We Already Know Who’s Winning Super Bowl LVII — The Billionaire Class

The players are preparing to face off, but billionaire NFL owners are all on the same team.

By Derek Seidman , TRUTHOUT

This coming Sunday, tens of millions of people will tune in for Super Bowl Sunday, the most watched television broadcast in the U.S. By design, Super Bowl LVII will be an escapist spectacle — Rihanna’s halftime show and all — that many will sit back and thoroughly enjoy (including this author, though my cherished Buffalo Bills won’t be playing).

But none of this should distract from the fact that the class power of NFL owners is anything but a fantasy. The league is dominated by a small handful of multibillionaires who strong-armed their ways into huge fortunes by swallowing up public subsidies, drilling massive amounts of oil and gas, busting unions and holding down wages, and pushing through wasteful development projects.

Many owners (who are almost all white) have also been big backers of Donald Trump, with no qualms about showering him with millions of dollars even after he called Mexicans “rapists” and praised white nationalists as “very fine people” — and all this, while raking in billions off the merciless physical sacrifice of mostly Black athletes and hiring extremely few Black coaches.

Sports ownership today — in the NFL and beyond — should be seen less as a niche business venture and more as a link in the wider chain of elite class rule aimed at accumulating ever more wealth at the expense of workers and the public.