Jack Todd: In sports, any principle can be sacrificed for a nine-figure deal
Cole Caufield's new contract is nothing compared to some of the crazy money spent just this week in sports.
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It has been a dystopian week. You needn’t have watched any of a thousand dystopian thrillers on Netflix to figure that out — all you had to do was to peer out the window.
If you chose to close the windows and the blinds, fill the house with air purifiers and crank the air conditioning up to 11 while binging on sports and ignoring the real world, it wasn’t much better.
It has been a mad, mad, mad spring in professional sports, focused on money, money and more money.
It’s already impossible to watch five minutes of televised sports without being besieged by ads and “news” segments pushing FanBet, GambleAway, BankruptcyDuel and all the other gambling sites looking to get their tentacles on your bank account.
On Monday, the Canadiens announced that young sniper Cole Caufield had signed an eight-year, $62.8 million contract – a lot of money for a 22-year-old. By current standards, however, the Caufield deal was carefully calibrated according to league standards and eminently fair to both player and team, because that’s how GM Kent Hughes operates.
The day the Caufield signing was announced, there was an announcement of another sort from Saudi Arabia. Former French national and Real Madrid striker Karim Benzema had reportedly signed a three-year deal for $643 million (two years plus an option year) to do sport-washing and play a little soccer for Saudi’s Al-Ittihad club, where he’ll play against former teammate Cristiano Ronaldo, now diving for Al-Nassr.
Benzema’s deal is apparently sweetened by an agreement that he’ll do publicity for Saudi’s World Cup bid. Even so, the total amount is staggering. I did a little quick math and if Caufield wishes to match Benzema’s deal under the terms of his extension, he would have to play NHL hockey for 82.9 years.
Meanwhile, had Argentine striker Lionel Messi chosen to follow his fellow stars to Saudi Arabia, Messi (who sealed his claim to be the greatest of his generation by winning a World Cup in Qatar) could have earned even more, with a purported offer of more than $400 million U.S. per year to join Ronaldo at Al-Nassr.
Instead Messi, who is already well-paid to act as a soccer ambassador for the Saudis, has apparently decided instead to play for Inter Miami in Major League Soccer once the details of his contract can be worked out.
If your head is spinning, you’re not alone. It’s everywhere. Sports Illustrated quotes an MLB executive predicting that the Angels’ pitching and hitting star Shohei Ohtani will command more than $600 million over 11 years in a sport that has remade the rules in an attempt to hold onto its audience.
Meanwhile, if you look deeply enough, money is behind the presence of the Vegas Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup final. Businessman Bill Foley led the group that paid a $500 million U.S. expansion fee to the NHL.
In return, the league didn’t leave the Knights to wallow at the bottom of the standings. The Knights were contenders from the start and still are. They made the Stanley Cup final but lost to the Washington Capitals in the spring of 2018 in their first season in existence. Now they’re back and two wins away from a championship, a modern-day desert dynasty.
Admittedly, the Vegas front office has done a brilliant job — but would it have been possible without some breaks from the NHL? Absolutely not. (The Seattle Kraken, for their $650 million expansion fee, didn’t get as much. They didn’t make the playoffs until their second season.)
This money-saturated week would not have been complete without the grand finale — the announced partnership of the PGA tour with the European DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the folks who bought Benzema’s services earlier in the week.
The deal, first announced as a partnership between the PGA and the controversial LIV Golf League, provoked howls of outrage from fans, media and players on the PGA tour. Then Rory McIlroy, the most outspoken opponent of the LIV golfers, explained that the PGA was not merging with LIV Golf but with the PIF — a fine distinction since both entities are backed by the Saudis.
The only thing that mattered was that the Saudis were kicking in roughly $3 billion and that now they are the effective owners of the PGA.
PGA today, NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL to come? The Gulf petrostates are already major players in the Premier League, so why not North American sports? If the PGA doesn’t care about mass executions, a dismembered journalist and the denial of basic human rights, why should the others?
All in all, it was a nasty week in sports, awash in gambling ads and soaked in billions in sport-washing funds, and yet no one seemed to care where the money originated or what impact it had on the sports we watch.
What we cared about was Matt Tkachuk’s clutch goal, Nikola Jokic offering a masterful display of how the game of basketball could be played, Karolína Muchova’s stirring, third-set comeback against Aryna Sabalenka.
I watched them all. In a sense, that makes me as guilty as the rest.
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