Reddit reviews Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love

Pretty much.

From what I read in this book, which is probably one sided/biased (and ignores most of the NHL!), they pretty much made it illegal to do that because it doesn't make them as much money. Not worrying about teams folding, but worried about the profit line.

Packers fans have it made. Team will always be there (as long as football is a thing) and wont ever find their team switching cities over night.

Yeah, the league is an association and Silver works for the association and the association members are the various owners of the teams. They agree to abide by association rules (and associations are similar to non profits). There also seems to be partnership like qualities to the association whereby owners share profits with one another and are heavily regulated in the way they can conduct business. So in a way it's more like a cartel.

Evidently, as you and /u/muchachoblanco point out, there is a divestiture clause that allows a team to be kicked out of the association and sold, etc., but I imagine the owner is entitled to fair market compensation.

An interesting book I read about these arrangements (it's a pretty light book and just introduces these arrangements) is 'Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love.'. It even has a chapter on Sterling and makes him seem like a jerk.

You should check this book out. It's a quick and witty read with a ton of cited evidence showing the fallacy of taxpayer-funded stadiums providing economic boons to cities: https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Sports-Owners-Ruining-Games/dp/1595587829

I know it's on a significantly different scale, but hell, just look at what the Olympics do to cities that have to invest in new infrastructure on their own dime.

There's a lot of academic research to support what you're saying, not just at the American level, but in much of the world (or world where a news medium is commercial).

In short, news media corporations are largely intertwined with other massive corporations and are massive capitalist institutions themselves (look at ownership over American or Canadian TV stations, for example). As such, protestors tend to be displayed as deviant, and try to portray the idea of change as undesirable and unattainable (look at how long mainstream media took to actually cover OWS). I'm just kind of paraphrasing some of what I read during my Master's, but some of the major sources that come off the top of my head are Mediating the Message and an essay titled Ideology and the Mass Media by Peter Golding & Graham Murdock.

I'm not sure the sports element is really all that relevant, though. Many of those networks won't have the rights to broadcast the World Cup or 2016 Olympics, so losing viewers during those times shouldn't be a cause for concern. Also, I don't see the same type of thinking behind American sports. I'm not American, but the Super Bowl and other major league championships are privatized, so the public really shouldn't be too hgh-strung about their costs, as they aren't using public funding like for the WC. As for the second part, it's usually municipal or state governments that put up that money, but it does present an interesting question. Dave Zirin points out that the same week the state of Minnesota offered public funding for Target Field (the owner of the Twins Zirin says is the wealthies in MLB), bridges collapsed and 13 people died.

Anyway, I'm flaming out now and just started rambling, but hope this offers some thinking points for you.

TL;DR Commercial mass media are huge corporate enterprises that frame protests negatively so as to maintain the status quo and keep making money.