidly in sports. Having spent much of my career inside sports and entertainment, I find this both exciting and unsettling.
Exciting because athletes historically excluded from ownership are finally gaining access to capital participation and long-term wealth creation.
Unsettling because collective bargaining depends on adversarial clarity – on understanding whose interests are aligned and which side of the table you are on. Clarity is essential for solidarity; solidarity is essential for leverage and power. Without that, players get screwed.
The frameworks governing professional sports were built for a world where labor and ownership were distinct identities.
We are entering something far more complicated. The old fight was labor versus ownership. The next one may be over who gets absorbed into ownership – and who gets left behind.
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