The team owners of professional sports setting up an employment cartel so that they can systematically pay labour less than its market worth is not socialism or anything like it. These are literally billionaires making the rules in favour of their own bank balance.
disclosure: not a socialist. Don't care for socialism at all. But it's not fair to tar socialism with billionaires feathering their nests driving down the relative return to labour vs capital, imho. It's just regulatory capture by its textbook definition. Total and complete regulatory capture, in fact.
This is about the economic environment composed of teams and games won where the medium of exchange is talent, and how the rules for how access to talent and other restrictions enable a more level playing field that keeps any one team from dominating the talent pool and winning all the games.
It's not about the economic environment of billionaires and how they leverage their cash hordes to underpay their employees. The regulations mentioned would apply no matter how the pay range for talent was scaled relative to the owners.
We can talk about the economics of something without shitting on socialism or shitting on capitalism or having disclaimers about which system the speaker does or doesn't like best.
There is an incredible naivete there if you think that the market for talent (ie labour) is being rigged without it being in the owners interests by design, first and foremost. I'm a little flabbergasted that you both don't see it for what it plainly is. Restraint of trade and regulatory capture. (Argue it's good and necessary and patriotic and the owners have done a perfect job that just happens to make them vast amounts of money as an unintended side-effect if you must but it is what it is!)
A better way of levelling the playing field would be league appropriation of all revenue above $x on a sliding scale for redistribution to poorer teams, yet have the players able to play where they want with no restraint on the market for their salaries.
What you'd get there is owners making dramatically less profit and players making vastly higher salaries. So why not that model? It's un-american! There are other models you can use if you want equality between teams. If you think it has anything to do with factors other than the owners want the money in their pocket and have the power to get it where the players presently don't I can't really help you resolve that. I do note that it is difficult to think of things in a fresh way when you've grown up with them constantly being in the background with an oft-repeated justification. Hard for all of us. I didn't grow up with american accented sports so I guess that's easier for me?
The owners would all scream, shriek and wale if anything like the restraints on the players was placed on literally any of their business interests. Imagine if for the good of all of america's industry the market for senior executives was subject to the same restraint of trade to level the playing field between mining, steel, tech, banking, retail, building materials, etc etc. So that all of America's industry can be strong and compete. No exec getting paid a million a year could complain, surely. Sportsmen can't because they're rich, right?
disclosure: not a socialist. Don't care for socialism at all. But it's not fair to tar socialism with billionaires feathering their nests driving down the relative return to labour vs capital, imho. It's just regulatory capture by its textbook definition. Total and complete regulatory capture, in fact.