349. How Sports Became Us

Dollar-wise, the sports industry is surprisingly small, about the same size as the cardboard-box industry. So why does it make so much noise? Because it reflects — and often amplifies — just about every political, economic, and social issue of the day. Introducing a new series, “The Hidden Side of Sports.”

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Upfront payment, $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabytes hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work is a new way to work in ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work can pull info from across your apps and connect to your tools to help you create finished work. You can even automate work in ChatGPT with the Scheduled Tasks feature, and the whole

• 2:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  time, you stay in control. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  The fact of the matter is, superstars do win championships.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Football is for the men.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  I hit her as hard as I could. The San Francisco 49ers quarterback knelt during the National Anthem.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Sports has a social impact that is way, way bigger than its economic impact.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  Introducing a special series.

• 2:52Speaker 05

  This was the moment I realized that baseball is a business. I have an eight-year-old son. There's no way I'd let him play tackle football.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  From Freakonomics Radio.

• 3:00Speaker 06

  My body took over. My mind shut off. Things hang in the balance. Outcomes are unclear. You cannot be afraid to fail.

• 3:06Speaker 07

  That could be the reason you're telling your second-grade daughter that she's moving next week.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  The hidden side of sports.

• 3:12Speaker 08

  I had never been in an environment that was so emotionally charged, where grown men were hugging and kissing each other.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 3:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  On a damp, windy day in May 1954, a handful of runners were getting loose at the Ifley Road Track in Oxford, England. One of them was named Roger Bannister.

• 3:42Speaker 09

  Roger Bannister limbers up for a planned attack on that four-minute mile never before achieved by man.

• 3:47Speaker 10

  This isn't like the tracks we're used to thinking of now. This was cinders.

• 3:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's David Epstein, a science journalist and author of The Sports Gene.

• 3:55Speaker 10

  And it was sort of a small, unimportant track meet, but it was known that Bannister would be making this attempt.

• 4:02Speaker 09

  Man against the mile, a supreme test of courage, of human will, of determination.

• 4:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bannister, 25 years old, had finished fourth in the 1500 meters, the rough equivalent of a mile, in the Olympic Games two years earlier. He was, like many athletes of his era, an amateur. In his case, a medical student working at St. Mary's Hospital in London.

• 4:24Speaker 10

  You know, just before he made the attempt, he went on a hiking vacation just to relax. And the morning of, he did medical rounds.

• 4:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because of his studies, Bannister had less than an hour a day to train for his attempt on the four-minute mile. The day was so windy that he nearly canceled his run. It also rained a bit. There were barely 1,000 spectators. But then, the wind died down, and Roger Bannister toed the line.

• 4:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you think happened? Do you think we'd really be telling you this story if Roger Bannister hadn't finally broken the four-minute barrier? Here, in Bannister's own words, is how it unfolded.

• 5:04Speaker 11

  As the gun fired, my legs seemed to meet no resistance at all, almost as if impelled by an unknown force.

• 5:12Speaker 10

  And as he comes around each lap, he's just about directly on four-minute mile pace.

• 5:19Speaker 11

  By now, the crowd was roaring. A four-minute mile was possible.

• 5:23Speaker 10

  And then for the last lap, he basically has to run a little bit faster.

• 5:27Speaker 11

  Somehow, to do it, I had to run the last lap in 59 seconds.

• 5:32Speaker 10

  And he gives it his all.

• 5:34Speaker 11

  Those last few seconds seemed never ending.

• 5:37Speaker 10

  He leans through, breaks through the finishing tape with his mouth wide open.

• 5:41Speaker 11

  My effort was over, and I collapsed, almost unconscious, with an arm on either side.

• 5:46Speaker 10

  And one of the iconic photos is these men in trench coats leaning over with stopwatches and someone reads off the time, because there's no huge digital clock on a Jumbotron.

• 5:56Speaker 11

  I knew I had done it before I even heard the time.

• 6:00Speaker 12

  Up to the finishing line. Time: 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds, shattering the four-minute mile, the Everest of athletic achievement.

• 6:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Everest comparison was no accident. Just a year earlier, a British-led expedition had been the first to summit the world's highest mountain. In a country still recovering from World War II, Roger Bannister paid attention to such accomplishments.

• 6:25Speaker 10

  And he viewed feats like a summiting of Mount Everest as these beacons of hope and rebuilding for the United Kingdom. And he saw his quest to run under four minutes in the mile as part of that.

• 6:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Could a simple footrace really affect the psyche of a nation? There are a lot of reasons that so many of us find sports so compelling. At the most basic level, we find thrill in the competition, the athleticism, the entertainment. But do we sometimes assign too much meaning to sports, to mere races and games and fights? Maybe. But you could also argue that sport has done a pretty good job throughout history of mirroring society at large: the politics, the economics, the social issues, as well as exploring the limits of human achievement. By 1954, the sub-four-minute mile had stood for years as a seemingly impassable barrier.

• 7:25Speaker 10

  The number of other athletes kept getting closer and closer but not breaking through. Athletes were told like their legs would fall off if they ran fast enough to run under four minutes a mile. And so it sort of looked like it was this asymptote of human performance in certain ways.

• 7:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pardon me? An asymptote of human performance? Yeah, I don't know what that means either. Here, let's ask a mathematician.

• 7:51Speaker 13

  So what is an asymptote? An asymptote is a straight line that approaches a curve and gets closer and closer, but never actually intersects it. This is the mathematical definition.

• 8:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's John Urschel.

• 8:06Speaker 13

  I'm a PhD student in mathematics at MIT. I work mainly in graph theory, applied to things like machine learning and combinatorial optimization.

• 8:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Roger Bannister proved the four-minute mile wasn't actually an asymptote. Is there a better example?

• 8:22Speaker 13

  Well, when you're skydiving, the longer you're in the air, the faster and faster you're falling, and the closer and closer you get to terminal velocity, but you never quite reach it. This is an asymptote.

• 8:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, good to know. Also, good to know, John Urschel, before getting his PhD in math, had a pretty solid first career.

• 8:48Speaker 13

  I'm a former NFL offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens.

• 8:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Urschel played three seasons in the NFL, but retired abruptly just before his fourth was about to start.

• 8:57Speaker 13

  I retired early mainly to focus on math.

• 9:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Urschel quit just as he was entering his peak years in terms of ability and earning potential. Why? One factor was a new report that seemed to strengthen the link between football and long-term brain damage.

• 9:16Speaker 13

  How much brain damage do I have? I don't know, and it's extremely hard to know.

• 9:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Brain damage has become a huge concern in modern sports, especially in the obvious contact sports like football. Back in the 1950s, meanwhile, not so much. As David Epstein was telling us, Roger Bannister's era was less about self-preservation and more about pushing what seemed to be our natural limits, like the idea that it wasn't physiologically possible for a human to run a mile in less than four minutes.

• 9:49Speaker 10

  But Bannister didn't feel that way. He knew as a medical student that 4 flat .01 wasn't different than 359.9, and so there was no real barrier.

• 10:03Speaker 11

  My legs seemed to meet no resistance at all, almost as if impelled by an unknown force.

• 10:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Roger Bannister ran one more sub-four-minute mile after that gray day in Oxford and promptly retired as an athlete. He went on to have a long and distinguished career as a neurologist. He died just this year at age 88. Today, more than 1,500 men have run the mile in less than four minutes. The current world record is just over 3 minutes and 43 seconds. What's the secret of this seemingly superhuman accomplishment? Here's how Bannister once put it. "It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ." Mind over matter, another reason that sports intrigue us. And it seems to work in sports as non-traditional as competitive eating.

• 10:55Speaker 14

  I can't believe it, the new record, 50.

• 10:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's Takeru Kobayashi, the Japanese eating superstar, telling us through an interpreter, how he doubled the world record of 25 and 1/8 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes.

• 11:10Speaker 15

  It has nothing to do with how you normally enjoy a meal. It's just a physical action.

• 11:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  A physical action that Kobayashi performed by stretching the mind, by consciously challenging every piece of conventional wisdom, the training, the methodology, the strategy, and finding a better way to eat fast.

• 11:32Speaker 15

  I think the thing about human beings is that they make a limit in their mind of what their potential is. So if every human being actually throw away those thoughts, the potential of human beings, I think, is really great. I think it's huge compared to what they actually think of themselves. I mean, if everyone could use it for everything, then everything could be much better.

• 11:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Everything could be much better? Can sport really deliver this kind of promise? Maybe, maybe not. But it certainly delivers a unique set of attributes.

• 12:07Speaker 06

  I mean, sports are such an absorbing world that I never really knew about much or cared about much until I had a child who was fascinated by all of it.

• 12:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Jennifer Egan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.

• 12:20Speaker 06

  And it's amazing how they provide a kind of structure of meaning in people's lives. Teams that you root for, the business of sports, things hang in the balance, outcomes are unclear, there are infinite narratives to it. And it's something you can touch in all different areas of your life at all different times.

• 12:40Speaker 16

  I don't like sports, but you've got to admire the energy, creativity, innovation that goes into sports.

• 12:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that is Dana Joya, the poet laureate of California and a former National Endowment for the Arts chairman.

• 12:55Speaker 16

  And it's very similar to arts. It's a way of focusing human energy to create these symbolic encounters, which have enormous emotional resonance to audiences.

• 13:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Emotional resonance, focusing human energy, infinite narratives and unclear outcomes, the business of sports, and of course, the costs and benefits of rooting for your favorite team, or for your kid. These are just some of the reasons that we're launching this special Freakonomics Radio series, The Hidden Side of Sports. Over the past several months, we've been interviewing dozens of world-class athletes, coaches, owners, union officials, league officials, and more. For instance.

• 13:34Speaker 17

  I'm Mark Cuban.

• 13:38Speaker 18

  My name is Michaela Shifrin, and I am an Alpine ski racer.

• 13:42Speaker 17

  My name is Lance Armstrong, and I'm, what do I do? Doug Peterson, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. I'm Dan Patrick, and I'm a sportscaster.

• 13:50Speaker 19

  I'm Kim Ang of Major League Baseball. Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets.

• 13:55Speaker 20

  Lawrence Epstein, I'm the chief operating officer at the ultimate fighting championship. Jed York, I'm the CEO of the San Francisco 49ers.

• 14:02Speaker 21

  Kerry Walsh Jennings, I'm a professional beach volleyball player.

• 14:05Speaker 22

  Bob Tewksbury, I am the mental skills coach for the San Francisco Giants.

• 14:09Speaker 23

  Simone Manuel, and I am a professional swimmer.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  Mark Teixeira, currently ESPN analyst.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Lauren Murphy, and I'm a UFC fighter.

• 14:19Speaker 17

  I'm Brandon McCarthy, I am a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves.

• 14:22Speaker 08

  Stephanie LeBeille, I'm a professional soccer player.

• 14:24Speaker 24

  Demaryius Smith, I'm the executive director of the NFL Players Association.

• 14:28Speaker 25

  What's up, guys? I'm Jimmy Garoppolo, and you're listening to Freakonomics Radio.

• 14:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey. Thanks, Jimmy. And don't worry, we also interviewed some economists.

• 14:38Speaker 05

  Our beliefs in streaks are much stronger than the data actually supports. The chance of having soccer be your vehicle to get to college as opposed to fencing turns out to be about 75 or 80 times harder.

• 14:50Speaker 24

  The rule of thumb is a second round pick this year is equal to a first round pick next year.

• 14:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  One question we'll ask the athletes is what exactly drives them to excel? To get back up after failure and injury and to just keep pushing? Like Kerry Walsh Jennings, who's won four Olympic medals in beach volleyball, three of them gold.

• 15:15Speaker 21

  I'm going for my sixth Olympics and I'm turning 40 in a couple of weeks. And I'm, you know, playing against these young kids who I was where they were, obviously, 20 years ago. And it's so nutty, but I'm still going through the same process of leveling up, aspiring to go higher, looking in the mirror, do you got it? Do you want it? Yes, carry on.

• 15:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  As much intrinsic motivation as sport may require, there's plainly a strong extrinsic motivator, too. I don't mean the fame. I don't mean the glory. I mean the money. I think when all is said and done, I'll be maybe somewhere around 70 million, having made. That's Brandon McCarthy, who's pitched for seven Major League Baseball teams over 13 seasons. There is a lot more money in sports today than there was 50 or 100 years ago, at least for the athletes at the top of the pyramid. We spoke with another longtime baseball player, the recently retired Mark Teixeira, who made out even better than McCarthy.

• 16:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  So your ultimate deal, which was in 2009, coming to the New York Yankees, correct? Yep. Eight-year, $180 million deal, correct? Yep. All guaranteed? All guaranteed in baseball, yep. The money in basketball is pretty good, too. Here's longtime NBA player J.J. Reddick. So you're going to have, in the next 10 to 15 years, you're going to have...

• 16:30Speaker 13

  A ton of guys who have made 100 to 200 to 300 million dollars in their career.

• 16:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  But because the top earning athletes are the most prominent, we tend to magnify how much most athletes get paid. Consider the NFL, which is the richest, most successful sports league in history. There are 53 players on a given NFL team's roster compared to 25 in baseball for most of the season and an average of 14 in the NBA. 53 football players. That's a lot of salaries to pay. The average NFL salary is around $2 million and the average career is just a few years long. John Urschel, the former NFL player who jumped ship for a math career, played offensive lineman, a position with an average salary of around $1.7 million a year when he entered the league.

• 17:20Speaker 13

  You take away taxes, you take away agent fees, you take away NFLPA fees.

• 17:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  The NFLPA, that's the Players Union.

• 17:27Speaker 13

  Now, let's say you're down to a million, under a million perhaps. And now this has to last you for the rest of your life, paired with whatever your next career is, as opposed to say, well, how many doctors are there in the US? The stable income over, say, 40 years beats the 1.6 million income over three years.

• 17:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  And again, that is if you happen to be among the best of the best of the best athletes who make it into the richest sports league in history. What about the average player in the most popular global sport, soccer, or what the rest of the world calls football? Here's Andrew Orsady, a former professional soccer player who now works for FIFA Pro, the International Players Union.

• 18:14Speaker 26

  If you look at the media, of course, every player is a multimillionaire driving a Ferrari. That's a myth because the tens of thousand players we represent, 14,000 of which we surveyed recently, are earning 1,000 US dollars a month after tax. Okay? Forget what you see of Cristiano Ronaldo moving to Juventus. Forget what you see of Lionel Messi, the English Premier League, La Liga. Forget it all. Think about the mechanism below which feeds those who get to the top, the very few who get to the top, the top 1%. That's not the reality.

• 18:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  The reality is that soccer relies on what is essentially a massive, global migrant labor workforce.

• 18:59Speaker 27

  Singapore, Australia and the US, then Germany. After Germany, we were Switzerland.

• 19:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's David Lowe. He was born in Singapore and for about 10 years, hopped all over the world playing pro soccer. He never earned more than about $2,000 a month and usually much less.

• 19:15Speaker 27

  And then I went to Thailand. After Thailand was Mongolia. After Mongolia was, I went to Iceland. And then I trained in France. And then from France, I signed to play in New Zealand. After New Zealand, then I went to Italy.

• 19:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you are an aspiring athlete, you quickly realize that while you may be the featured attraction, the compensation doesn't necessarily follow.

• 19:44Speaker 24

  The reality is they are management and we are labor.

• 19:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Demora Smith, who runs the NFL Players Association.

• 19:52Speaker 24

  The history of labor and management in the United States has been one, for the most part, where management has successfully lobbied and changed laws through litigation that have affected a net negative for employees.

• 20:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some sports ecosystems are particularly warped. Consider college football and basketball in the US, where the athletes are paid $0 while generating billions for the universities.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  My freshman year in college, my head coach got a $10 million extension. And that was when I was like, oh. We aren't a team, we're a business. And that was when the light went on for me.

• 20:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Dominique Foxworth. He played college football at Maryland, then six seasons in the NFL. His final contract paid him about $27 million over four years. But he learned early on that football is a business and a particularly high-risk one.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  I've been on the field a couple of times where people have been paralyzed. I played in a preseason game in the NFL where a guy died in a locker room afterward. We had practice at Maryland where a helicopter came to take one player off the field. And the coach said, move it down. And we kept doing the drills as the helicopter was taking one of our teammates who couldn't move to the hospital.

• 21:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Foxworth was at Maryland in the early 2000s. The current Maryland football coach, D.J. Durkin, was recently placed on administrative leave after a player died during a spring workout. Dominique Foxworth, for his part, got an MBA from Harvard after he left football. His wife has three graduate degrees, two from Harvard, including a law degree. They have three kids, two girls and a boy. I asked Foxworth, considering his own history and the growing body of research about football and brain damage, what happens if his son wants to play?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  He's only five now, and I say no. I mean, it's not a problem that we're actually facing at this point, but I would say no.

• 21:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if he comes to you and says, hey, Dad, I know before I was born, you were amazing, NFL player, did a great career, et cetera. What do you mean no? What are you talking about?

• 22:11Speaker 02

  I mean, I think the research wasn't there. I suspect my parents would not have let me play when I was that age if there was information available. And like, it's not even clear information, but what is clear is that it does put you at higher risk. And like, the best-case scenario is that you play professional football and you make a lot of money. Like, I wasn't, I was far from poor growing up, like, middle-class. But like, I went to Baltimore County Public Schools. I was, I guess, that's not my son's experience. I didn't have access to the things that he'll have access to. So like, I frankly-

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Think that he is starting in a much better place than I am. So he should do much better than than banging his head into other people's head for money. Like, it seems like a step back to me, honestly.

• 23:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then what about you? Do you worry about your brain? Does your wife worry about your brain?

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, I it feels like you're living a horror movie, honestly, where it's like this thing lurking in the background. And so, I mean, it's scary. And I think that what is most frightening is, right now, I would do it all over because of what it's done for me and my family.

• 23:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, yes, along with the fun of watching and playing and following sports, along with the emotional resonance, the infinite narratives and unclear outcomes, you can't deny that sports can also be complicated and full of conflict. Sport is, in fact, an exercise in conflict. You're trying to beat someone, to outrun, deceive them, to take what's theirs, make it yours. But there's a ton of conflict outside the game, too. And that's another reason we're launching this series, to explore those conflicts. For instance, the relationship between athletes and ownership.

• 24:09Speaker 24

  There are going to be core philosophical differences between us.

• 24:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's also the conflict between fair play and wanting to win maybe just a bit too badly. Here's the cyclist Lance Armstrong, who was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles after he was proven to have used the doping agent erythropoietin, or EPO.

• 24:31Speaker 17

  The sport of cycling in the mid 90s, EPO was like wildfire. And we were holding out, holding out, holding out. And we got to this this moment, which we're like, oh, my God. We don't have a choice. Or, well, we do have a choice. Our choice is to go home. We could just quit, retire. But if we want to stay and fight, we all walking around with knives because we were told we were going to a knife fight. And next thing you know, everybody had guns. And we said, oh, [BLEEP]. These boys are carrying guns. And so in the spring of 95, we went to the gun store.

• 25:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll also explore the conflict between gut instinct in sports and the growing reliance on data and analytics. Here's the Philadelphia Eagles' Super Bowl-winning coach Doug Peterson.

• 25:18Speaker 24

  There's a lot of data available to us and, you know, it can be overwhelming, take you away from the football aspect of it, but I just take a slice of it and try to use it to our benefit, you know, for that week.

• 25:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we'll hear the UFC fighter Lauren Murphy talk about the conflict between being a peace-loving human and a UFC fighter.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  The fight started and I hit her as hard as I could and she actually fell down. She, like, I knocked her down with the first punch and I was so green and so naive, I didn't even realize what had happened. I remember distinctly looking at her and thinking, what are you doing on the floor? And so I let her get up, just because I didn't know really what was going on, and then I hit her again and that was, that was it.

• 26:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, as you can see, we've got a lot of ground to cover in this Hidden Side of Sports series and we'll be exploring all of it over the next few weeks and then periodically over the next few months. After the break, we'll get things started with a look at just how big the sports industry is and how we got here.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  We've seen professionalized athletes in the world for, you know, at least 2,500 years now.

• 26:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Also, not everyone in sports fits the jock stereotype.

• 26:28Speaker 19

  And the flight attendant comes up to me and she says, so, what did you do to get on this plane?

• 26:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's coming up after the break. And if you want to hear our full, unedited interviews with some of the athletes, coaches, executives, and others featured in The Hidden Side of Sports, sign up for Stitcher Premium at stitcherpremium.com/freakonomics. We'll be releasing those interviews over the course of the series. We'll be right back.

• 26:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio, sponsored by Granola. You know that moment when a meeting ends and someone says, let's circle back on this next week, and everyone nods, but no one writes it down? Then next week rolls around and it's radio silence? That's why Granola exists. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. And the best part? Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. No setup, no awkward bots. It's just your normal meeting with superpowers. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free.

• 27:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just head to granola.ai/freakonomics. That's granola.ai/freakonomics to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai/freakonomics. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Quince. You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself wearing on repeat? The sweater that goes with everything? The perfect pair of pants? Or the tee you somehow always reach for first? Those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and merino wool.

• 28:26Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 29:06Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 29:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  The National Football League, as you may have heard, is having some problems. A huge concern about player safety, as we heard from John Urschel and Dominique Foxworth, the contentious National Anthem protests, which we'll hear about later, and the NFL's audience has shrunk a bit. But let's be honest, the NFL is still a juggernaut. Of the top 50 shows on TV last year, 37 were football games. To understand why, to understand why sports are such a big deal to so many people, let's start with a man who pretty much asks himself that question every day.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Sure, this is Victor Matheson. I'm a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

• 30:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Matheson specializes in the economics of sport.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm one of the editors of the Journal of Sports Economics. I'm also the current president of the North American Association of Sports Economists, and I'm also the author of The Economics of Sports, sixth edition, which is, I think, the top sports economics textbook in the world. So I kind of have a trifecta going on right now.

• 30:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, Victor, are you yourself now, or have you ever been, an athlete or otherwise seriously involved in sports?

• 30:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I was actually a referee for Major League Soccer for about 10 years.

• 30:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, no kidding.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, my college coach, when I was playing, took a look at me and said, hey, you know, I've been watching the way you play the game, and I think you might make an excellent referee.

• 31:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Victor, how old are you, if you don't mind me asking?

• 31:12Speaker 03

  So I am turning 49 next week.

• 31:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, happy birthday. Can you talk for a minute, then, about the ways in which sports, especially the business of sports, is different from when you were a kid?

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Sports have become bigger and bigger and bigger business. So a little before my childhood, but not much more before that, we would have athletes in the NBA and NFL have full-time jobs in the offseason because you're not making enough in the season to actually survive without having something to do in the offseason. I'm here at Holy Cross. Our most famous athlete is Bob Cousy, the first great point guard. He lives in a very modest house here in Worcester because he never made $40 million a year like a top NBA player might make now. And so, obviously, that's a huge difference.

• 32:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right, and other than, I guess, the obvious answer of we like to watch sports and consume all things around sports, why else do you think that sports have such an appeal that makes them so valuable, that ultimately generates so many dollars and eyeballs?

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Well, number one, we make more money and we have more free time today than we did in the past. And so, we have a lot more disposable income to spend on play and on recreation and on toys than we did a generation or two generations or three generations ago. Number two, we also have technology that helps us enjoy sports in a way we didn't in the past either. So, I am not super old, but old enough to remember watching sports on the 19-inch black-and-white TV that we had. And obviously, my flat-screen 50-inch high-def TV

• 33:04Speaker 03

  that I can watch, shocker, from any country in the world at any time I want, on demand, is certainly a much better recreation option than trying to pick out exactly which kind of gray player was playing against what other kind of gray player back as a kid.

• 33:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what can you tell us about the size of the sports industry and how it compares to other industries?

• 33:29Speaker 03

  So the answer here is actually surprisingly small. So the biggest league in the world in terms of revenue generated is the NFL, and the NFL generates something like $14, $15 billion a year. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "Well, $14, $15, that sounds like a lot of money." That's roughly the same size as Sherwin-Williams. So the typical American buys as much paint from Sherwin-Williams as it does buying NFL products from the largest league in the world. You add in all these other American leagues, NBA, Major League Baseball, the NHL, Major

• 34:09Speaker 03

  League Soccer, plus the PGA, and pro tennis, and mixed martial arts, and all these things, add them all up together, you've got maybe $50 billion of pro sports, a few more tens of billions of dollars in college sports, but you're still only up at $60, $70 billion. That makes spectator sports in the United States roughly the same size as the cardboard box industry in the United States. Now, obviously, none of us gather around the water cooler on Monday morning saying, "Hey, man, do you see that awesome cardboard box that American paper just put out?" Of course we don't.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  So sports has a social impact that is way, way bigger than its economic impact.

• 35:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so why does an industry that's only as big as the cardboard box industry matter so much? Here's one explanation. Athletic competition has been around a long time.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  So we've seen professionalized athletes in the world for at least 2,500 years now. And so we see stories about people winning gold medals at the early Olympics, having lifetime supplies of food that you could eat anywhere in the city for free forever, or receiving large payments that are in the vicinity of hundreds of thousands of dollars, even back in the pre-B.C. days.

• 35:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  But let's be clear. Long before there was professional sport, there was sport.

• 35:48Speaker 28

  I think the earliest sports were individual. So that Pharaoh Thutmose would strike the ball for Hator, for the glory of the gods.

• 36:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's John Thorne.

• 36:01Speaker 28

  I'm the official historian for Major League Baseball.

• 36:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thorne says sports have always been connected to sacrifice and to the regeneration of seasons.

• 36:11Speaker 28

  There is a reason why baseball begins in the spring and ends in the fall. And cricket likewise.

• 36:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what can you tell us about the ancient history of sport as a proxy for war and/or violence?

• 36:27Speaker 28

  Well, one reasonably well-known episode was at Plural Mill in a battle for a very small piece of land. Rather than have a massacre of hundreds of troops on each side, there were delegations formed. The 30 best men of one side against the 30 best men of another, and both sides agreed to abide by the outcome. I believe this is the origin of team sport.

• 36:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  This happened in 1351, during the Hundred Years' War between the English and the French. This event came to be known as the Combat of Thirty. Some of the historical details are disputed, but generally, it's thought that thirty knights on each side engaged in controlled combat over several hours with breaks in between. The French won. It's believed that four of their men were killed, while the English death toll was at least double that. Over time, this contest came to be held up as a shining example of chivalry. Better a dozen dead than hundreds, yes? If you think it's a stretch to label this deadly encounter the beginning of team sport, well, when's the last time you watched an NFL game?

• 37:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Two opposing armies in offsetting uniforms, each with a captain, a rank and file, and marching orders, using physical violence to push into enemy territory. Even the language of war permeates the game. A blitzing linebacker penetrates the offensive line to sack the quarterback. Now, some people may find this militarization off-putting, some may enjoy it, and some, maybe the majority of sports fans, don't think about it at all. They just revel in the excitement of a physical battle with stakes that seem high, but compared to actual war are absurdly low. Except, of course, for the warriors themselves.

• 38:30Speaker 13

  How much brain damage do I have?

• 38:33Speaker 02

  I don't know. I played in a preseason game in the NFL where a guy died in a locker room afterwards.

• 38:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, sport seems to have been a proxy for war, at least as far back as the 14th century. In the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, it became a tool for colonialism, which helps explain how sports went global. The British Empire, as it took over massive swaths of land and people, wasn't just spreading its politics and religion, but also its sports. It invented, codified, and evangelized a number of games, including cricket, soccer, and tennis. This was seen to serve many purposes: replacing native culture with a version the British considered superior, increasing physical fitness of the native populations with an eye toward grooming the best soldiers,

• 39:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  and instilling an appreciation for fair play, rule-following, and, if you want to be just a tiny bit cynical, for subjugation. The United States, in its early days, thought of sport similarly, promoting it as a form of muscular Christianity. I asked John Thorne about this. I'm curious if you could talk about a few different elements of baseball and how they either exemplified or maybe even encouraged some of the behaviors that came to be known as hallmarks of Americanism.

• 39:57Speaker 28

  Jingoism, bragging, cheating, all of these things have a great, a great tenure in, in baseball as in America. And those, and those things that were barely tolerated in drawing rooms were absolutely adored on the ball field.

• 40:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  I was thinking of maybe some positive attributes like fair play and rule of law and so on.

• 40:17Speaker 28

  Well, fair play and rule of law are taming. The tendency to invite women to watch the games goes back to the 1850s because women were thought to be a civilizing influence, that men would not swear quite as much, they would not engage in physical confrontations.

• 40:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was baseball itself considered a civilizing influence, however, on Native Americans and perhaps other groups?

• 40:42Speaker 28

  Sure. Because baseball was imbued with American values or was thought to be, the export of baseball to minority communities, to foreign countries, generally through military occupation, was a part of the rite of passage, that if you were going to Americanize Japan, if you were going to Americanize Cuba, if you were going to Americanize Brazil, then you brought baseball with you. When Barack Obama and Raul Castro became closer and tried to end 50 years of hostilities, baseball was the mechanism. Because baseball, in the

• 41:27Speaker 28

  19th century, baseball was a very great thing. It was a great thing because everyone could agree that it was a great thing.

• 41:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Baseball was a great thing for John Thorne himself.

• 41:36Speaker 28

  I would say that...

• 41:40Speaker 28

  Sports was my way of becoming American.

• 41:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thorn immigrated to the US with his family in the 1950s when he was two years old. They were Jews from Poland.

• 41:52Speaker 28

  It was a matter of inclusion where perhaps not all other avenues were open to me. I became a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I think any self-respecting Jew would have to select the Dodgers. They were the outsiders and they included Jackie Robinson, who was an early hero for me.

• 42:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jackie Robinson was the first black player allowed to play in Major League Baseball.

• 42:15Speaker 28

  I think what the Dodgers showed me and what baseball showed me was that anybody could be an American, even me.

• 42:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, John, how does baseball and/or other sports affect the social and political and cultural objectives and dreams of America? That's what I really want to know.

• 42:34Speaker 28

  Well, I think sports is all about sublimation. We all think of sport as wonderful fun in and of itself, whether engaged in or spectated. And in fact, when we go to a ballgame or we watch one on TV, we are affiliating with a civic entity and we sublimate our martial instincts by pouring them into sport. For two hours, three hours, four hours, we allow ourselves and those around us to be somebody other than whom we are on a nine-to-five basis during the week or in our own households. We can paint our faces. We can wear silly

• 43:18Speaker 28

  hats. We can drink ourselves silly. We can yell insulting epithets at the umpire or certain players.

• 43:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you argue that's generally a healthy function, correct?

• 43:30Speaker 28

  Generally a healthy function because primitive instincts and aggression lurk at every moment.

• 43:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right. And one component of that is tribalism, right? It's our team and the other team. And anything that our team does, one thing that I find really curious about sports is if you're You're watching your team and there's a questionable call. You don't have to question that it's a wrong call if it's against your team. You know it's the wrong call, whereas if it's against the other team, you know it's the right call. So we really-

• 44:02Speaker 28

  Yeah, intellect is put on hold. That's why I call it faith for the faithless, that you have faith in your team and your faith may not be questioned.

• 44:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think that deep tribalism is essentially a positive force or negative? Or what's the trade-off?

• 44:17Speaker 28

  It's a dangerous force when it is permitted to walk out of the stadium or out of the bar.

• 44:27Speaker 29

  Fans from both teams pummeled each other with punch after punch, but it didn't end there. Police are also investigating not one, but two shootings that happened outside the stadium after the game was over.

• 44:48Speaker 08

  It's a tribal identity and a lot of football fans that I work with are very happy with that tribal label. It really rings true to them.

• 44:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Martha Newsom, a cognitive anthropologist at Oxford. She studies group bonding and the extreme behavior that can result.

• 45:03Speaker 08

  So before I started all this research, I didn't have a huge interest in football, but I had a boyfriend who loved football. And we went to a match and I found it so fascinating. I had never been in an environment that was so emotionally charged, where grown men were hugging and kissing each other and crying together.

• 45:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Newsom calls this kind of bonding "identity fusion."

• 45:35Speaker 08

  And it's when a personal identity and the group identity-

• 45:41Speaker 08

  Become so heavily invested in each other that they're fused. They completely merge. And so any attack on yourself feels like an attack on your group. And likewise, any attack on your group feels like an attack on yourself. So you go to these extreme lengths to defend and honour your group. So that that's the kind of psychology we're looking at. In military insurgent groups, religious groups, nationalists, and also in football fans.

• 46:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Newsom argues this phenomenon comes with costs and benefits.

• 46:11Speaker 08

  I think sport is wholeheartedly and unreservedly a great way to bring people together. The unifying effect, just watching a football match or even talking about it right now. I get goose pimples of all those people coming together for that that collective goal, that ambition, I, you know, that's it's really powerful. It's a good thing, but with that comes great responsibility. So responsibility for inclusion. Racism has been absolutely hideous in football. It's an ongoing thing. Homophobia is a huge issue, which is it has not been tackled in football properly. Gender is another issue. There's violence in gender.

• 46:51Speaker 08

  So when England lose a World Cup match, the rates of domestic abuse go up around 30%. That's disgusting.

• 47:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's an interesting paradox here. Research has shown that being on a sports team is one of the best ways of building social trust, that is, creating strong bonds even between people from very different backgrounds. Being a sports fan doesn't necessarily seem to conjure the same magic. It might, in fact, facilitate a kind of sorting into like minded tribes with common enemies. You can't deny there's a certain homogeneity to many sectors of the sporting universe, starting with the obvious fact that the big team sports that get most of our attention and dollars are male team sports. But just because the athletes are male, should it necessarily follow that the vast majority of team and league executives are male?

• 47:50Speaker 19

  It's unfortunate that we're not further along at this point.

• 47:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Kim Eng of Major League Baseball.

• 47:56Speaker 19

  So I think we were ahead on the race side. I mean, Jackie Robinson is the one example that everyone points to. But on the gender side, it's been slow to come. We're not where we should be.

• 48:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ang has been in baseball for more than 25 years. She's now a senior vice president of international baseball development for the league.

• 48:18Speaker 19

  So what we do is we try and help grow the game globally. And at the same time, I've monitored and established programs which would help clubs to scout players, evaluate them, bring parity to the market in terms of signing them.

• 48:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ang grew up in Queens, New York.

• 48:36Speaker 19

  Playing stickball and running bases in the streets. I was really a sports nut, loved to play.

• 48:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  She went on to play softball at the University of Chicago, which is known slightly more for its academic rigor than its sports teams. She studied public policy and she wrote her senior thesis on the 1972 federal legislation known as Title IX.

• 48:58Speaker 19

  And Title IX is basically a law that tries to enact equity and parity. And you cannot discriminate based on gender, race, et cetera, to institutions who receive federal funding.

• 49:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Title IX led to a major surge in women's sports in America, putting it well ahead of most other countries. That's one of the big reasons the US national women's soccer team has been so dominant, especially compared to the US men.

• 49:26Speaker 19

  So it's through that paper on Title IX that I really started to think about a career in sports.

• 49:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  After school, Ang got an internship with the Chicago White Sox and rose through the ranks. She moved on to the New York Yankees organization, winning three World Series rings there, then became assistant general manager with the Los Angeles Dodgers. What was it like being one of the very few female executives?

• 49:50Speaker 19

  I always had to be overprepared and I did not have the leeway that a lot of the guys did. And I also didn't have necessarily the camaraderie that they had. You know, a lot of them played minor league baseball together or major league baseball together.

• 50:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Even as an assistant GM, Ang ran into a sort of exclusion that would seem to be driven by a baseline expectation.

• 50:13Speaker 19

  You know, I'm walking into the major league clubhouse of a visiting park and I have all the right credentials and the security guard would say, no, you can't go in there. I'd say, well, I actually can go in there. Look at my credentials. And there's just the automatic presumption of who you are or what. Probably in this case, more of what you're not. You know, you're not an executive. You're not an official with the ball club. You're media. You're an interpreter, you know, something of that nature. So, and that takes into account both gender and, you know, being of color. So I can tell you a funny story.

• 50:56Speaker 19

  I was traveling with the Dodgers and the executives and the coaching staff sit up in first class. I've got Joe Torre to my left and I've got, you know, Don Mattingly, Rick Honeycutt, some of our coaches in first class as well as the players are boarding. And the flight attendant comes up to me and she says, so what did you do to get on this plane? And I looked at her and I said, do you really want to know? And she said, yeah. And she leaned in closer and I said, you see all these guys? She said, yeah. And I said, well, they all report to me.

• 51:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you hear this story, how much of a villain do you want to make the flight attendant out to be? It's the kind of judgment so many of us make every day on so many dimensions. Something doesn't fit the pattern we've been conditioned to recognize. And we don't even consider the fact that the pattern may be evolving. The swimmer Simone Manuel, who's African American, saw a pattern that she didn't think she fit into.

• 52:11Speaker 23

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of it just had to deal with difficulty fitting in.

• 52:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  She grew up in an athletic family in Texas, played lots of sports from a young age.

• 52:22Speaker 23

  With the other sports, there were other black individuals and in the sport of swimming, there weren't. And so it was, it was really hard sometimes for me to relate to others because.

• 52:36Speaker 23

  And I kind of questioned if swimming was a sport that I should be participating in. There was nobody else on deck that was black.

• 52:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  There was another reason for Manuel's reluctance to swim.

• 52:47Speaker 23

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of it comes from the culture of African Americans. 60% of African Americans do not know how to swim. A lot of what keeps us out of the water is our hair. My mom would always tell me, Simone, it's just hair. And she continuously told me this so that I kind of started to believe it.

• 53:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  She believed it so much that she wound up going to swim at Stanford, and then at the 2016 Olympics where she won a gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle, and at the 2017 Worlds.

• 53:22Speaker 30

  Americans have a great chance. With less than 10 meters to go, here comes Simone Manuel. It's gonna be at the touch. Simone Manuel gets it done.

• 53:33Speaker 23

  Holy smokes. It doesn't matter what my hair looks like if I'm on the podium, winning gold medals and inspiring somebody behind me to hopefully forget about their hair and do the same thing as me.

• 53:48Speaker 30

  Manuel wins gold.

• 53:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Barriers broken, and records, too. Inequities revealed, and sometimes addressed. Bonds formed, except when they're not. Sport is as imperfect as any corner of society, but it's a bit more exciting than most, don't you think?

• 54:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, we go deep with one of the most successful teams in professional sports.

• 54:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a team that's won five Super Bowls.

• 54:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what happens when success turns into mediocrity and worse?

• 54:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  The players are angry, fans even more so. They want to fire the owner. I own this football team. You don't dismiss owners.

• 54:57Speaker 07

  When you lose a game, a lot of noise happens. When you lose two, a ton happens. Usually three is like Armageddon. Try nine.

• 55:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  It was also the team where this was happening. Colin Kaepernick's protest against racial injustice seems to be gaining traction. And that led to this.

• 55:13Speaker 28

  Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now?

• 55:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  But then, something magical happened.

• 55:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  That magic led to this.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  We might be the happiest non-Super Bowl winning team in the league.

• 55:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Last year, the San Francisco 49ers had one of the strangest seasons in NFL history. With the new season just underway, we sit down with the owner, the coaches and executives, and the players to find out what happens this year.

• 55:59Speaker 31

  It means no worries for the rest of your days.

• 56:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 56:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Derek John and Anders Kelto with help from Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rosalsky, Greg Rippon, Alvin Melathe, Zach Lipinski, and Andy Meisenheimer. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. Freakonomics Radio can be found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Our entire archive is available on the Stitcher app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish. Transcripts and show notes. If you sign up for Stitcher Premium, you'll get all our shows ad-free, plus lots of bonus episodes, including the full interviews with many of the athletes and other sports figures from this series.

• 56:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just go to stitcherpremium.com/freakonomics and use the promo code freakonomics for one month free. We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected]. Thanks for listening.

• 57:11Speaker 08

  Stitcher.

• 57:17Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 57:47Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 58:19Speaker 32

  Hey, it's Kelly Ripa. And if you don't know, I have a podcast where I get to say whatever I want. Hold on, let me get a shovel and a body bag. I envision doing a podcast with the conversations that happen in my dressing room, off-camera, where people feel free to talk. No hair, no makeup. This is my kind of job. Only Kelly Ripa can ask me this question. I'm flipping the script and saying what's really on my mind.

• 58:42Speaker 33

  We're seeing a different side of you. It's a little bit more honest.

• 58:46Speaker 32

  When the cameras go off, the real fun begins. Get my hair. Down over here. Hey. This is an off-camera podcast, so it doesn't even matter. It's unfiltered conversations and unexpected confessions.

• 58:58Speaker 10

  My mom says, Woody, I knew your dad.

• 59:01Speaker 32

  Stop the press. I would like to volunteer to administer any and all DNA tests.

• 59:08Speaker 10

  Maybe that should be part of the show.

• 59:09Speaker 32

  Let's talk off-camera with me, Kelly Ripa. You just put that in the universe. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

• 59:18Speaker 33

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