Well that’s pretty much the whole point of the issue. The owner’s costs have gone up, their relative profits are shrinking and therefore the value of their businesses are going to go down as a result. It’s not that they aren’t making money right now, it’s that they are making less money which if sustained will lead to losing money and a loss of value.
You have to spend money to make money, it’s a concept as old as time. The owners are ones doing all the investing, risking and innovating in order to grow the pie. The players benefit from that. If the owners aren’t able to grow their revenue they aren’t motivated to grow the overall pie and subsequently the players salaries.
The players salaries have SKYROCKETED in the last decade because the owners have grown the pie. The owners negotiated the TV deals and built the cash cow stadiums. The owners convinced the taxpayers to fund part of their stadiums, and as a fan that probably pisses you off but it’s money that goes directly into the players pockets. They are partners in that chicanery.
The NFL salary cap has increased from $40M in 1996 to $130M in 2009. Th players salaries have grown by over 300% in 13 years. I assure you owners haven’t seen their team values increase anywhere close to that. The players aren’t asked to give back any money, they are being asked to slow their growth to be more in line with what the owners growth is so that the system doesn’t collapse the way the NBA has.
The player costs have been the same as a percentage of revenues that whole time, but they are willing to decrease that, despite the fact that the players are the product. If the owners are having problems with costs, why won’t they open up their books?
What part of the players salaries are part of this negotiation? I was under the impression that players pay was a negotiation that happened with each player individually. Is this only true for a few star players and most of the players get some base salary?
Then they should open their books. If they are truly not profiting as much as people think, why don’t they make that public?
And those stadiums are rented out for the other roughly 350+ days out of the year. If buying a stadium were such a terrible proposition, the owners wouldn’t do it. The reason do is because they don’t have to share all that luxury box money and rental fees. They also, in some cases, don’t share licensing fees either. Even so, their largest expense (player salaries) does not come out of that paltry 131MM.
Do you know other well-paid professions where people routinely have second jobs? Regardless, it’s a misconception that they have shorter days or summers off.
Nobody has argued they are insolvent. Whether or not their investment is liquid is irrelevant, especially if they can sell the team in a few years for a healthy profit. Also, they can raise money by selling minority ownership, or by making money in ways that is not subject to sharing.
The entire pot of money to the players is negotiated in the collective bargaining, but the individual players amounts are subject to one on one negotiations.
I don’t really buy this, either. Or rather, I don’t buy that the owners have made much difference except at the margins to the amount of money they’ve collected; the reason the NFL has become massively more profitable over past decades is because all pro team sports have become massively more profitable; all they’ve done is to not be total morons about how they’ve gone about capturing that profit.
ETA: To be clear, I don’t think the players deserve the credit, either; they’re both lucky enough to have been sitting on a gold mine. They don’t deserve credit any more than the ruling families of the Persian Gulf states deserve credit for their people’s prosperity.
The owners are the only ones putting money up? Tell that to the tax payers who buy the billionaires a new stadium every 20 years. Once built the value of the franchise skyrockets. Shouldn’t they share that with the tax payers?
Ford bought the Lions for 45 million and it is now worth 800 million. Somehow I can’t generate any sympathy for them. They risk nothing. the TV contract pays for all their expenses before they play a game.
Lets see them open their books to prove they are getting hosed. They are not.
Revenues have skyrocketed for 2 key reasons. New stadiums complete with luxury boxes and massive TV contracts. The owners are wholly responsible for the former and largely responsible for the latter.
Can you say taxpayer. That is who buys the damn stadiums. They are looting us every time they decide the last stadium we bought them must be replaced or they will just have to move someplace that appreciates them.
Are you so intent upon pushing your agenda that you can’t trouble yourself to actually read what people say? It’s like canned replies, you see a few keywords and pull the trigger on your next pre-written post.
He never said that the taxpayers don’t chip in and finance a large portion of the construction of new stadiums. What he did say is that the owners were wholly responsible for the new stadiums, which is true. They got built because the owners pushed for them, threw their money in the ring for part of the cost (in a few cases, all of the cost), and generally made them happen.
Getting new stadiums and luxury boxes are fine, but produce not a dollar of revenue until people spend the money to use them. And nobody pays $10,000 for a luxury box to watch the Fighting Irsays. They pay $10,000 to watch Peyton Manning.
You’re absolutely right. Which is why it doesn’t take a great leap of faith to understand why the Lions, Jaguars, et al., teams that don’t draw flies and are repeatedly blacked out, are almost certainly having financial issues. And so on top of the stadiums, they have to pay top dollar to fill them, which costs even more money, which must be recouped by stadium receipts, merchandising, etc., money that doesn’t come.
Here are the 2011 salary cap figures. You don’t think Jacksonville’s owners would like to get them out of the basement and draw people to the stadium when all that money goes directly to them? There’s a reason they paid so “little”, and it takes no imagination to figure out why.
But the owners are getting fat, and if they’re not, so what, it’s their duty to engage in profligate spending for our entertainment. Because the “rich fatcats” got that way by spending millions more than they made every year, right?
The Colts had Johnny Unitas and no one was paying $10k to rent a box. Now they have Manning they are. The difference isn’t the player, the difference is the facility and the marketing that created the interest. There have always been great players playing a great game. Revenues have gone up because the league has made it happen and our society wanted it.
A report debunking the owner’s poverty claim. The key statement is “Between 1998 (when Forbes began reporting team values) and 2008, the
average NFL team increased in value from $288.1 million to $1.04 billion, or 360 percent:” Please tell me what I can invest in that gets that kind of returns even if it had no dividends. Really, if owners of the NFL were incapable of making money despite the NFL’s incredible success they would be utterly incompetent.
It’s not like the owners made those deals and then the players showed up to the party and asked for handouts. The owners were only able to make those deals because they had a product to sell. The players are the product.
The owners structured the last TV contract in a way that gave them a huge war chest to wait out the lockout that they had planned in advance. Some TV networks objected . The owners prevailed .
The average NFL player makes 700,000 for 3 years. Then it is on the street. hardly the life of Riley that anti workers types claim.
The injury rate in the NFL is 100 percent. All players play hurt and get the trainers to assist them to find a way to play. There is no off season. the players are working out year round . Many work at the stadium training facility.
Pro football players have a life span shortened by about 20 years. How much is that worth?
So what? That value is meaningless until the team is sold, and even then it’s nothing more than a guesstimate. Say I want to sell something of mine, asking price $1 million. Its actual value is much less, but if i can sucker someone into paying that money for it that’s what it’s worth. If not I have to re-evaluate my asking price.
The Cowboys franchise, for instance, is worth exactly the price that someone is willing to pay for it, no more an no less, no matter what Forbes says the team is worth. Ask Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, WorldCom and Enron about valuation and what it meant to them.