Sports Fans Understand Better than Anyone Why Billionaires Shouldn’t Exist

On Sunday, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Washington Commanders played in the NFC Championship, a thrilling partial shootout the Eagles ran away from en route to putting up a fifty-berger against their division rivals with the Super Bowl on the line. But Washington has no reason to despair; no fan of this long downtrodden franchise would have turned down a 32-point drubbing in the NFC title game coming off a year that delivered them the second overall pick. Not after what they just went through.

That pick turned into Jayden Daniels, a quarterback who just authored one of the greatest if not the greatest rookie season in NFL history. But the bigger reason for Washington’s dramatic almost worst to almost first year is they got rid of that fucking asshole weighing them down in the luxury box.

Dan Snyder was universally agreed to be the worst owner in the NFL, so much so that the other owners pushed him out last year over a culture of sexual harassment he cultivated in Washington that in a just world, would have sparked a broader conversation and brought down more than one billionaire owner’s operation. Owners of all stripes are loath to create any kind of justification to take their toys away from them, and will only kick out one of their own from of the club under extreme circumstances. It’s why in any accurate top ten ranking of the biggest threats to a sports franchise’s well-being, its owner is all ten.

By all reports, Washington’s incredible turnaround under new ownership was primarily driven by people being excited and motivated to not work for one of the most repugnant and incompetent sacks of shit in existence. All billionaires are bad but as Elon Musk so helpfully demonstrates, some are more broken by their financial isolation than others. Dan Snyder is a loathsome person who is so bad at his dream job that he couldn’t make one of the signature NFL franchises much money, and the NFL kicked him out mainly over the latter, but the former certainly didn’t make it less desirable. Seth Wickersham and Don Van Natta Jr. recently called up all of Dan Snyder’s friends and painted an incredible picture of a small, hateful man moping on a yacht who “hates” the success his former team enjoys.

There is no sports hell like the one a bad owner creates. None. Players, GMs and coaches come and go, but these leeches almost never leave, and no one has more power and influence than they do.

Just ask fans of the team with the new worst owner in the NFL, the Dallas Fighting Jerrys. They just watched their two most hated rivals play for a chance to stop Taylor Swift’s run for the NFL’s first three-peat in one of the starkest demonstrations of the value of good ownership in NFL history. The famed oil baron has never hired a Black head coach and only was “curious” when he stood in front of those Black kids and the National Guard trying to go to school in Little Rock in 1957, and today he runs the team like Disneyworld for Cowboys marks. Players have complained about random tours popping into practice as some of these guys prepared for the biggest weeks of their lives that would determine their future paychecks. I guess that’s what happens when you work in a place that everyone casually refers to as Jerryworld.

With the downtrodden Washington franchise finally reaching an NFC Championship, the Dallas Cowboys are now the sole NFC team to not make the conference championship game this century. The freaking Arizona Cardinals did it! The Carolina Panthers too! Even the eternally accursed Atlanta Falcons showed some pride before that backfired in an extremely high-profile manner. Jerry is such a horrendous owner that he found depths the rancid and reclusive McCaskeys in Chicago haven’t been able to plumb. They did it with Rex Grossman! What the fuck Jerry!

There is one ignominious distinction the Cowboys do not have that my beloved Broncos nearly earned through a period of tumultuous ownership before becoming the official team of Wal-Mart, as longest playoff drought in the NFL belongs to the New York Jets. This is a clusterfuck of a team that per a real Athletic report by real reporters about real things that happened, are partially run by a 17-year-old boy. Woody Johnson, Donald Trump’s former ambassador to the U.K. who was not invited back to hang out with the cool kids this time around, genuinely takes advice from what his kid reads on the internet to overrule his entire football operation, and he reportedly nixed a trade with the Broncos for Jerry Jeudy because his Madden rating was too low. Johnson’s Jets are such a calamitous shitshow that they made Aaron Rodgers look like the voice of reason by simply musing about being fired by a teenager. The billionaire class is not exactly sending the NFL their best.

Philadelphia by contrast is a paragon for effective and steady ownership. During the same period that the Cowboys have not made an NFC Championship Game, the Eagles under Jeffrey Lurie have made the playoffs seventeen times, the NFC Championship eight times, and the Super Bowl four times, winning once. We can mathematically measure the impact a bad owner can have relative to a good one, and it’s catastrophic.

This is why sports shouldn’t have owners. I get that this upsets Yankees fans who revere George Steinbrenner, but when football season comes around and they put their Cowboys jerseys on, they should understand that the poor people in Dallas shouldn’t have to suffer through this endless ineptitude simply because they were born in the place with the most unhinged yeehaw billionaires. Why should the deranged bird people up north who literally eat shit to celebrate get to have all the fun?

This is why any vision of socialism in this country needs to lead with abolishing sports owners. I’m serious. You want to bring a broad-based coalition on to our political platform? Tell every MAGA New York Knicks fan that James Dolan has functionally been yeeted into the sun and out of their lives, and that the city owns the team now. They would immediately anoint Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as Queen of New York. Billionaires shouldn’t exist, and sports are billion-dollar enterprises with deep emotional roots in the community. It’s insane and unjust that we let one person control entire cities like this, while using people’s emotional connection to the team as leverage to loot public coffers to build stadiums they profit from (or they move the team). Sports are for us, not the billionaires.