Is football just another scheme in the art of making money?

Football started as a game. It was made for fun, for friends, for passion. High school football preserves these qualities, and the players fight to keep it that way. “I play for the guy next to me; I play for the name on the front of the jersey, not on the back,” says senior Markus Stoll. But as the game becomes a job, as the choice to play becomes an obligation, these qualities fade. Players and teammates become actors and celebrities; jerseys turn from symbols to products. History will tell you that once money is introduced to the good, evil rises; when you introduce money to the great game of football, you get the National Football League.

The NFL had a revenue of more than $6 billion for the 2013-14 season, with approximately 60 percent of that money going to the players. Much of this revenue comes from media profits, with more than $1 billion coming from the NFL’s deal with DirecTV alone. The players enjoy an average salary of $1.4 million, with NFL’s highest paid player, Jay Cutler, making $17.5 million for the 2014-15 season, and its lowest paid active players making about $420,000. This makes the NFL one of the richest “businesses” in the United States, and its players some of the highest paid workers.

Despite NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL reeling in $44.2 million a year, and all of the money that is distributed to players and owners, the NFL is still considered non-profit. How can this be? Reg. 1.501c6 l defines a non-profit business league as an association of persons having a common business interest, whose purpose is to promote the common business interest and not to engage in a regular business of a kind ordinarily carried on for profit. This can’t be true, seeing that the money players get is not just to ensure that they can continue playing, but to ensure that they live a life of luxury (something $17.5 million a year can surely buy). The NFL is seen and treated as non-profit because the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) makes an exception to just its league. “The IRC 501(c)(6) amendment was enacted to ensure that a professional football league’s exemption would not be jeopardized” is found on the IRS’s website. This means that the NFL can evade most taxes, and many legislators have been fighting to revoke their non-profit title.

But is it the NFL’s fault that they make so much money? What are they supposed to do? Just throw it away? In the end, the argument stands that if the players play well and perform, they deserve the money because that’s what people pay to see. Just like in high school, the better you play, the more scholarships you get. In the NFL, the better you play, the higher your salary. Sometimes this is not the case though. Sometimes players get the money just because they’re famous. One perfect example is Johnny Manziel. Manziel is a Cleveland Browns rookie who doesn’t even start, but he is worth more than $4.5 million due to all the publicity he gets. This year, after five weeks, he has thrown the ball once, and it fell incomplete, but he is still bringing in millions with various commercials he’s starring in.

There are tons of cases just like Manziel’s, proving that the NFL has become more of an acting agency than a sporting program, but there are some negative effects to being in the NFL. Ray Rice, a former Baltimore Ravens player, was released earlier this year because of the domestic abuse charges against him. This seems right at first, but TMZ has recently uncovered the truth of why he was let go: the NFL knew about these charges and what had truly happened for a while now, but they didn’t act upon it until it hit national news. Just recently, the NFL commissioner released an apology for the way he handled the situation. Through that apology and many of the events leading up to it, it’s easy to see that the NFL seems to be in it for the glory, and none of the guts.

Many WHS football players have expressed their negative feelings of the NFL and what it has turned football into. “I would love to see the NFL revert football back to its grassroot purpose: for the love of the game,” WHS football player Cy Sirmon said. “I think they’re more interested in producing what America finds intriguing, instead of producing great players and great football.”