America’s success as the world’s most prosperous and dynamic country rests on its culture. Key ingredients of this culture include our affection for innovation, for the pursuit of excellence, and our intolerance for those who seek to take unfair advantage of others.
Unfortunately, we have a major blind spot here when it comes to professional sports. Rather than watch an NFL, NHL, NBA, or MLB game with a focus on excitement, tactics, and momentum, we allow ourselves to be subsumed by an unending blitz of advertisements. We allow games to be delayed even when players are ready to restart after a change of offensive-defensive teams or timeouts. Just so that broadcasters can squeeze in a few more ads. And now it’s happening at the FIFA World Cup. The international soccer tournament, which is mostly being hosted in the United States, is suffering mandatory three-minute water breaks in each of the game’s two 45-minute halves. This is a major development for a sport that has never had timeouts.
Yes, ads pay for our ability to watch games affordably. Yes, ads are, at their most basic level, a positive reflection of a capitalist society in which corporate prosperity rests on consumer choices in a hypercompetitive marketplace. Ads are not bad per se. The issue is that Americans have allowed commercials to take priority over our enjoyment of sports.
