When football masquerades as a charity: Column

Ken Stern | USATODAY

December marks the beginning of two seemingly distinct seasons: the giving season, when many Americans make donations to charities, and the football championship season, starting with charity bowl games and ending with the non-profit NFL's Super Bowl in February.

Other than the accident of the calendar, these things would seem to have little in common. But many of the major pillars of American football — and other sports — are, in fact, charities or non-profits supported directly and indirectly by public subsidies.

Let's start with the bowl games. From the very beginning, the college football bowls have been organized as non-profits. The first bowl game — the Rose Bowl — was never conceived as a stand-alone event. It was launched in 1902 to shore up the flagging finances of the Tournament of Roses. The game was not an immediate success and was replaced by an annual polo match and subsequently chariot races, ostrich races, and a battle of the species sprint between an elephant and a camel. None of those events proved worthy, and in 1916, the football game returned.

Rose Bowl imitators

The ultimate success of the Rose Bowl spawned many imitators. Some, such as the Salad Bowl and the Cigar Bowl, did not survive, but most did. This year's bowl schedule is clogged with 35 games, and the rise of corporate sponsorship and TV rights have turned the season into a billion dollar "charity" enterprise.

By any measure, bowl games are odd choices to be charitable organizations, seeing as they have become opportunities for corporate promotion and the entertainment of university boosters. And the beneficiaries of the millions of dollars that wash through are the bowls themselves.

The bowl games, for example, spend an extraordinary amount on salaries: The Sugar Bowl's CEO made more than $634,000 in 2011. No doubt, there are challenges to running a bowl game, but the relative difficulty was revealed when the Fiesta Bowl characterized its CEO's work as part-time.

The bowls also spread their largesse to others in the college football community. The Orange Bowl sponsors an annual Summer Splash cruise, and the Sugar Bowl maintains a Standing Committee on Golf. What they don't spend money on is helping those in need. Less than 2% of revenues go to charities.

Other sports have also reaped benefits. The U.S. Open golf tournament is a charity, and numerous other highly profitable sports organizations are structured as non-profits, most notably the National Football League.

Non-profit NFL?

The notion that big-time college sports can masquerade as charities is ludicrous. But at least the bowl games obtained their status somewhat honestly, either through the accident of history like the Rose Bowl or by taking advantage of the provision in the charity laws that give exemption to amateur athletics.

But the provision granting non-profit status to the NFL was part of a behind-the-scenes deal that added "professional football leagues" to the statutory list of otherwise bland organizations such as the chambers of commerce, real estate boards and boards of trade. The sole purpose was to enrich the NFL.

And since 1966, enrich is exactly what the NFL has done.

Not only has the NFL avoided millions in taxes but, as Gregg Easterbrook recently described in The Atlantic, the league and its teams have benefited from billions of dollars in direct public subsidies for stadium construction and in abatements from rents and taxation.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell almost certainly is among the most highly paid non-profit managers in the world, with compensation of $29,490,000 in 2011. Six current and former NFL executives each made more than $1 million that year.

Support real charity

The holiday season is critical to many charities. Last year, Teach For America raised 80.5% of its donations in December, and Catholic Charities raised almost 70%. It's the time of year when we think about those most in need of a helping hand.

But the fact that the bowl games and the NFL masquerade as charities or non-profits remind us that it's also the time when we collectively support the least neediest of all.

Ken Stern is president and CEO of Palisades Media and the author of the new book With Charity For All: Why Charities Are Failing and a Better Way to Give.

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