We are all pawns in the NFL's game

In one of the most memorable scenes in the first season of The Wire, D’Angelo Barksdale, a lieutenant in his uncle’s drug-dealing operation, encounters two low-level gang youngsters, Wallace and Bodie, playing a game of checkers with chess pieces. Realizing that the two don’t know the rules of chess, D’Angelo explains the movements of kings, queens, and rooks, each serving as a metaphor for someone in their real-life organization. But the most essential lesson comes towards the end with an explanation of the pawn. While D’Angelo is acutely aware of the relative uselessness of the pawn, a high-population piece with a very limited set of potential movements, Bodie sees the pawns for what they can be, potential queens capable of any movements they so desire.

Within the series, each of these characters is, at some point or another, revealed to be the equivalent of a pawn within the Barksdale organization. No character makes it out alive—some make it a little further down the board than others, but none truly gains the power to which Bodie aspires. This is the way chess works—I have played thousands of games of chess in my life (I logged into my Chess.com stats page to confirm that this was the case and not an outlandish estimation) and in a game that starts with sixteen pawns, most of them don’t get out alive. In most games, none make it to the queen rank to which Bodie aspires, and even in a game with an unusually high level of promotion, it’s never more than two or three. Even those that do reach queen status are hardly immune from potential capture, and even those who survive still exist solely at the behest of the king. The mastermind behind the pieces wants to keep the queen alive only so long as it fulfills their ultimate purpose, which has nothing to do with the queen’s continued life.

The billionaires in charge of major American professional sports teams don’t wish you harm—this would require them to consider your state of being at all. Your ultimate purpose to them is as a vessel through which they can ultimately enrich themselves. In a game of chess, a player would gladly sacrifice their pawn to capture a non-pawn piece. There is an inexact but largely agreed-upon formula for approximating piece value—a pawn is worth one point, a bishop or knight is worth three points, a rook is worth five points, and a queen is worth nine points. If you are playing chess, you don’t want to lose a pawn, but it isn’t going to materially impact your chances of victory, even if you were to gain nothing in return.

When the St. Louis Rams relocated to Los Angeles, there were thousands upon thousands of NFL fans in a country known for, to quote John Steinbeck, its poor seeing themselves not as exploited but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires willing to justify the move. Regarding a team’s move as reasonable not only allows fans to justify their support of an organization which would rubber-stamp such a transaction, but to feel empowered that it was not their team that moved, a minor reward for their loyalty, a thing which is understood to be an undisputed social good. This process has played out in the years since in different cases—the NFL abandoned their fans in San Diego and Oakland for the glitzier, more affluent Los Angeles and Las Vegas markets. Fans in Major League Baseball have fantasized about relocating the Tampa Bay Rays or Oakland Athletics to their preferred tourist destinations while National Hockey League aficionados have wished the Arizona Coyotes to Houston or Québec, depending on their national loyalty.

Since relocating to Los Angeles, the Rams have been among the most successful teams in the National Football League. Since a 4-12 debut in 2016 under St. Louis Rams carryover head coach Jeff Fisher, hired in 2012 having already been informed that the team was planning to move to Los Angeles and presumably valued for his ability to drive fans away with the most aesthetically unappealing ultra-conservative style of play imaginable and his track record of shepherding teams to new cities, the Rams have averaged 11 wins over each of the last five seasons, more than all but two NFL teams (Kansas City Chiefs, New Orleans Saints). In stark contrast to their timid personnel decision-making in the six years of Stan Kroenke’s ownership of the team in St. Louis, most if not all of which were later confirmed to be spent biding his time before he could bolt to Los Angeles, the Rams have aggressively pursued splashy player acquisitions—three months after the move to Los Angeles, the Rams traded up to the #1 overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft in order to select quarterback Jared Goff, whom they later packaged for another quarterback upgrade in Matthew Stafford, whom they have since surrounded with established stars such as Odell Beckham Jr. on the offensive side of the ball and Von Miller and Jalen Ramsey on defense.

And yet, by and large, Los Angeles doesn’t seem to care about the Rams. In a meaningful Week 18 game this season against the San Francisco 49ers, one with a division title and a home playoff game potentially hanging in the balance, SoFi Stadium, Stan Kroenke’s six-billion-dollar palace in the inner-ring suburb of Inglewood, was so loud that a quarterback was forced to resort to silent counts—that quarterback was Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford, overwhelmed by the heavy and vocal concentration of fans in 49ers red. The home-field disadvantage was so pronounced that Stafford’s wife Kelly openly pleaded with fans not to sell their tickets for the next week’s playoff game against the Arizona Cardinals. For the Rams’ upcoming rematch at home against the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game, the team implemented a controversial restriction on sales from outside the Los Angeles region (which has since been rescinded), with Melissa Whitworth, wife of Rams offensive lineman Andrew Whitworth, offering to buy the tickets of any Rams fan who would otherwise sell them to 49ers fans.

It feels like overkill to express that this never would have happened in St. Louis. While many have claimed that Los Angeles is simply still trying to get its feet wet as a football market in just its sixth season with the NFL following a twenty-one-year absence of the sport’s premier league, St. Louis hosted two playoff games before raucous, partisan crowds in its fifth season as the home of the Rams, and in the four seasons prior to the team’s 1999-00 Super Bowl run, the Rams averaged just 5.5 wins per season. The St. Louis Rams sold out every home game they played from 1995, their first season, until Christmas Eve 2006, when the Rams, at 6-8, failed to sell out a game played on a de facto holiday (and still sold 62,324 tickets). While attendance dipped following the team’s acquisition by Kroenke, assumed immediately and prophetically by most fans, despite his Missouri roots, to be a ruthless capitalist with ulterior motives, and the team’s descent into the literal worst five-year stretch in NFL history, the franchise, as all NFL franchises are, remained wildly profitable. But ultimately, the question was not whether Los Angeles fans were going to be more rabid fans than St. Louis fans. The answer to that question was irrelevant.

Forbes estimated Stan Kroenke’s net worth in 2015 at $7.6 billion. It now estimates his net worth at $10.7 billion. It is not a mystery as to why his net value has skyrocketed even beyond the typical increases that occur with a large enough stockpile of assets—he is now the owner of one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world. The stadium, which will host this year’s Super Bowl, next year’s College Football Playoff National Championship, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2028 Summer Olympics, was the prize for Kroenke. He never needed the Los Angeles market in order to avoid taking a loss on the Rams—each team’s split of the league’s $9.8 billion in revenues is over $100 million higher than the league’s salary cap. But just because he didn’t need the money doesn’t mean he didn’t want it. St. Louis and its fans were his pawns.

But St. Louis was not exclusively a pawn of Stan Kroenke. It was a pawn of the entire league, a league which voted 30-2 in favor of relocating the team, citing the inability of the country’s 20^th largest market (by combined statistical area) to sustain a team in a league in which twelve of its franchises were in smaller markets, a claim met with virtually no non-local media scrutiny. St. Louis was a pawn of Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys owner whose outsized influence and vocal support of the Rams move made him league ownership’s biggest mouthpiece, as Stan Kroenke would rather do anything than speak publicly. St. Louis was, and remains, a pawn of Kansas City Chiefs chairman/public facing owner Clark Hunt, who voted for relocation and wasted no time turning around and claiming St. Louis as his own turf (the franchise’s value has nearly doubled since 2015, including a 22.5% increase in the one year after the Rams left St. Louis). The only teams which can claim some level of innocence in the exploitation of St. Louis as pawns in the NFL’s game are the Raiders, who deserve no credit for their vote as it was motivated by their own desire to abandon their loyal fan base in Oakland, which they did a few years later, and the Cincinnati Bengals, whose owner, Mike Brown, threatened to relocate the team not long after assuming control unless he received a publicly financed stadium, which he did. St. Louis may not be Brown’s pawn, but Cincinnati sure is.

Of the thirty relocation votes, none is more startling to the naked eye than that of the Green Bay Packers, who have voted for every franchise relocation since the AFL-NFL merger. Unlike the league’s other owners, most obviously Kroenke, Green Bay Packers ownership did not have an obvious financial motivation for the Rams relocation. Rather than a billionaire or a group of billionaires, the Green Bay Packers are owned by Green Bay Packers, Inc., a publicly-held nonprofit in which 361,300 people hold over five million shares of stock which does not yield dividends and cannot be sold for a profit. The ownership structure, unique among major American sports teams (and now illegal in the NFL), is frequently cited as a point of pride for the National Football League. It creates an ownership pool that, while hardly impoverished (it does, after all, require one to have $300 to spare on a financially worthless asset), is certainly less affluent per capita than the league’s other owners. And yet, with absolutely nothing financial to gain from it, the Packers have routinely signed off on team relocation.

It’s not as though shareholders of the Packers conducted votes on these relocations—it seems as though Packers team president Mark Murphy rubber-stamps them without much thought or input from the owners themselves. But by a country mile, no fan base has a stronger sense of entitlement to their right to an NFL team than the Packers, and the community ownership structure is a large part of why. A solid majority of “Well if St. Louis wanted an NFL team, they should have just supported them more” takes that I have heard in my life have come from fans of the Packers, a pro-billionaire stance seemingly incongruous with the state of Wisconsin’s socialist leanings and the dark-blue city in which the St. Louis-based Packers fans with whom I grew up originated. The ownership structure spawned a cottage industry of deeply insufferable statements from pro-Packers media, such as this embarrassing essay from SB Nation’s Green Bay Packers blog Acme Packing Co., in which the writer concludes that “Fans of the Oakland Raiders are probably wishing they had the opportunity to buy their own ‘worthless piece of paper’ right about now”, callously and myopically ignoring the fact that Oakland Raiders fans were never given the chance.

And yet Packers fans/owners aren’t all that much more powerful than the fans of any other team. In a world of meat-eaters, they are household pets—spared from the worst of fates but hardly regarded as equals by their ultimate masters. It may seem like an overstatement of the power of voters who don’t even get a say in what their so-called ownership peers get to do with their teams, but the Packers are essentially pawns promoted to the power of queens (or perhaps underpromoted to a knight, if you want to keep it to some semblance of scale). Sure, they are more powerful than an ordinary pawn, but ultimately, no matter who holds the power, it all acts in service of the king. And they, and you, will never get to be the king.