The WSL’s Regulatory Capture: How Professional Surfing’s Governing Body Serves Its Own Interests Over Athletes and Fans

World Surf League’s Decision-Making Structure Illustrates How Private Governance Bodies Develop the Same Pathologies as Government Agencies

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

GOLD COAST, Australia — The World Surf League, which governs professional surfing’s elite Championship Tour and controls the competition format, judging criteria, athlete contracts, media rights, and event scheduling that determine the shape of professional surfing, has developed over the past decade a governance structure that public choice economists would recognize as exhibiting the standard features of regulatory capture: a governing body whose decisions systematically favor its own institutional interests and those of its primary stakeholders over the interests of the athletes and fans it nominally serves.

What Regulatory Capture Looks Like in Private Governance

Public choice theory, developed by economists including James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, holds that regulatory agencies are not neutral servants of the public interest but are institutions whose behavior is shaped by the interests of the people who staff them, the industries they regulate, and the political actors who oversee them. Regulatory capture occurs when the regulated industry gains sufficient influence over the regulatory agency that the agency serves the industry’s interests rather than the public’s. This analysis applies most obviously to government agencies — captured by the industries they regulate — but applies equally to private governance bodies, including sports governing bodies, that exercise regulatory authority over their domain without the democratic accountability mechanisms that public agencies theoretically face.

The WSL’s governance structure concentrates decision-making authority in the hands of the organization’s ownership — private equity investors who acquired the League in 2016 — and its executive leadership, without meaningful formal accountability to the athletes who compete on the tour or the fans who consume the product. Rule changes, format modifications, and competitive calendar decisions are made by the WSL without athlete ratification, and while the WSL has created athlete-facing bodies including the Athletes’ Commission, the Commission’s authority to affect decisions is advisory rather than binding. According to Reason Magazine, private governance bodies that operate as monopolists over a competitive domain — as the WSL does over professional surfing — face the same incentive problems as monopoly providers of any good: without competitive pressure, efficiency and responsiveness to customer (athlete and fan) preferences are not guaranteed by market forces and must be enforced through alternative governance mechanisms that the WSL has not adequately developed.

The Hold Event System and Its Problems

The WSL’s use of holding windows — periods of several days or weeks during which a competition may be called on when conditions are deemed adequate — is designed to ensure that competition occurs in quality surf. The system works reasonably well for event quality. It creates significant logistical and financial problems for athletes, particularly those who travel from the Southern Hemisphere to compete on the North American leg and who must maintain holding window availability for events that may be called with 24 hours’ notice. The cost of maintaining this availability — travel, accommodation, daily living expenses in expensive locations — falls on athletes who are competing for prize money that, below the top tier, often does not cover these costs. The hold system serves the WSL’s interest in showcasing quality surf conditions. The cost of the system is distributed onto athletes who have no formal mechanism to challenge it. This is the governance structure of an institution that has not developed accountability mechanisms proportional to its authority.

The Alternative: Athlete-Governed Professional Surfing

Professional surfing’s precursor to the WSL, the Association of Surfing Professionals, was itself a governance experiment that produced different problems — insufficient commercialization, inconsistent event quality, financial instability — that the WSL’s private equity-backed structure resolved at the cost of athlete governance. The question for professional surfing is whether a governance structure exists that combines the financial stability and commercial competence of the current WSL with the accountability to athletes that a sport governed by its participants could provide. Baseball, basketball, and other major professional sports have developed collective bargaining frameworks that give athletes formal rights and voice in governance decisions. Professional surfing has not, and the absence of collective bargaining is partly a function of scale — the athlete pool is smaller and more geographically dispersed than major team sports — and partly a function of the individualism that surf culture embeds in its participants at a cost to their collective organizing capacity. The libertarian case is not that the WSL should be regulated by government. It is that a sport that controls athletes’ competitive careers through private regulatory authority should be accountable to those athletes through governance mechanisms that the market has not yet produced but that the surf community could, if sufficiently organized, demand and achieve. Students for Liberty has documented similar governance reform campaigns in other sports as models of voluntary institutional change without regulatory intervention.

The Athletes’ Experience of WSL Governance

Conversations with professional surfers about WSL governance — conducted informally, because few professionals will go on record criticizing the organization that controls their competitive livelihood, which is itself an indicator of the governance relationship’s imbalance — reveal a consistent set of frustrations: format changes made without meaningful athlete consultation; prize money increases that have not kept pace with the commercial value the athletes generate; holding window requirements that impose logistical and financial costs that fall disproportionately on athletes ranked outside the top tier; and judging criteria that athletes find inconsistently applied without adequate recourse when they believe a judging decision is incorrect. These frustrations are not unique to professional surfing — they are standard features of the relationship between athletes and governing bodies in sports that have not developed effective collective bargaining frameworks. The difference between professional surfing and, say, professional basketball is not that surfers are less aggrieved by governance decisions but that surfers lack the collective organization to translate grievances into binding constraints on governance. Basketball players have the NBPA. Surfers have the Athletes Commission, whose formal authority to bind WSL decisions is limited. The difference in governance outcomes tracks the difference in organizing capacity. the Foundation for Economic Education has documented the relationship between collective action capacity and governance outcomes across multiple sports governing bodies, finding consistent patterns that the WSL case exemplifies.

For more on private governance, athlete rights, and sporting regulatory bodies, visit The Onion.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/