Coronavirus: billionaire sport team owners find themselves faced with financial choice – to pay or not to pay?
- Multiple high-profile athletes and owners have pledged to pay arena staff for the coming weeks
- However there are some notable holdouts, billionaires who have remained quiet as the world comes together to fight the virus
The short answer is yes. In a just and honourable society, billionaire owners of sports franchises would pay the salaries of their workers during this unprecedented public health crisis – it’s just the right thing to do. Sadly, our reality is a little more complicated, and as we head into unchartered waters with the coronavirus crisis, true colours are starting to emerge.
Covid-19 has forced society into a host of unprecedented situations. Right now the world’s largest work from home experiment is taking place, one which will drastically alter the workplace of the future.
Companies have been forced to pivot, entire sectors have been brought to their knees and governments are scrambling to provide adequate services to those in need as we rethink globalisation under an entirely different scope.
In the world of North American sports, we’ve had some good stories out of the NBA, and some notable silence. Many star athletes, from Zion Williamson and Kevin Love to Giannis Antetokounmpo, have pledged to help cover some arena staff salaries as it looks like the league will be on pause for at least the next three weeks.
Many owners have also been notably proactive, including Dallas Mavericks boss Mark Cuban, who announced his organisation will foot the bill, while other teams’ ownership groups, such as the Cleveland Cavaliers, followed suit with similar responses.
But there have been some notable holdouts in both the NBA and the NHL, the two main North American leagues impacted right now, as a handful of billionaires have remained silent as arena staff now deal with the reality that they have essentially been forced to take unpaid leave. For someone making minimum wage, this could mean financial ruin.
Anyone who has ever worked a low-paying job – scraping by day-to-day – will know that when a pay cheque unexpectedly does not arrive, it becomes a massive, uncompromising life crisis that grinds everything to a halt. And sadly, for most people across the planet, this is the story of their lives – constantly trying to stay above water financially.
Being broke is no fun, and if you can’t conjure compassion or sympathy for those who struggle while you thrive, you have not learned to be an adequate human being.
Fan sites, blogs and Reddit have become a hotspot for listicles featuring billionaire owners, some of whom could pay staff by taking less than one per cent out of their net worth, who continue to remain silent and sit on their hands during this global pandemic.
Some of the holdouts are no surprise to anyone, but the fact that there are still NBA and NHL franchises that have yet to make a statement on the situation should give us all pause. These are people who own private jets, small islands, multiple mansions and could probably grab enough cash from underneath their satin sheets to cover these workers’ salaries.
They are supposed to be sports fans above all else: who buys a team to make money knowing they are notoriously hard organisations to turn a profit with?
I get that a lot of these teams are run by multiple people and even groups in some cases where voting is needed to make large scale decisions, but this is a no-brainer, and quite frankly, if you want to throw your cynical hat on for a second, an easy way to grab some positive PR in a world searching for silver linings.
Once the panic and pandemonium of the coronavirus dies down and we return to some semblance of normality, there will invariably be a lot of summations, reviews and trials within the public court of opinion concerning what went down and who did what.
Those out there hoarding items like toilet paper, or trying to hock sanitiser on Amazon, will hopefully have their day in society’s court.
In the sporting world, the true colours of our billionaires are coming to light. Because when you make enough money to buy a professional sports team, you enter into an agreement with the city and the team’s fans, an unwritten code.
Not only are you the owner and majority shareholder, but you become synonymous with the franchise and help define its ideals, from the front office right down to the concession lines.
When this is all over, let’s not forget who put their money where their mouth was, and who sat atop piles of golden coins like Scrooge McDuck.
