It's about the ATL Braves but I think his summation of the "rough bargain" is really spot on:
Deflated because early-21st century sports owners and early 21st century sport fans have fallen into something of a rough bargain. It’s not a consciously-negotiated bargain, but it’s one that, through practice and example, fans and owners have realized is the sweet spot for our relationship. That bargain is this: we, as fans, will endure you fleecing taxpayers for stadiums, taking your games off of over-the-air television in favor of big money cable deals which raise our rates, pocketing money in “management fees,” and selling anything and everything that isn’t nailed down with a team logo slapped on it. In exchange, you will at least pretend to be interested in delivering a winning team and, in your utterances and actions, demonstrate that you understand that fans want to see an entertaining and, occasionally, championship-caliber product a million times more than we want to hear about the financial health of ownership and the business vision of the franchise. Obviously not all teams do this. But the teams with the happiest, most engaged fans and with the owners who are less-loathed than their brethren generally fit this description. To the extent the Braves have made news in the past few years it’s been because they’ve (a) decided to abandon their relatively new ballpark in the city they call, for marketing and territorial purposes, home in favor of a taxpayer funded ballpark no one but wealthy white suburban people can get to (and even they can’t without difficulty); and (b) sent off all of the players which have excited fans in the past several years. Against that backdrop, the largely faceless CEO of a division of a largely faceless corporation which owns the team is claiming implausible but, I suppose, unfalsifiable things about the business of baseball which read like a pat on the back for financial performance more than any sort of argument for the competitive prospects of the team (Q: “When can we expect to see the Braves in the top 10 in terms of payroll?” A: “I won’t give you a timetable, but you will start seeing major jumps 1/1/17”).-- Modified on 11/16/2015 10:09:16 AM
The key issue here is that there is little to no punishment for actively not trying your best to succeed in the 4 major North American sports; in fact via the draft (and depending on the sport), teams are often rewarded for throwing in the towel completely.
Such an issue does not exist with soccer or rugby, for example. If you tank a season you aren't rewarded the following season with the best college/high school/international player available; you're relegated to a lower division, where prize money is lower, attendances are lower, TV money is lower, the ability to sign high caliber players is lower, and there are no means to qualify for continental competitions (the Champions League in soccer or the Heineken Cup in rugby union, for example) which is where the biiiiiiiiiiiiiig bucks are.
There are numerous examples of teams enduring catastrophic falls from grace as a result of this. A team getting relegated from the Premiership to the Championship in England is estimated to be making something in the region of 25-40 million GBP per season less. Add that to the exodus of players who have contract clauses that grant their release on relegation, and those that simply are too good and are bought up by bigger clubs, and the downfall is not hard to envision from there - the team with no money loses its best players and isn't making enough money to replace them, and you cannot just give up on a season as you will end up falling down yet another division, where again the circumstances become worse still, so you spend what little you have in a desperate attempt to right the ship. Sometimes the ship is indeed righted; sometimes it sinks. Sometimes it sinks spectacularly; Nottingham Forest and Stockport County come to mind.
However, if an NFL team manages to go 1-15 in a season, what happens? They get the first pick in the draft and endure a couple of home games that season where the stadium isn't completely sold out. So? The constant search for parity in American sports, while in many ways is a positive thing, also creates a lot of problems. This would appear to be the largest to me.