Lebron James, or the Concept of Athlete as Industry
Anybody that thinks basketball is about game-breaking three pointers and slam dunks needs to wake up. Basketball is about as much about players on the court as Lost is about real life. With the NBA market a Mecca of cash opportunities, basketball has long become, like most other sports, a thinly veiled term for business involved with sports. But that’s old news. Today’s is that sports figures themselves have now become industries—as witnessed with LeBronathon, otherwise known as the spectacle of LeBron James’s free agency.
Assessing LeBron-as-industry can be underscored by analysing the PowerPoint presentation the New York Knicks gave him in their bidding process. That team, no joke, hired an entire marketing consultancy firm called InterBrand to model some 50,000 potential lifetime scenarios for “the King.” All kinds of possibilities were assessed, such as James’s potential to win a championship, fan appreciation, city value, and self- brand value. Naturally, hired by the Knicks, the results were computed in such a way as to demonstrate why James should play for them—itself a marketing tactic—but this doesn’t stop the stats from speaking volumes about James anyway.
InterBrand concluded that if James played for the New York Knicks, he had some 50% chance of becoming a billionaire. With other teams, notably his home team Cavs, this potential dwindled to almost nothing. In other words, James was told: come to New York and we’ll make you worth roughly three times the average NBA team (team worth being $367 million on average). The lynchpin wasn’t bright lights, big city—at the end, it was big money.
And not just the big money teams could offer James. Obtaining James was really about obtaining all the symbolic and actual revenue of his brand-value. First and foremost, teams put stakes in James because it meant getting a financial make-over. And a big one at that.
According to the New York Daily News, New York’s Economic Development Corporation conducted studies that indicated should James come to their city, James would generate about $58 million in new city spending, as fans and tourists tried to see the star and get in on the action. And in Chicago, an economist was bold or goofy enough to peg his value to that city as over $3 billion.
These facts suggest that the now-finalized wooing process of LeBron James was about a lot more than simply getting a great player. That’s putting it mildly. The burden was about as heavy as revamping the entire urban economy. By failing to get James, the Knicks lost an opportunity to advance profit—and hence betterment—of their city. That’s about the worst you can do as a sports franchise. Epic fail.
Nielson ratings reported that about 7% of homes in the US were tuned into James’s ESPN special. That’s over 21 million viewers. Any athlete that can boast that kind of support for an hour ceases to be human. We’re now talking about an Unidentified Being, such as the President or Christopher Walken (about 35 million tuned in for Obama’s inauguration, for what it’s worth). In light of these facts, it is clear that, contrary to maybe a few strange basketball purists, LeBron James milking his decision was, at least financially, in his best interest. In fact it was undoubtedly also in the Miami Heat’s best interest. One could even say, somewhat accurately, that James received more publicity off the court than he could ever achieve on it. And the same goes for all mega-popular athletes. Look at Tiger Woods. What does the average person remember him for? Winning 14 major golf championships? No. Having mega family issues and driving into a tree sparking all kinds of controversy? Yes.
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