Strikes would not happen if US sports leagues were based around free market principles rather than monopolies that set artificial restrictions on athletes salaries and conditions.
Your approach is more or less what happens in world soccer. Clubs like PSG or Manchester United essentially purchase their championships. Libertarianism doesn't make for very interesting games or teams.
I think sports leagues could do with a little less privatization and a little more Green Bay.
Depending on one's definition of successful. Is the EPL the most popular league? Probably. Are the EPL teams the least profitable and most indebted? You bet they are! To the tune of 3.9 billion USD of debt across the league.
This is a lockout and not a strike, for one. Two 'free market principles rather than monopolies' - monopolies and free market principals are synonymous. They are not in opposition to one another (except in libertarian-land).
At-will employment wouldn't make sense in professional sports. Imagine a team that got eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. A player could give two weeks notice and then join a team that was still competing.
Contracts would still exist, as well as a few other rules, but for the most part there wouldn't be things like a salary cap.
European club soccer is much closer to this model and it both creates really strong competition at the top end and a large spread between the top and bottom teams in a league. It is also very difficult to move from the bottom to the top without a huge amount of outside revenue.
Pro sports leagues in North America tend to operate as a monopoly, allowed because they have a union to balance it out. That's why both the NHL and NBA settled their lockouts right before the unions were able able to de-certify (NHL) or file an anti-trust (after decertifying in the NBA) lawsuit.
European club soccer is much closer to this model and it both creates really strong competition at the top end and a large spread between the top and bottom teams in a league. It is also very difficult to move from the bottom to the top without a huge amount of outside revenue.
No, it doesn't. The disparity in athlete talent and revenues between teams which make the Champions League and those which don't is greater than the disparity between say, the NFL and high school football. For the past decade, the winning teams of the Champions League and its feeder legs have all been one of the top 3 highest-spending teams in their respective leagues. There's simply no contest between, say, Manchester United and some random Irish club. In contrast, most of the professional American leagues reduce the talent disparity enough that either team could realistically win a match.
I may not have picked the best wording, but basically I'm agreeing that overall the disparity is very high. The upside is that games like Man City v Man U or Real Madrid v Barcelona end up being very entertaining.
The flip side of that is you would decimate small market teams who don't have the funds to compete with much larger markets. That means "buying" power for salaries would be centralized to a handful of teams, while the rest of the league would be less and less competitive until they would have to fold.
Also, don't you think wages would be higher without unions? The collective bargaining is allowing professional sports owners to suppress all salaries. If there were no unions/collective bargaining, at the very least, the top players would immediately start to see much much bigger contracts. No sure if the journeyman player would benefit as much.
Yes, wages for the best players would be higher, but wages for everyone else would be lower. The unions are designed to protect the majority of the players at the cost of the truly elite players.
I don't think that woud be true across the board - financially successful teams, like the New York Rangers, would likely pay more across the board in order to get better players.
I think sports leagues could do with a little less privatization and a little more Green Bay.