One of the most memorable aspects of the 2016 NFL season was the national anthem protests. Starting with Colin Kaepernick in a preseason game for the 49ers, players chose to remain seated, to kneel, to raise their fists, or to stay in the locker room, during the playing of the national anthem, in order to protest racial inequality. The anthem protests sent President Trump into something of an apoplectic frenzy. However, ultimately Kaepernick paid a high price for his protests, as he wasn't offered a contract by any other team after opting out of his 49ers contract at the end of the season. But did teams also pay a price for the protest actions of their players?
That is the question addressed in this recent article by Noah Sperling and Donald Vandegrift (both College of New Jersey), published in the Journal of Sports Economics (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online). Specifically, Sperling and Vandegrift look at the effect of protests on TV viewership, for the following game. The reason for looking at TV viewership, rather than game attendance, is:
Though attendance captures actions rather than attitudes, attendance as an outcome measure is still flawed. Stadium capacities impose an inherent upper bound on attendance and tickets are often purchased months in advance. Thus, attendance is unable to track short-term, weekly changes in demand.
They focus on the following game to overcome two timing issues with the TV viewership data:
Given that Nielsen ratings are calculated based on average ratings over an entire game, it is difficult to determine if the observed rating is capturing the full effect of the protest behavior. It is possible that this averaging could be capturing disgruntled viewers who were unable to change the channel in time following a protest and thus they are counted as a viewer for purposes of the rating. Other situations could include an anti-protest viewer who failed to notice the protest during the game and only became aware of the action from media reporting following the game’s conclusion. The same concerns apply to the viewership-in-millions measure which is also averaged across the span of the entire game.
Sperling and Vandegrift also distinguish between two 'levels' of protests:
Unambiguous protests include any protests in which a player kneels or sits during the national anthem, stays in the locker room during the national anthem, or raises a fist during the national anthem. By contrast, ambiguous protests include all other player protests (e.g., locking arms with teammates during the national anthem)...
They find that:
...(1) the unambiguous protests reduce viewership in the week following the protests by about 15% while ambiguous protests do not generally produce statistically significant reductions in viewership; (2) the negative effect of unambiguous protests on viewership is particularly strong in metro locations that voted more heavily for Donald Trump in 2016; and (3) following Donald Trump’s statements in week 3 of the 2017 season, both ambiguous and unambiguous protests increased and the increase in ambiguous protests was particularly large.
That put the profit-maximising NFL team owners in a difficult position. The protests negatively affected TV viewership, which (if the protests continued) would be sure to negatively impact future revenues that the NFL (and team owners) would receive from TV broadcast contracts. Sperling and Vandegrift note in the conclusion that the increase in protests following President Trump's statements in 2017:
...taken together with: (1) subsequent negotiations between players and owners over the anthem protests; (2) the willingness of some owners to join players in less objectionable forms of protest; and (3) the May 2018 agreement to “stand and show respect for the flag and the anthem” (Haislop, 2020), suggests that the owners advanced or supported the ambiguous protests to rebut arguments that they sought to suppress the players’ expressive rights while they pursued actions to curtail unambiguous protests that threatened their income derived from TV broadcasts.
The owners responded in a very carefully constructed way that would ensure that their profits were maintained. They supported ambiguous protests, which ensured that the protests had virtually no effect on TV viewership (and future team revenue). However, letting the players continue to protest (albeit in an ambiguous way) kept the players happy and willing to continue to play for the team. Such rational owners!
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