as is team required to spend only between X and Y amounts each year. should read
as each team is required to spend only between X and Y amounts on salaries each year.
Brown County (where the Packers work) also periodically votes to give the team money (in the form of dedicated taxes) to do things like refurbish the stadium. One such tax appears on Brown County residents’ monthly telephone bill, something Brown County residents seem to forget about when they call me to bitch about their phone bill being so high. One more reason AFAIC not to move to Brown County.
This may hit a quote or two, but I won’t clog the thread. Anyone following knows what this is.
jimmmy, the salary cap was Pete Rozelle. And it was in part implemented because (in part) L.A. couldn’t get ticket sales for the Rams. But the NFL wanted the LA market for the TV market, but LA just hasn’t gotten home ticket sales. Re: Al Davis suing (and winning) getting the Raiders to back to Oakland. He knew that he had a base in Oakland.
This also explains why the Cardinals were sent to St. Louis long ago. When the Cardinals were sent to AZ, the NFL knew there was a bigger market in St Louis for a team than LA, hence the Rams in St Louis.
I won’t go into the Browns becoming the Ravens, but still having the Browns, nor why Indianapolis is involved by having the Colt’s. I trust you know this.
My priority list for season tickets (sold out since 1965) is 53,175.
Perspective, as a GBP season ticket holder, you are allowed to pass 2 season ticket seats in your will. The 3rd generation better be on a list. My estimated time for a chance is about 35 years.
Any question I’m such a fan? I grew up with this. I accept it. I’m on a list to wait over half my life to get season tickets.
For what it’s worth.
Go Packers!
Here’s a little bit more on the economics of owning an NFL team (granted, calling the Redskins after this year is stretching the term, but, hey, that’s all we’ve got).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32841-2003Dec26.html
Green Bay is presently well BELOW the salary cap. They’re not really butting heads against it.
NFL team salaries are more or less in line with other sports. What gives NFL teams a lot of salary safety is not the cap, but the extremely favourable CBA that makes contracts non-guaranteed - if a team’s salary structure goes awry they can fire players willy-nilly and aren’t on the hook for remaining salary (although they still get nailed for signing bonuses.)
Contrast this with any other sport - well, we have a good example in baseball, where the sad-sack Rangers are on the hook for Alex Rodriguez’s monster contract. Rodriguez is certainly a high-value player - he’s the best player in the world, to be quite honest - but the Rangers are in budgetary trouble and can’t really afford him and should be rebuilding. But they can’t just fire him, because baseball contracts are guaranteed, and nobody will take him in a trade because he’s so expensive, unless the Rangers accept some monstrous contracts in return. (I guess the Yankees could afford him but they don’t happen to need a player at Rodriguez’s position right now, so it’s not worth it to them.) So the Rangers are stuck; they can’t get rid of him. Other teams are stuck with players who make huge amounts of money even though they got injured and are useless (Grant Hill of the Orlando Magic) or got old (Hakeem Olajuwon with the Raptors) or just turned out to be a stupid investment (Curtis Joseph of the Detroit Red Wings.) The Magic, Raptors and Red Wings have to pay every dime of those contracts. That can be crippling for a smaller-market team, so such teams either have to avoid big contracts - making it harder for them to compete - or just have to risk getting screwed.
In the NFL, however, Green Bay can sign a big contract and get out of a lot of it by just giving the player the pink slip. So if the player budget balloons, they have an escape route that, say, the San Diego Padres, Orlando Magic and Calgary Flames don’t have.
Even if the NFL DIDN’T have a salary cap, the Packers would still be fine. The problem with high salaries isn’t paying high salaries, it’s paying high salaries for a losing team. Almost any team in any North American pro sport can sustain high salaries when the team is successful. The Cleveland Indians were well above league average when they were winning even though Cleveland is a small market, because when they were winning they were packing the house. The Ottawa Senators are very profitable (having gotten out of a bad owner’s hands) despite being in a city about half the size of Cleveland because they’re winning. The problem those teams face is that if your team starts to lose you’re probably still stuck with most of the salaries you were paying to support the team when it won, and if it was a lot, you lose money very quickly. If the Toronto Blue Jays are winning, they can support an expensive team, as they did in the early 90s; when they stopped winning, they became unable to support the big salaries, but they were stuck with a lot of overpaid bozos they couldn’t release or trade so they lost a bundle. If they start winning again, attendance and cable revenues will jump and they will make more money, but if the salaries go up they’re at risk of taking a bath again if the team stops winning.
An NFL team is way more flexible. If the Buffalo Bills are winning, they can support a $65 million team. If they stop winning and ticket sales go down, they aren’t necessarily stuck with the $65 million payroll; if need be they can release $25 million in salary and fix the budget almost overnight. Baseball, basketball, and hockey teams cannot do that.
And then on top of that there’s the earlier fact that an NFL team’s revenue stream is far more steady. To use the Blue Jays example, the Blue Jays’ team revenue has been highly volatile. Baseball teams draw most of their revenue from game attendance, and the Blue Jays’ attendance when from over 50,000 fans per game in 1993 to just over 20,000 fans per game last year. And since the Jays’ TV revenue is heavily dependent on local cable contracts, their cable revenue has experienced similar changes in “attendance” and resulting revenue. Most teams have similarly dramatic attendance trends; the Yankees when they were bad in the late 80s and early 90s were around 20,000-25,000 fans per game, then jumped to over 40,000 per game in the late 90s. The Cincinnati Reds drew 30,000 per game in the early 90s, then dropped to about 21,000 per game late in the 90s. Basketball teams and hockey teams have seen similar attendance swings, often swings of 30% or more, between successful and unsuccessful years.
NFL teams simply don’t have that. First of all, since they have a huge and consistent TV revenue base, it wouldn’t matter as much if they did. And secondly, since they’re selling tickets to far fewer games, they just don’t have the same level of variation in home attendance. They can predict total revenues out 3, 4 and 5 years with a fair degree of accuracy, and it just doesn’t change much.
True, I was going by the Green Bay metropolitan area, which includes Pulaski and some other cities.
RickJay, I admit I only read half your post. But I have to ask, do you know the full salary-cap implications?
(Oh OK, the first 2 paragraphs)
Teams like Chicago are our bitch because of parity. Admit, you know why I love the wins since Favre took over, but the history says you will, at some point, sweep GB. (That’s to ChiTown fans)
True NFL fans will give me a pass on that one. It makes an awesome rivalry. The Vikings never won a title.
But to keep this on topic, the Bears, Lions, Vikings could be all be sold on the whim of an owner.
The Packers will still be there for a shot at winning the Vince Lombardi trophy.
Cheer for who you want, just don’t cheer for an 0-4 Super Bowl team. (hehehehehhehe)
QtM is a cheesehead?
I guess you learn something new everyday.
Hell, zoid! It gets even better. My dad grew up in a cheese factory which was converted into a house. And you thought your grandparents house smelled funny? Hah!
And my aunt works in a cheese factory to this day.
I don’t think it matters to most fans who owns a team, at least 99% of the time, as long as the team doesn’t move. The NFL’s allowing owners to move anytime, anywhere is quite unique to the NFL. Baseball broke rules on two occasions to keep the Giants from leaving San Francisco; the NHL basically told the Ottawa Senators they weren’t allowed to leave Ottawa no matter who owned them. “Thanks” to Al Davis, the NFL’s franchises can move at will whenever they get a new subsidized stadium. It has zip to do with the salary cap.
And not to point out the obvious, but how could a team be your “bitch” because of parity? If there was perfect parity, you’d be their bitch half the time. If there was perfect parity, Bengals fans wouldn’t be so worked up over their team going 8-8.
Hey, the Broncos were once an 0-4 Super Bowl team. There is hope even for the Vikings.
Rick jay I disagree with your complete dismissal of the salary cap as a factor for Green Bay’s staying competitive.
As noted, the Pack is a publicly traded corporation. As such, its only income is from the NFL. The other teams have owners, some of whom are wealthy independently of their NFLteam investment. Say the Pack makes $71 million from the NFL and another 10 from the stadium & local stuff. That’s it for them. They can’t pull in any more money. Assume they spend 90% of that on salaries (not on stadium security, coaches, GM etc.). Now say Daniel Snyder, or Jerry Jones, make the same amount of money on their team and, with no cap, are going to spend an extra 20 million of their own monies on salaries alone.
The league would quickly become one of haves and have-nots. Winning teams will be those that are essentially vanity projects for billionaires. (Not that we haven’t seen the occasional poor man’s team in baseball be a winner, but that hasn’t been the overall trend).
Or to put it more simply Imagine the league without a salary cap where the Pack is able to offer Reggie 4 million per year and Washington is able to offer 12 million per …
What is so fantastic, if you ask me, is the Packers have over 70,000 seats at their disposal and they still sell out every week. I’m willing to bet that there are more than 30,000 people sitting at home in Green Bay on Sunday (though, in front of the t.v.). I would love to see some statistics on how many games were sold out before, say, 1989 (Majik man sold some seats, I’m sure), and after the glorious 60’s. However, I think I’ve heard that less than 20,000 seats actually go on sale for each game. Through all this, I’m most curious about how the ticket sales would reflect a losing season or three in G.B. Hopefully, I’ll never find out but I’ll bet it won’t ever reach the Arizona-type emptiness no matter how stinky the Pack might become far away into the future.
The reason the waiting list for season tickets is so long is that it has become very profitable for a lot of these ticket holders.
Lots of season holders buy their alotment and then sell them for huge markups and make a profit. They never even go to the games. Why give them up when you can make easy money.
If there came a day when the tickets had the purchasers name on them and they had to show ID with their tickets to get in, i’d bet a lot of those season ticket holders would give them up.
I think I remember watching this on Inside the NFL (or something like that). They were talking about the profit sharing in the NFL and used Green Bay as the shining example of everything right about profit sharing. IE exactly what this thread is discussing. But then they flipped the coin and talked about the “dark side” of profit sharing, for example the Bengals who have for years been sucking up all that shared revenue without really putting much money or effort into the team.