#tmjuke

Far greater than the Romans had ever imagined, combining new synthetic materials to further discomfort the masses more than stone ever could, America has created not one, but hundreds of coliseums - we just don’t call them that. 

Happy Labor Day:

Thankfully, truly, we pay our athletes millions of dollars in contracts that may seem absolutely ludicrous to the general viewer. Aside from the economics of it all, these athletes are heroes - they represent everything, from geographic pride to the American Dream. Now back to the money part, imagine, if they were slaves.

Rich owners take their teams of brawn and brains and pit them against other owners’ teams in a fight for supremacy. They buy and trade players as assets, thinking solely about the athlete’s value to the franchise, discarding them ruthlessly when their contract has run up, or worse, they have fallen out of favor.

Race aside, it’s all a bit Roman isn’t it. Luckily the main differences are the key ones - athletes are paid handsomely for their services and they are often respected as society’s elite. But what about the path they took to get there? 

There was an interesting moment last summer, when Arsène Wenger, manager of Arsenal FC commented on the lack of top quality strikers from Europe:  

"Maybe in our history, street football has gone. In street football when you are 10 years old, you play with 15-year-olds, so you have to be shrewd, you have to show that you are good, you have to fight, to win impossible balls.”

To give some perspective, Luis Suarez, playing for Barcelona FC is a man who is often ridiculed for his on-field antics, but is also almost worshiped for his uncanny ability to score a monstrous number of goals. Between the biting, the racism, and his abnormally large chuck teeth, there’s a child who grew up, not knowing exactly when his next meal would be, who almost didn’t even feel the love a family. He grew up on the street, fighting, playing football. Maybe that’s why he’s so damn good at football. Maybe that’s also why he’s racist, and possibly a bit feral.

And for every star like Suarez, be it in the NFL, NBA, or the EPL, or all the other countless professional leagues worth billions of dollars, there are countless youngsters who failed to make the cut, who laid down their broken dreams, facing the reality of their poverty-stricken lives. They gained no tangible skill sets, other than perhaps a strong mentality, to apply themselves to another trade.