© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Keith Strudler: Filling The Seats

Here’s what we’ve learned from the successful completion of the NBA and NHL seasons and near completion of the World Series. If you use science, highly reduce risk, get player buy in to live a sheltered life, and largely keep fans and outsiders away from the field of play, you can successfully play professional sports during Covid. You may have some outbreaks, like baseball had early on and the NFL seems have right now. But overall, a disciplined, risk averse approach has made the difference between live games and dead air.

And while that’s good news, it belies the fairly obvious reality that this isn’t a particularly sustainable model. And I don’t just mean the sustainability of asking adults to spend months at a time sequestered in a theme park hotel, something that probably won’t happen again this spring. I’m talking about the fiscal sustainability of playing live professional sports without live fans, or at least not a stadium full having a normal live sporting experience, where you can yell and give high-fives and drink and eat Shake Shack, all the normal accoutrements and appeal of pro sports.

It’s also a big part of its economics, perhaps some 40% of revenues for sports like baseball and basketball. Which means that while pro sports leagues might want to take a victory lap for a job well done, it’s also celebrating something that inevitably won’t work. Which means any long-term plan for pro sports with empty seats is pretty much unsustainable. And let’s not forget that sports viewership for the NBA was significantly lower in the bubble world, countering the belief that even more people would watch in a socially distanced world.

League commissioners are well aware of this fairly significant threat to the business model, even as they take something of a deep breath of relief that they simply survived the moment. That’s why NBA commissioner Adam Silver has made it clear his priority to have fans in the arena when they start next season in, let’s say January. And that’s despite the fact that a whole lot of very smart doctors and scientists think that’s optimistic thinking at best, if not pure fantasy. Baseball, on the other hand, is already considering that attendance may not be normal, whatever that is, until 2022, by which point we’ll assumedly have a vaccine. Which means that for the next several months, if not years, professional sports will bring in far less revenue than expected and take a far less primary place in American life than before. Let’s be clear, going to a live sporting event, while sometimes a pain, is still far different than watching it on TV. And perhaps more to the point, just knowing you can changes the psychology, if not also the calculus.

So, what does this all mean. Well, at the very least, we know that there’s one unpredictable constant in this equation. That’s the virus, which will continue to do what a virus is want to do. And while pro sports commissioners are powerful people, they do lack the bandwidth to change the epidemiological conditions of the planet. Which means that whether they like it or not, it’s highly unlikely sports fans will be able to attend many NBA games in person next season barring a medical miracle, which I’m still hoping for. Which also means that for the time being, professional sport is a made for TV product, kind of like professional wresting or the Bachelor.

Which also means the most important think commissioners and owners and athletes can do isn’t try to figure out how to cheat science. It’s try to figure out make sure professional sports isn’t relegated to the whims of a spectator public that’s tuned out a bit the past few months, which of course may have as much to do with the black hole that is this election as anything happening on a field or court.

How do they do that? That’s the multiple billion-dollar question, how to sustain a live property in a virtual space. Perhaps it’s the use of more innovative VR technology that brings fans a little closer to the action. Maybe it’s somehow create more revenue streams through new interactions with fans. Maybe it’s more gambling. Whatever it is, the next 12 months are pretty important to make sure that America’s pastimes don’t turn into a giant loss leader. Which is why a victory lap right now is probably unwise.

Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

Related Content
  • Perhaps the most overused, contentious, and misunderstood word in the age of Covid is the term “Optics.” That’s because the concept of optics infers…
  • In the odd chance that you were able to watch the entirety of that hellscape last night, you may recall one of Trump’s somewhat irrelevant throwaway lines…
  • Lest anyone think the White House is the only high profile super spreader in the US, I present to you the Tennessee Titans. Like the White House, the…
  • For everyone who firmly believes that the SEC is the leading college football conference in the country, you now have some hard data to support that…