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Kathryn Kisska-Schulze (Clemson) presents Taxing Sports activities, 71 Am. U. L. Rev. 845 (2022) (with John T. Holden (Oklahoma State; Google Scholar)), at Florida State as we speak as a part of its Regulation and Enterprise Speaker Sequence hosted by Jeffrey Kahn:

Sports activities are now not mere video games. In as we speak’s money-driven tradition, they’ve cultivated right into a profitable enterprise enterprise the place everybody—whether or not skilled or beginner; proprietor or participant; coach or spectator—stands to make vital cash. Fashionable sports activities have additionally morphed right into a panorama encompassing each the normal athletic occasions and the extra novel esports and every day fantasy sports activities (DFS) arenas. Throughout all these bodily, digital, and organic spheres, sports activities revenues are being measured by way of billions. It thus stands to purpose why taxes have grow to be a progressively vital dialogue level inside U.S. skilled and collegiate sports activities, the video gaming world, and the newly legalized sports activities playing business. This Article is the primary to offer a holistic and trendy evaluation of the impression of U.S. tax regulation throughout the modern enterprise of sports activities and discover a extra common strategy to the various tax points affecting quite a few related stakeholders, together with franchises, enterprise ventures, universities, athletes, people, and federal and state taxing jurisdictions.

Conclusion
The “enterprise of sports activities” is altering. Not do athletes compete purely for love of the sport. Sports activities have advanced right into a extremely productive enterprise, the place everybody stands to make a buck. The enterprise aspect of the business has moved past skilled sports activities into the realms of beginner athletics, DFS, esports, and the legalized sports activities playing business, and the greenback indicators generated are huge.

Just lately, Congress and states have proven elevated curiosity in usurping a higher share of those sports-related revenues, even amidst the extra amicable remedy traditionally bestowed upon skilled and collegiate athletics. The newly legalized sports activities playing business permits states to seize tax revenues not beforehand accessible to them. As well as, the fourth industrial revolution has blurred the normal traces of sport, inviting vital income era from novel subsets of the sports activities tradition that mix the bodily, digital, and organic spheres. Throughout this ever-evolving business, taxes are and can proceed to play an integral position. Sport is not only a sport anymore, and Congress and states taxing jurisdictions have indicated they’re able to play ball.

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