New NFL CBA Article

[Lyion]

REVENUE SHARING RAISING TENSIONS
http://www.profootballtalk.com/rumormill.htm

As NFL owners prepare to meet next week in Washington, there's an increasing amount of tension building regarding the question of whether the concept of revenue sharing will be expanded to included currently unshared revenues.

The problem is that the union wants to enlarge the salary cap formula to include all revenues. Currently, the team-by-team maximum salary amount is determined based on the revenues that the 32 organizations share, such as network television money.

By throwing all revenues into the blender from which the per-team salary limit is determined, teams making less money through unshared revenues will, as a practical matter, see a greater chunk of their profit margin devoted to player salaries, since the unshared revenues earned by the big-money teams will push the cap number upward.

As a result, the low-income teams don't want unshared revenues to be included within the cap calculation unless those unshared revenues are (you guessed it, Einstein) shared.

The sharing of revenues has helped the NFL achieve and maintain its status as the elite professional sports league in America. While baseball has become an exercise in daily boredom as the rich teams steamroll the poor ones by buying up all the good players, pro football has created a near-perfect balance among all of its franchises, giving every team a fair shake at getting to the Super Bowl each year.

This dynamic keeps interest high in more cities deeper into the season, and the system of free agency enables teams coming off of disappointing campaigns to increase local optimism by picking up new players.

But if the cap is driven upward by moneys that aren't shared by all teams, the reality is that the competitive balance will tilt decidedly in favor of the teams making more money than the others through, for example, the sale of luxury suites and club seats.

Part of the problem, as we understand it to be, is that the ownership ranks gradually have been infiltrated by owners with no football background (e.g., Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder), who have little regard for the notion of competitive balance.

They simply want to make as much money as they can and win as many games as possible. And they surely believe that, if there's a way to use all that money they've made to win more games, so be it.

If guys like that had been in the league in the 1960s, the entire concept of revenue sharing likely would have been written off as corporate socialism, and the NFL never would have achieved the status it now enjoys.

So on one hand the ultra-rich want to get ultra-richer, and they refuse the notion of subsidizing their comrades through the pooling of money earned under each organization's banner. On the other hand the moderately rich will get less rich, since their total available salary commitment will take an ever bigger piece of their total revenues than it already is.

The low-money teams will then be tempted to spend less than the max on players, which in theory will make them less suited to compete on Sundays. Also, the low-money teams will have less resources to devote on coaches, facilities, and all other aspects of building a winning organization that are not controlled by a hard ceiling of expenditures.

There's also a growing feeling that the owners inability to resolve their revenue differences will continue to prevent the league from making progress on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement with the union.

If an extension isn't hammered out by 2007, the league will face a year without a salary cap (to the likely delight of the high-earning teams). If a new deal doesn't come by 2008, the NFL could face its first work stoppage in more than two decades.

Consequently, the current dispute between big-money and less-money teams could be, as one source put it, "the beginning of the end" of the NFL's dominance over other pro sports leagues.

That's why, in our view, it's important for Commissioner Paul Tagliabue to come up with a plan that all (or at least most) of the teams can tolerate. The strategy must address on one hand the desire of high-end teams to not be penalized for their financial success while at the same time ensuring that the low-end teams aren't faced with a alary cap that will make the venture a far less profitable one.

The third prong, of course, is that the union must buy in to the approach.

We've previously floated in this space a relatively simply solution to the problem. The unshared revenues would be taxed, not shared, and that money would be dumped into a pool that would supplement all player incomes based on performance, seniority, or other factors.

The only glitch in this regard (as we've learned by bouncing the idea off of some of our sources) is that the agents wouldn't get a piece of the extra money paid to players from this pool. Since the agents have a very strong say in the bidness of the NFLPA, it's unlikely that the union will agree to any plan that doesn't involve a juiced-up salary cap -- and in turn a greater stream of payments from which the agents can skim their three-percent fees.

[Tikker]

athletes make way too much money already


I will giggle mightily tho if they hold out, lose a season like the NHL, and get jabowned by the new cap

[Lyion]

It'll be interesting to see if they allow for the rookie set contract to play out.

I don't see the revenue sharing cap being green lighted as it'll fuck up the NFL, just like MLB is and the majority of owners do not want that.