How financial crisis will hit sports industry

“Let’s bring it back to realistic human size,” said futurist Hiemstra. “It would have to be a league mandate for that to work, but the NFL may limit offensive and defensive linemen to 300 pounds.”

Among individual major sports, the NHL — with its shrinking national footprint — is considered to have hardest road to survival, several economists said. Depending on the length of the recession, the NHL governors may be forced to take over and run several financially strapped franchises, while a few more teams may eventually go bankrupt, causing the league to contract, said Smith College professor Zimbalist.

NASCAR has its TV money locked up for a while, but that circuit’s 43-car field may lose a chunk of teams in next few years, meaning smaller races on Sundays. The Big Three U.S. automakers are scaling back their NASCAR connections. Corporate sponsors, which fuel about 80 percent of NASCAR’s budget, also are reducing support. With the Daytona 500 looming in February, Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Petty Enterprises — two premier teams — still lack sponsors to fund four of their six cars.

“It could end up being the Daytona 50 if we’re still talking about this (recession) 10 years from now,” Carter said.

Will the athletes themselves feel any of this pain? Yes. But not enough for the stars to change their limo lifestyles, the experts said. Owners likely will use the economic stall to renegotiate stiffer salary caps — limits that currently are quite soft.

“This is the kind of atmosphere in which management often jumps up and tries to realign things in its favor for the long, profitable future to come,” Kreidler said.

“Contract duration will be shortened and I expect teams to be very cautious about entering into hundred-million-dollar deals,” added Raymond Sauer, professor of economics at Clemson University and founder of “The Sports Economist” blog. “But it would take a decline of cataclysmic proportions to return to a salary era equivalent to, say, the 1960s.”

At the games themselves, the biggest change fans see may be noticeably smaller crowds — even at post-season games — and a corresponding lack of energy in the buildings, several economists said. Some baseball teams, including the Washington Nationals, the San Diego Padres and the Oakland Athletics, have cut ticket prices for 2009. But as consumers feel the further bite of a recession, a night at the arena may be a luxury that gets quickly stripped from family budgets.

“It’s not the end of the world if the Rose Bowl isn’t sold out,” Sauer said. “Although it will take the gloss off the event.”

On the other hand, that may not matter to league honchos who, some experts predict, soon will place less value on huge, live crowds. As long as TV viewership stays healthy, network and advertising dollars will continue to come to the leagues. The rise of mixed martial arts as a TV phenomenon already has shown that you don’t need 65,000 people in a stadium to make the product appealing to home viewers. In short, this is television’s best art: manipulation.

“You do need a few thousand people, situated properly for the best camera shots, both for the regular broadcast and the YouTube kind of viral distribution that can really kick-start a national conversation,” Kreidler said.

“That’s a radical concept when applied to football,” he added, “but not so much something like the NBA, where empty seats already are common during the regular season.”

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