Derek Carr Says Raiders Fans Who Don't Follow Team to Vegas Aren't Real Fans

Derek Carr is an employee of a limited partnership company named the Oakland Raiders. As it happens, the Oakland Raiders are a peculiar business in the entertainment industry, exempt from anti-trust regulations and founded on the principle that customers will pay lots of money to demonstrate their loyalty to this company. In return, customers get a sense of identity, some degree of satisfaction, cultural cache, and a common bond with family, friends, and their community. None of these goods or services are provided by the team per se, but rather through a complex feedback loop within the customer's own mind. To keep collecting their checks, the company needs to do only one thing: exist.

For the past 15 years, the Oakland Raiders haven't done much more than exist. They have missed the playoffs—the basic metric for corporate success in this peculiar industry—for 14 straight years. The drought ended this year, the very same year the Oakland Raiders also decided to stop existing.

The company decided to move its headquarters from Alameda, CA to Las Vegas, NV due to a $750 million government subsidy offered by the taxpayers of Las Vegas towards its new headquarters' construction. Like any business would, the Oakland Raiders accepted the offer of free money. Soon, the Oakland Raiders will become the Las Vegas Raiders.

Carr, the aforementioned employee of the Oakland Raiders—and perhaps Las Vegas, too, if the company chooses to offer him a new contract—believes that his employer deserves the continued loyalty of its customers despite the company ceasing its only requirement in this already lopsided arrangement. Carr told ESPN, of the customers who won't continue to give the Raiders money after they move to Las Vegas: "I don't really believe that they're true Raider fans."

In Carr's opinion, customers ought to blindly oblige the company they patronize under any circumstances. Otherwise, in Carr's mind, the customer does not deserve the label of "fan," the ultimate commodity in this bizarre marketplace.

Of course, this strange marketplace, sometimes known as "sports," does have some traditional traits of the free market. For example, any customer is free to patronize another business—or none at all—if they do not like the services their current company is providing. If, for whatever reason, Oakland Raiders customers feel like their preferred business is owned by a cheapskate, backstabbing weirdo with daddy issues whose only defining feature is being respected by nobody who broke a profound social contract, they can take their money and loyalty elsewhere. They can become "fans," as it were, of another business, because they're sick of getting disrespected and are starting to realize this is pretty one way street as far as relationships go.

Derek Carr has earned approximately $5.3 million working for the Oakland Raiders.