by Timothy Huang

Created on: December 03, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

In my opinion, professional American sports will never, ever die. Professional sports, in the form of the professional "major leagues" National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB) and even the National Hockey League (NHL) have withstood past and present challenges to be special and endearing enough to be weaved into the fabric of American society. Based on the success of professional American sports dealing with challenges in the past and present, it is also able to survive and even thrive in the future.

The greatest challenges facing professional American sports are economic, social and political issues that may weaken the current professional American sports. However, professional American sports still prevails in United States and even thrive presently.

First, a few major leagues suffer from economic disparity presently. The richest MLB club presently (Yankees) is richer than the 5 poorest MLB clubs combined. The NHL clubs from Ottawa and Buffalo became bankrupt, which heightened the conflict between clubs and player unions and caused the 2004-2005 NHL lockout (causing the only disruption of awarding Stanley Cup to the 'best North American hockey team' since NHL owned the Cup). NBA has some teams that continues to struggle on, for even big-city teams like the Philadelphia 76ers and the Los Angeles Clippers are still finding their winning ways.

Fortunately, NFL is relatively free of economic disparity as it had minimum salaries for all players. NFL also enforced a fixed salary floor and a fixed salary cap, applicable for all teams. Hence there is a flow of distribution of talent across all teams, giving hope to under-performing teams and making all teams as almost equally competitive. This season, the perennial losers Browns, Titans, Vikings, Cardinals and Lions are in contention for playoffs as they are in contention of the top 6 positions of their conferences. This had also happened in all the 13 seasons after the advent of maximum and minimum salaries for teams. This brings hope to all the teams, instilling all football fans the belief that "our team will be in post-season this season and then we will win the Super Bowl"! As a result, there is an upward increase of NFL fans across all the NFL franchises. NFL had succeeded to reduce a possible inequality of financial power.

After NFL provides the solution to reduce economic disparity, NHL adapted such a system after the lockout, bringing similar benefits.

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