The New Yorker:

In its new collective-bargaining agreement, the pro soccer league has eliminated the draft. Free agency “was always the players’ power to begin with,” one executive said.

By Louisa Thomas

“The history of power in professional sports can be summed up very quickly,” DeMaurice Smith, the former executive director of the N.F.L. Players Association, told me recently. “Every sport up until this point is predicated on management and the owners doing everything to retain their power and control.” Granted, Smith comes to this subject from a particular vantage—he led N.F.L. players through a lockout and two collective-bargaining negotiations. But the evidence can be summed up quickly, too. In the United States, athletes in the major professional sports leagues have never had much say in where they play. What rights of free agency they do have were gained through long and ugly court battles and labor fights, and that free agency is generally restricted, limited, or discouraged by the leagues’ rules. Players rarely get to decide if, when, and where they are traded. It happens all the time—a family’s life changes in a moment. The cornerstone of major American professional sports is the draft, in which teams take turns selecting the rights to sign new players who want to join their leagues. Generally, the teams that fared worst in the previous season get the first picks, and players have essentially no control over who chooses them. Once drafted, many players sign contracts that aren’t guaranteed, if they are lucky enough to sign contracts at all. When leagues expand, as they often do, new teams are stocked through an expansion draft, in which teams “protect” some of their players but leave others for the taking.

The inaugural N.F.L. draft was in 1936. Drafts have existed in the other major men’s sports for at least fifty years. In 1970, a retired N.F.L. player sued the league, arguing that the draft violates the Sherman Antitrust Act, and won. But the league got around that quibble by working out a collective-bargaining system, through which players, as a group, accepted severe limits on their freedom in exchange for certain benefits and standards, and a claim to a portion of the ever-growing revenue generated by the mass-entertainment spectacles in which they play the starring role. Bargains, as everyone knows, can be Faustian.

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