Commercialisation and advertising has taken over the game of football

The argument

A person watches a football game for... well, the football. They tune in to the TV or drive up to the stadium for the sport, for their favorite club or team; not for commercials. Unfortunately, fans today gets the reverse treatment. Expecting to enjoy a game of soccer, they instead get bombarded with brand names and logo in a way that takes away from their enjoyment of the game. Advertising is everywhere in football. Just look at the uniforms of the players; they're either covered in multiple company logos, or dominated by one large one. One can hardly even tell what club the player represents, but one can certainly tell who's paying them. And the problem is only growing. In the United States, Major League Soccer is allowing teams to add one more sponsor logo to their uniforms; by removing the MLS logo from the sleeves. The logo of the league itself is being replaced by another ad. Nothing could be better representative of the ad problem in football than that. As if that wasn't enough, company sponsors also have control over ticket sales. For example, during the Women's FIFA World Cup 2019, Visa customers had first access to match tickets. Sponsoring the league or the tournament is one thing, but taking tickets away from dedicated fans who happen to not use Visa is somewhat absurd. It really feels as though this sponsorship deal is shoving Visa down people's throats. Fans can't enjoy the sport anymore without kowtowing to brands, just as the leagues themselves do. All this commercialization goes to show that football is no longer focused on the sport itself, or competition, or even team spirit. The name of the game today is money. The club needs money; the league needs money; even the players want money. And it's natural to want to get paid. But the way they beat people over the head with these advertisements, it feels as though making money is all that matters.

Premises

Counter-arguments

This argument seems a bit nitpicky. Not every uniform is gaudily covered in company logos; many just don't look that bad. And at any rate, it doesn't affect actual play. Does a spectacular goal by Messi or Ronaldo really diminish just because they've got an extra picture on their shirt? Only the most traditionalist, stick-in-the-mud fan would think that. Football actually handles its advertising quite well. In football, the ads are little logos on shirts that one can barely even see on TV or from the stands. Meanwhile, baseball plasters its ads all over the back wall; with every pop-up or change of ends, the viewer is bombarded with billboard-sized messes. Basketball and American football have a commercial break seemingly every few seconds. By contrast, football's ads seem to be handled the best out of any sport.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The claim about shirts is overstated as a general matter. Football kits typically carry a small number of sponsor marks alongside the club crest, and the counter-argument on record notes that the branding is barely legible from the stands or on television — so the assertion that one cannot tell which club a player represents does not describe the ordinary case. [Rejecting P2] Priority ticketing for a sponsor's customers concerns allocation of a scarce good, and the mechanisms it competes with — ballots, membership schemes, loyalty points — also distribute unevenly. The premise identifies an irritation rather than a takeover, and one tournament's arrangement does not establish a general condition. [Rejecting P3] The inference from advertising to a change in the sport's focus is not drawn. Nothing in the premises bears on how matches are played, contested or organised, and the counter presses this directly: the quality of play is unaffected by an additional mark on a shirt. [Rejecting C] The comparison the counter offers also cuts against the conclusion, since football has resisted the in-play commercial breaks and perimeter saturation common in other major sports — which suggests it manages commercial pressure comparatively well rather than having been overrun by it.