I hate to say this, and will probably get flamed for it, but it doesn't bother me much. It's not even the same game I watched when I was a kid. I wouldn't even necessarily say it's better now (granted, as a kid your emotions and the way you see things adds a nostalgia effect).
Don't get me wrong, I watch a lot of football, every game I can possibly watch when the games are on, and I hate the offseason and the waiting, but I think I would survive. I grew up also watching a lot of boxing, basketball, tennis, tons of sports, and now I only watch Football for various reasons. Things change, times change. And when I really look at it, the sport of football, it's already been heading in the arena-league type variety of sport in my opinion. And it's been heading that way for a long long time.
I do have a difference in opinion though when it comes to the argument that they're just entertainers and that teachers and firemen etc should be paid the same or more than entertainers (be they sports figures, actors, whatever). I disagree with that argument. Surely a teacher is more important than a football player on an intellectual level but there are complexities in the argument that few people even contemplate or address. If you were to dump all those billions into education (k-8 say) then you're also going to have to deal with the corruption and the nastiness (and it can get brutally nasty) that comes with it. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try, obviously, but realize that the victims in a corrupt education system would be children and families. Not that they aren't already corrupt, but we're talking about a whole 'nother level of corruption. With firemen or policemen, I could see corrupt firemen or cops setting their own fires or committing crimes merely to increase their budget (or their bonus) if the system were flooded with billions of dollars. Sure, that may already happen, but again we're talking scale and the victims would be normal, everday dudes.
That being said, I'd rather my teachers, firemen, policemen did those things for a "higher" reason than merely monetary. They deserve to be paid better, obviously, but I think it's more complicated than simply dumping billions of dollars into an industry.
I also strongly disagree with the notion that entertainers are unworthy of the money they make. I think they deserve it and probably more. What are we without entertainment, culturally? Take it all away or make them do it out of the goodness of their hearts and what are we? There's something to be said for entertaining billions and billions of hard working people. Entertainment spreads the culture of those doing the entertaining, whether they're writing books, making movies, inventing facebook, whatever. That's a pretty high calling in my opinion. I believe without proper (and constant) entertainment we'd all be wound so tightly we'd snap. Maybe thousands of years ago it was possible to kick rocks or whatever for entertainment, but nowdays it has to be mass produced and distributed to reach as many people as possible. It also has the added benefit of keeping most people as docile as sheep--without it we'd be cutting off heads.
Just my .02 cents.
