Will pro sports still be around in 50 years?

[jjones]

Bambi Hunting should be a pro sport by then.

 

[Deeko]

Maybe attendance at BASEBALL games is dropping. Baseball is a dying sport. It is far too slow paced for today's society, and thus less and less people are watching it. Being that you said you are a huge baseball fan, that could show why you think sports are dying, because baseball is. Now, it never really will die, look at the MLS no one watches that and it is still around, but it will shrink drastically, especially in like 20-30 years when the majority of its fan base is...ehm...no longer with us.

As for sports players being role models, who cares? Since when were they supposed to be role models? And you are falling into today's media-crazed world. Its very similar to how JFK had mistresses, the press knew about it, but no one raised a big stink about it. I'm sure pro athletes are the same exact way, do you think they all used to be perfect little angels? Hell no.

Fact of the matter is, there will ALWAYS be pro sports, because people will always pay to watch them.

 

[Deeko]

Originally posted by: jumpr
Which brings me to another point. If pro sports ARE still around in 50 years, do you think that performance-based payments will be the future of athlete compensation? It makes a lot of sense that golfers get paid based on their performance. Wouldn't it make sense to pay baseball players based on their batting averages, or football players based on their number of tackles/yards per season?

Many football players already are paid that way, in a sense. Their salaries are incentive-based, so if they run for X amount of yards or get X amount of tackles, they get a 3 million dollar bonus.

 

Originally posted by: Deeko
Maybe attendance at BASEBALL games is dropping. Baseball is a dying sport. It is far too slow paced for today's society, and thus less and less people are watching it. Being that you said you are a huge baseball fan, that could show why you think sports are dying, because baseball is. Now, it never really will die, look at the MLS no one watches that and it is still around, but it will shrink drastically, especially in like 20-30 years when the majority of its fan base is...ehm...no longer with us.

As for sports players being role models, who cares? Since when were they supposed to be role models? And you are falling into today's media-crazed world. Its very similar to how JFK had mistresses, the press knew about it, but no one raised a big stink about it. I'm sure pro athletes are the same exact way, do you think they all used to be perfect little angels? Hell no.

Fact of the matter is, there will ALWAYS be pro sports, because people will always pay to watch them.

Good answer. I think you're right - I'm stuck in the romanticized image of sports that I held as a youth, and now that I'm a lot older, it's getting harder and harder to go back to that image because I simply pay more attention to the news, and less on the games.

 

[WinkOsmosis]

So.... Athletes messing up will somehow destroy sports?

 

Originally posted by: WinkOsmosis
So.... Athletes messing up will somehow destroy sports?

I think so. Mistakes made by Enron employees destroyed Enron - wouldn't the same hold true for professional sports? They're both businesses.