The NFL bends the knee to China

The National Football League is the latest American sports league to cave to Chinese interests while pushing woke policies at home.

The league announced Wednesday that it was expanding internationally by allowing eighteen of its thirty-two teams to market abroad. However, a map detailing the marketing agreement labeled Taiwan as part of China. Taiwan considers itself an independent country, but China has been aiming to take control and considers Taiwan one of its many provinces. In 2018, China demanded that international companies list Taiwan as a Chinese province or risk losing the ability to do business in China.

The NFL has clearly accepted this attempted power grab in exchange for being able to market its games and merchandise in China. They are not the first sports league to make the calculation that it is worth silencing opposition to a genocidal and authoritarian regime so long as they get a massive payday. The NBA began confiscating “Free Hong Kong” signs at games last season and has stayed silent rather than support Boston Celtics player Enes Kanter in his protest against human rights conditions in China. Major League Baseball recently re-signed a major broadcasting deal with a Chinese media company.

It’s not uncommon for corporations in the twenty-first century to be purely profit-driven and less than socially responsible. What is especially annoying, however, about the NFL’s spinelessness is its insistence on giving clichéd morality lessons to its American viewers. The NFL doubled down on woke messaging during the 2021 season, plastering “End Racism” and “Black Lives Matter” on players’ helmets and in team end zones and featuring the so-called “Black national anthem” at major events. Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers recently spoke out about the league’s unnecessarily strict vaccination policy, which he alleges is not about science but about “shaming” players into getting vaccinated so that the NFL “looks better to the rest of the world.”

The NFL, of course, cannot keep its own house in order and thus has no business telling anyone else how to be virtuous. The league is filled with current and former violent criminals who would never be offered lucrative jobs in the public eye if they weren’t so exciting to watch on a football field. The NFL has also been accused of covering up the results of an investigation into #MeToo allegations at the Washington Football Team; owner Dan Snyder has faced little punishment even though the probe found him responsible for overseeing a toxic workplace culture.

All of this points to an organization that only touts social justice when it is convenient, i.e. when it will make them money or prevent them from being “canceled.” The proof that the NFL doesn’t actually believe in any of the causes it promotes is quite clear thanks to its flippant erasure of Taiwan.