It’s time to stop deifying our favourite athletes.
On Jan. 13, the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins played the fourth-coldest game in NFL history, featuring 27mph winds and whopping -20 degree Celsius temperatures. The National Weather Service’s characterization of the conditions as “dangerously cold,” prompts a profound concern about the threshold at which the compromise of fan and player safety for financial gain and playoff-season viewership becomes unacceptable.
There’s an understood moral ambiguity associated with the suffering and violence glorified in professional sports, alongside the insinuation that being tough enough to play and win constitutes a heroic player or team.
For many, sports serve as more than mere entertainment—they’re a religious experience, a ritual that binds communities and transcends the boundaries of individual or player identity. Football in particular has evolved into a civic American religion, with Sunday night football taking on a quasi-sacred status—ironically, on the same evening considered the Lord’s day in many Abrahamic contexts.
In this sporting religion, deceased players are elevated to the status of saints, superstar athletes are defined as gods, reporters become scribes chronicling sacred narratives, trophies are revered icons, commissioners and referees assume roles akin to a high council, and stadiums stand as modern-day sacred spaces to see rituals unfold.
The consumerist religious fervor in the sporting industry, however, has become increasingly pronounced. The celebrity of professional athletes is best understood as a transformation of flesh into commodity. This is evident when examining the aggregate value of the NFL reaching a staggering $163 billion—nearly equivalent to the combined value of the NBA and MLB. The Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs, as individual entities, command values of $5.7 billion and $4.3 billion respectively.
Once confined to the realm of sports, athletes’ celebrity status spills over into mainstream culture, reinforcing the perception of sports as a lucrative business, often at the expense of participants’ ethical considerations.
The Chiefs’ 26-7 victory in sub-freezing temperatures averaged 23 million viewers on Peacock, NFL+, and NBC s in Kansas City and Miami alone, reaching a total of 27.6 million fans. The game’s viewership easily sured the previous record of 15.3 million viewers from the game between the Seattle Seahawks and Dallas Cowboys on Nov. 30.
According to a variety of reports, NBCUniversal paid $100 million for the rights to the game, attributing an increase in spectatorship to extreme weather and the novelty of Taylor Swift’s attendance to watch Travis Kelce play.
Within this intricate web of economics and fandom, professional athletes simultaneously play roles as producers and the produced as they become tasked with amusing a reliable and dependent fanbase.
The blurred boundaries between the human and the commodified athlete raise ethical questions about the extent to which the industry should push the limits in its quest for financial success.
The bone-chilling clash between the Chiefs and Dolphins and the debate over playing conditions goes beyond the immediate spectacle on the field. It forces onlookers to confront the broader implications of a sporting culture that prioritizes financial gain over the well-being of participants and fans, and consider the ethical responsibilities owed to those who make the sport perceivable.
Tags
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be ed, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to [email protected].