Back in early December I wrote a column entitled “The Financial Golden Age of Sports: 1996-2008″.  In it I predicted that professional sports were going to go into a financial decline that would last for years.  I don’t make forecasts unless I have a very strong sense of them being correct.  Well, this forecast has unfolded so quickly and so correctly that even I am a bit surprised.

In that column I wrote:

“going forward, the economics around sports in general will decline, at least for the next 5-8 years if not longer.” And

“Corporations, after firing thousands of people, will not want to display corporate indulgence with skyboxes and named stadiums.  In households across America and around the world, thrift has become both a necessity and cool.  This is going to be the wall that sports franchises will run into when they try to continue their always upward pricing on season’s tickets and even individual tickets”

And finally:

“There will be lay-offs at the league and team levels. There will be discount pricing of tickets the day of a game in most sports.  The credit crunch and severe recession will keep stadiums from being built.  Newspapers, whose sports pages had a symbiotic, promotional relationship with local sports teams, will be going out of business weekly.”

Since I wrote that column:

-the NFL has cut 169 jobs

-the NBA cut 10 percent of its staff

- the USOC laid off 54 workers to cut millions from its budget

-NASCAR teams have laid off hundreds of employees and even the …

We are coming to an end of the greatest financial age of sports in history.  The twelve years between 1996 and 2008 were years when the money around sports exploded beyond any precedent era.  This also means that, going forward, the economics around sports in general will decline, at least for the next 5-8 years if not longer.

The bookends for these 12 years of explosive financial growth are the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 and the Beijing Olympics of 2008.  The Atlanta Olympics were the first post-cold war Olympics and, being held in the U.S. created a huge marketing platform.  The Beijing Olympics was the coming out party for the most populous country in the world and gave  recognition to China as a major player on the world’s geopolitical and financial stages.

In 1996 cable television had become a dominant media force in the U.S.  ESPN, and all of its networks, was beginning to take its’ place as the behemoth of sports television.  Regional sports networks, TBS and TNT soon joined the party and it seemed that sports were everywhere on TV.  The broadcast networks and all of these cable entities competed for the rights of all major sports.  The fees paid to the NFL, MLB, the NBA, and the college football conferences exploded.  This led to dramatically increased player salaries, advertising rates and, for the consumer, rapidly increasing cable bills.  Of course it also led to much lower ratings as nothing was special any more.  Even though Monday Night Football on …