In the time of ancient Rome, huge crowds of the uneducated populous would gather to watch the spectacle of watching men battling each other to the death. The elite of the Roman society used these athletic events to keep the masses entertained, to draw their attention away from their miserable conditions and redirect it to entertainment.
Today we live in a somewhat less violent culture, where the killing of humans for entertainment would be considered inhumane and abhorrent. However, our society has a growing wealth inequality that is giving more and more power to the elites of our society.
Meanwhile, conditions for the lowest class of people in the United States get worse. Those who control the wealth in our society have the power, and they have an interest in keeping it that way. Just like the Roman elites, the wealthy in the U.S. need large events to distract the low income populous from their unpleasant circumstances. One example of an event like that would be the Super Bowl that occurred during the weekend.
According to Yahoo TV, the Super Bowl had an average viewership of 111.9 million Sunday. This is a huge event that drew in enormous amounts of money. This is the biggest issue with the Super Bowl, or professional football in general. It essentially serves the same role in our society that gladiators did in the Roman Empire.
Proponents of the Super Bowl and professional sports in the U.S. will give endless examples of what they assert as benefits of professional sports. Some of these examples may even truly be benefits, but in this case, the ends do not justify the means. Not only is the Super Bowl clearly just entertainment for the masses, but it also has negative effects for both the players and for society.
The NFL players are paid millions of dollars to compete under rigorous conditions and a lot of pressure. In many cases careers of NFL players are ended because of a physical injury they endure during their experiences playing for the NFL. I’m sure that most of the players probably consider their jobs to be very good, and they probably love to play football, but the reality is that those players who are not well established are in a very risky situation under a lot of pressure.
Professional sports are one of the biggest obsessions of the people in the U.S. Huge amounts of money are exchanged in support of professional football in the U.S., and many people watch a sporting event at least once a week or more. While there are some redeeming qualities represented by professional sports, there are also many negative things promoted by the NFL. For instance, professional sports like football support gender norms about masculinity teaching young boys that they need to be tough and violent with other males and that young females need to wear sexual outfits and cheer from the sidelines. Football does not offer any intellectual lessons and is all about physical dominance. Advocates of the NFL will say that it teaches kids about teamwork and working hard. The truth is that these life lessons can be learned (and probably are much better learned) by kids playing the sports themselves. Professional sports are not adding these “life lessons,” they are corrupting those lessons and forcing them into a system that uses them for profit.
The NFL exploits athletes’ talents to profit from the entertaining of Americans. I’m not trying to argue that if you enjoy the NFL you are unintelligent or morally wrong; my point is that the NFL takes the very real benefits of sports and athleticism and capitalizes upon them in order to make a profit.
