in which he criticized organized sports as a tool of indoctrination and exploitation by the bourgeois and as a form of “colonization” by corporate advertising. So, it is from this angle one can try to align the NFL labor system with slavery to see the juxtaposition and understand why many consider the NFL owner/player relationship as a different, more advanced dimension of the traditional slave model, where predominantly white NFL owners possess the economic, financial power to subjugate the majority of the black players working for them.
The same argument could be made in any relationship between worker and employer.
In the 1970s, French philosopher Jean-Baptiste Brohm wrote an essay titled Sport: A Prison of Measure Time
In the case of the NFL, however, the nuance exists when systematically 97% of the 32 NFL owners are white (1 non white) while the majority, 68 to 70%, of the roughly 1,696 (53 x 32) players are black, which was precisely the case during slavery in the European colonies where most slave owners were white but in rare cases a tiny percentage of mulattoes-sons of white masters with slaves- were also allowed to own slaves.
This particular setup existed primarily in the French colonies, like Haiti, which was the most profitable French old colony. The colony in 1789, at the time called Saint Domingue, was the most profitable possession of the French Empire where the lowest class of society in the country was enslaved blacks, who then outnumbered the whites by a margin of over six to one, like currently in the NFL, there is roughly a six to two gap between white owners and black players without mentioning the huge income imbalance that exists between players and owners. There is no exact number to the annual income of the NFL owners, but it is estimated to be roughly around $200 million per year/per owner, while the average salary of NFL players is approximately about $2.1 million according to Forbes.