FOOTBALL IS WRONG

By now nearly everyone in America knows that the National Football League has lied for decades about how dangerous their sport is.   Cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain condition caused by concussions that can result in memory loss, erratic behavior and even suicidal depression,  runs rampart through the ranks of the players.  While the league has finally admitted the danger and taken a few steps  towards trying to make the game safer, at the end of the day, bone crushing, body and brain damaging tackles are such an intrinsic part of the sport that there's really no way to disentangle them from it.
Now banning the most popular sport in the nation  is an impossibility, but I certainly think that it's perfectly reasonable to say that tackle football should be banned for all children below the age of 18.  The fact that there are boys as young as 12 engaging in a violent contact sport is appalling.  As a recent Vox magazine article pointed out, a 2015 study found that former NFL players who began football before age 12 fared worse on cognitive assessments than those who started later in their teens. And this held true even controlling for number of years played.  Putting it plainly, young boys with brains still  far from developed, should not play a game that runs the risk of concussions.  Let them learn the basics of the game through touch or flag play, and then switch to tackle when they are old enough to vote or join the military.
And it's not just CTE, recent articles in The New York Times have illustrated that NFL players run a much higher risk of being addicted to pain killing opioids than the general public, and line men are encouraged to beef up by having incredibly unhealthy eating habits that can lead to serious health issues.

Another problem is the stadiums that teams play in.  Today's modern teams expect huge stadiums with multiple instant replay screens and luxury lounges.  The problem is that they usually expect the taxplayers to help foot the bill for all these features.  In a despicable move, the owners of NFL teams, who are often themselves billionaires, will threaten to leave a city unless taxpayer funds are used to help build a stadium, essentially holding the team hostage.  So, cities that are often strapped for cash will waste precious taxpayer dollars to "save" the team. Yet nearly all the money that the team generates in those stadiums goes to them and not to the city.   The argument that teams draw in fans who spend money in the local economy ignores the fact that there are only eight regular season games played in the stadiums, which means they draw no one for the vast majority of the year.  And with seating, parking and concession prices rising constantly, they drain money away from spending fans might have done elsewhere.  As a 2017 article in The Washington Times pointed out, according to economist Michael Farren, the $750 million in public funds Nevada will use to build a new stadium for the Raiders could have provided a year’s worth of education to nearly 100,000 public school students or funded all state highway rehabilitation costs for the next 6.5 years.
In many ways, the NFL is a perfect example of everything wrong with American capitalism: it's wealthy owners push the players to be more and more successful, ignoring the health risks, and then demand taxpayers help pay for their modern stadiums, which often have ticket prices so high that the average fan can't afford to go.  Yes. the owners sit in their luxury boxes and watch the game while literally looking down at the people seated below them, who's taxes helped fund their overpriced lounges.  The rich just keep getting richer in America, and the NFL is just another example of it.