A Sports Economist Tells the Trolls They're Wrong About Women's Sports

Ask an Academic: I interview Dave Berri about women's sports and economics and his new book "Slaying the Trolls!"

Jun 01, 2024

Other places you can find me this week:

At The Guardian, writing about the small youth sports leagues that are centering inclusion of trans youth and other LGBTQ+ young people, while so many are moving further into exclusion.
Unboxing my real, final copies of MY BOOK! If you haven’t pre-ordered a copy yet of BETTER FASTER FARTHER: HOW RUNNING CHANGED EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT WOMEN or sent the link to all the women runners and lovers of feminist and alternate histories you know, I’ve only got a couple more weeks to annoy you with that request.
Recovering from the cold I got while attending my 15th Smith College Reunion, a truly magical time of connection and reflection. More on Smith College and how attending an historic women’s college influenced my writing about gender next week.

*Jackson Pollock 1912-1956. New York. Unformed Figure. 1953. Cologne. Musée Ludwig.*

While coming up with my little WNBA primer two weeks ago I thought I’d check in with Dave Berri, a sports economist at Southern Utah University who has been one of my favorite people to turn to with my questions about women’s sports and economics over the years. He’s the first person who explained to me that, back when men’s sports leagues were first starting, most of them were failing enterprises. This is an important piece of context when we discuss women’s sports economics because there’s often an underlying assumption or inference that the reason women’s sports leagues have failed or teams have folded is because of some biological inferiority or inherent fault with women athletes.

As it turns out, Berri and Nef Walker, a fellow academic who studies race, gender, and intersectionality in sport business management culture, have a new book out Slaying the Trolls! Why the Trolls are Very, Very Wrong About Women and Sports. Berri and I had a lovely chat about some of the biggest misconceptions about women’s sports that continue to pop up for both of us today, and what the data actually shows. Also this conversation helped me uncover a very important feminist text: the original FULL lyrics of Take Me Out to the Ball Game, which I am now considering a feminist anthem (more on that below) and am now extra proud that this is one of my 2.5 year old’s favorite lullabies.

The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

MAGGIE MERTENS: What was it about the trolls concept that made you guys want to do a whole book addressing those statements?

DAVE BERRI: After I wrote Wages of Wins, my first book, I started a blog, and I started blogging a lot. And I got comments. And they were trolls. And you’d respond to them, and they’d leave another comment, and then you respond, and you realize this is worthless, they’re just going to keep responding until you give up. And it occurred to me, this is all men who are doing this, and that’s just very bizarre behavior.

As I started speaking with more women in sports, and hearing their experiences, I noticed with women it’s multiplied, it’s much more. Then I started looking into women’s sports and the trolls were really wrong about that, this wasn’t just economics or the market, it was discrimination.

And so I talked with Nef, and we were discussing how there’s all these trolls out there, and we should write a book together detailing where the trolls are wrong.

MM: So what kinds of things do you address, what are some of the common tropes from these kinds of trolls?

DB: One of my favorite stories in the book is women are better than men at sports. Women don’t have to beat men to be better than men. The way to understand that is that the champion Featherweight boxer, is this guy from Japan, who’s nicknamed the Monster. He’s considered the second-best boxer in the world. The boxing rankings put him ahead of two Heavyweights. He weighs 115 pounds, he can’t possibly beat a heavyweight. That’s ridiculous. But he doesn’t have to beat them to be considered better than them. So therefore, Tamika Catchings, Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, or Candace Parker do not have to beat Michael Jordan to be better than him. They all won more than he did, they got better results, that’s how better works.

MM: I get constantly quoted this idea by trolls that the NBA gives the WNBA X-amount of money every year. But the only place I can find anyone citing this are on Right-Wing news sites, so I just wonder who is feeding them this information that they repeat and repeat but I can’t confirm at all?

DB: You know, you talk to the owner of the Atlanta Dream, and he’s very clear about this, ‘I’ve never gotten a check, where is the check?’ The NBA owns half the league, and they do call all the shots. And the NBA is the source of this idea that the New York Times keeps reporting: ‘The WNBA doesn’t make a profit.’ Nothing in any of the articles they wrote that ever says they have the data to back that up, the NBA just keeps saying it.

What’s interesting is there’s a long history of the NBA making exactly the same assertion about the NBA. The NBA has asserted that it doesn’t make a profit since the late 1960s. It said it in the late 1960s in a Senate hearing, and they said it in 1983 when they were negotiating the first payroll cap, and they said it in 2011 when they wanted the players to take a pay cut. And they said it in 2016 after they got the pay cut, Adam Silver said half the teams are not making money. How are they not making money? You just signed a massive broadcasting deal. You just got the players to take a pay cut. Are you ever going to make money? So they are asserting this over and over, but there’s no evidence. An accounting professor told me that a firm essentially can assert a profit or loss depending on the motivation you have in writing up your financial statement.

MM: Sure, lots of companies that are held up as beacons of the business world don’t record profits all the time.

DB: Yeah. Movies often don’t record profits. Musicians often don’t record profits.

MM: And yet that’s the excuse for paying WNBA players $70,000.

DB: Exactly, that’s the other thing is that’s not how pay works. People aren’t paid based on profits, they’re paid based on revenues. If asserting there are no profits leads to no pay, then every firm would do that. Everyone should hire the trolls, they’d be the cheapest employees ever. All you have to do is tell them, there’s no profit then I don’t have to pay you anymore. And just tell them “That’s basic economics!”

MM: Can you talk a little bit about how did men’s sports actually become such titanically huge businesses?

DB: Well, they did not start out that way. They started out as very tiny little businesses in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were no fans. It's a rather weird thing. Sometime in the mid 19th century at a college sporting event, somebody got the idea to sell tickets, and that made it a business. And they did that in baseball in the 19th century, they sold tickets, and it became a business. Initially, they didn't want to pay the players. And the reason why they didn't want to do that is because the players were rich people. And if you paid them then poor people would show up and play. But eventually they began to pay the players because they found that if you paid the players, you get better players. The National League starts in 1876. The first 18 teams that got National League franchises, 16 of them went out of business. The failure rate was that huge. Major League Baseball does not get to an average of 10,000 fans a game until the early 1940s. So when Babe Ruth played, he saw 10,000 fans in New York. But when he traveled, he didn’t! This is a very tiny, small little business. And it took another 50 or 60 years for it to become a national pasttime.

It takes decades for people to actually form an emotional attachment to sports teams. Eventually, you get to a point where there's enough fans, there's enough networking between the fans, that the fans develop these emotional attachments. So the first 40 franchises in NFL history, almost all went out of business. Their failure rate was 90%. NBA same thing. Their first 23 franchises, 15 went out of business. The initial size of the NBA at 10 years old, is 10% of the size of the WNBA right now in revenue. In today’s dollars they made $20 million. WNBA makes $200 million. And the NBA still paid 40% of their revenue to players — they still managed to find the money to pay their players. In fact, the NBA players in real terms were not actually paid that much less than what they are paid right now. WNBA comes along in 1997. Adam Silver says in 2016, ‘I thought they’d be further along by now.’ But why? They are exactly where they’re supposed to be, they’re gradually building a fan base.

MM: I follow what you’re saying about it taking time to get fans invested, but there’s also the undervaluing of women doing these jobs in general, right? Even the size of the media rights deals and who we decide to put on television and how does that play into the inequality, too?

DB: Major League Soccer just got a $2.5 billion deal from Apple, and that was following a fairly large deal from ESPN/Univision, and that deal clearly didn’t pay off. They gave them like $90 million and the ratings were lower than the WNBA. So that deal didn’t work out and then Apple goes, ‘Here’s more money.’ People keep investing in Major League Soccer as if they think this is going to be something someday, but in order for that to be something someday you have to eat the two leagues ahead of you and the gap between you and them is phenomenal. MLS is never going to be the Premier League. Adult men who are the best in class will always go play in European leagues. That’s why Messi scores every game he plays in the MLS.

They keep throwing money at this, and then you have all these women leagues out there, NWSL, European soccer, WNBA, National Pro Fastpitch, and they’re starving for investment dollars. If I took you back in time and told you you could buy the Boston Celtics for $5 million and someday be worth $5 billion, you would like to buy that, right? We already saw the test and we know the answer, WNBA is at the same point, but people are acting like they’re not sure if the investment will pay off.

Here’s the thing that should irk people about the WNBA: They’re moving Caitlin Clark games into bigger arenas. But they’re doing it after they drafted her, and after they saw the demand. United Football League, on the other hand, already has the big stadiums, they already have them, and there is no demand. So you moved the men’s games into the bigger arenas before there is a demand as an investment, saying someday this will pay off. But the women you only move when it’s been proven to you, without a doubt. Women you have to prove it. Men are an investment, women are just a boring cost.

MM: Two years ago when the Seattle Storm moved into their new arena, Climate Pledge Arena, they didn’t even have a spot for a team store inside! The only team store was for the NHL team, the Kraken, which was a brand new team. So everyone is telling us to support the WNBA and buy more merchandise, well where is it? If they don’t have it, we’re not going to buy it. Now they have the store and it’s open and it’s always PACKED during every Storm game. But that should not have taken that long!

DB: And they keep doing that over and over and over again. With the recent NCAA media rights deal, they say that the women’s basketball deal is worth $80 to $100 million, and give them $65 million for the women. And then the women’s basketball NCAA tournament gets higher ratings than the men’s, and they only sold that for $65 million [while media rights for the men’s tournament were sold for $875 million per year]. And there’s no point where there’s any accountability. Over and over again, you see these men, and it’s the same thing with the trolls, they’re so confident they know the answer. Even when the data shows they’re totally wrong, they think they're on the right path.

MM: Is there anything else from the book that you wanted to mention?

DB: We touched on a lot of it, but there is the idea that Taylor Swift discovered football for women. As though women had never been sports fans before! Actually, we start the book by pointing out that the song “Take Me Out to The Ball Game” is written about a woman. The woman is the baseball fan in the song, a woman who wants to be taken to the game because she’s such a huge fan.

Take Me Out to The Ball Game
Katie Casey was baseball mad,
Had the fever and had it bad.
Just to root for the home town crew,
Ev'ry sou
Katie blew.
On a Saturday her young beau
Called to see if she'd like to go
To see a show, but Miss Kate said "No,
I'll tell you what you can do:"
Chorus
Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd;
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don't care if I never get back.
Let me root, root, root for the home team
If they don't win, it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game.
Katie Casey saw all the games,
Knew the players by their first names.
Told the umpire he was wrong,
All along,
Good and strong.
When the score was just two to two,
Katie Casey knew what to do,
Just to cheer up the boys she knew,
She made the gang sing this song:
Chorus
Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd;
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don't care if I never get back.
Let me root, root, root for the home team
If they don't win, it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game.

Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a weekly newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.

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