I was thinking about the current NBA lockout. Wouldn’t it make sense for the players to just form their own league? It would be similar to lawyers or doctors practices where the highly skilled people aren’t employees, they are partners in the business. It seems as though the players hold all the cards. There are only so many Lebrons, but thousands of people who who could do what the owners do.
The owners have the stadiums, the TV contracts, the employees that make the business run, basically everything that it would take to have a national league. It would be a pretty big undertaking to start over from scratch.
What is it that you imagine owners do? They put hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, and they’re lucky to find 30 people to do it, let alone thousands.
Each owner puts up a hundred million dollars each year to cover payroll and expenses and hopes that they can make enough $ from ticket sales and sponsorship deals to turn a profit. Maybe not such a big challenge in Miami or Boston, but a very tough proposition in Sacramento and Toronto.
For players to run their own 30-team league, they’d have to come up with hundreds of millions, maybe billions, to subsidize all of the losing teams in small markets. A 6 or 8 team league might be more feasible, but they’d have to forego a significant amount of broadcast revenue. And put 80 percent of their ranks out of work.
Moved to The Game Room and edited title.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Not sure what you mean by this. The number of franchises is limited to avoid dilution. There are many more people that would like to have teams, and who have the money to do so, than there are teams to buy. Many franchises have sold for more than they are worth just so that the owners have a vanity project.
The way I see it is that players hold all the cards if they can stick together. The TV contracts and stadium leases are worthless if there is no season or if they field an inferior product.
There’s that pesky word if in that sentence.
The ownership is easier to keep in line, because there’s only 30 of them, and all (or nearly all) of them are successful businessmen. (Of course, Mark Cuban is a wild card, and Donald Sterling is just weird, but they generally aren’t able to change the direction of the league.)
You have 300-odd players, the vast majority of whom do not have good business sense, or any kind of knowledge on how a pro basketball team or league is actually run, and most of whom are likely to be primarily motivated by what’s best for me. Herding blind, insane cats might be easier.
In addition to everything else, unlike in baseball or football, the players actually have somewhere to go if the NBA decides to cancel the season or kick them out and go with college players; they can go to professional leagues overseas.
The players hold zero cards in this negotiation. All the owners need to do is wait and they will fold. This are billionaires, losing a few games isn’t going to hurt them as much as a player who is looking at losing the grand majority of his entire lifes earning potential.
A players league would probably never get off the ground, but about a TV Network sponsored league? What if USA Network or CBS decided to get back into the pro basketball biz? All the money in sports comes from TV nowadays, and comparably little from ticket sales. I could see a 10 team league that landed some superstars off the ground.
Possibly more feasible, but the major broadcast and cable networks aren’t generally known for being risk-takers. The reason that a CBS is willing to put up a bid on, say, the contract to televise the NBA is that it’s a known quantity; they can, generally, be pretty sure of what kind of ratings NBA broadcasts would get, and how much advertisers would pay to run ads on those games. A new league would probably be seen as a crapshoot; the networks (and advertisers) would probably be very leery of over-committing money towards a new league with no established fan base for the franchises.
In addition, it’d probably take some time to get the logistics set up (teams, owners, stadiums, schedules, etc.), and what if the lockout gets scheduled after the network invests millions of dollars into setting up the rival league?
It was tried by baseball players back in 1890, it’s known as the Players League and it lasted only a year.
There was a 10 page article on it by Bill James back in his 1990 “Baseball Book”. Essentially the fans were turned off by being asked to choose between players and owners, the PL got about 60% of the players to jump but faced initial startup calls in building ball parks. The regular owners (National League and American Association) were better financed, they cut ticket prices and handed out freebies to hurt the PL. It worked. One year after the PL folded, the weaker American Association folded (some teams joined the NL) and players were left with fewer jobs.
Says James “We hear talk now of another league being formed by player’s agents. If it ever comes to pass, it will end as this one ended-in financial ruin. A business which respects the rights of its employees is a fine thing. A business which is founded for the benefit of its hired hands has a foundation in quicksand.”
How is this supposed to work when players retire or enter the league? The new layers would have to buyout the old, and how are they gonna do that?
That’s not true, at least not across the board. National TV revenue is about $31 million per team, and the average local TV deal is worth about $12 million. Ticket revenue averages about $90 million.
If there were 30 people willing to put up that kind of money, there would already be a rival league.
The players don’t hold any cards. They really don’t. Kobe and LeBron and a handful of other stars could go play in Europe and make a ton of money. Hundreds of other players would take huge pay cuts to play somewhere else.
That’s the truth. These guys have been coddled since they were in middle school. Their concept of business and reality is staggeringly low. I have a good friend who manages an NBA player. The stories about the stupidity of their actions is worse than what you might glean from the press.
Something like 60% of players that make it to the NBA end up broke. For every Magic Johnson, who is probably close to being a billionaire, there are many more that are living on their pension, heavily in debt, behind in their child support or just scraping along. Some of those guys have very prominent names, guys that were perceived to be the smart ones and had long careers.
I know I wouldn’t invest in a pro basketball players league. While the owners are a bunch of greedy assholes that deserve to go broke, their business sense is light years beyond what you can expect from the average (or above average) player. Now, if Magic Johnson came up with something, I might listen, especially if he had Larry Bird working with him.
You left off their most important jobs - blackmailing cities to build arenas to satisfy their vanity, and whining about salaries escalating when they are the people signing the checks and making the offers.
Ain’t that the truth.
It is slightly off topic - or not so slightly- but Malcolm Gladwell had an interesting column about how the owners aren’t really in it for the money anyway.
They aren’t whining about salaries escalating, they’re whining about losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Since total player salary is based on league-wide total income, and that percentage is a negotiated part of the CBA, which they were involved with, why would they complain about it?
The issue for owners is that they think the player’s total cut of the pie is too large, but they would pay the same amount to the players regardless of how many dumb contracts they give out.
IIRC, the NBA was the first league that “saved itself” by agreeing to a salary cap. It agreed to and capped a percentage of revenue that would go to player’s salaries. When you make your bed you have to sleep in it. The players agreed to a salary cap but now the owners want more.
I’m not taking sides in this matter. I have little regard for the owners or the players. Still, I find it distasteful when horribly rich people make stupid decisions and then cry poor.
If the NBA is an unsuccessful collection of businesses then crash it. Shut it down and start over. The owners need to quit crying. If they don’t want to pay their workers at the rate they formerly agreed to when they claimed to be in distress then get out of the business.
As for the players, please go to Europe or China. Then there won’t be so many gun crimes in the USA.
It was even worse for the owners under the previous CBA–there was no real cap, so teams could bid basically as much as they wanted for players. Of course, owners felt compelled to outbid each other for players, as is the norm in uncapped environments. The 1999 CBA at least brought some measure of cost certainty to the league, but the owners seem to have underestimated their overhead, meaning the percentage of revenue going to the players was a bit too large to ensure a profit for the owners.
I’m not shedding any tears for these guys, either. I’m just tiring of the “look at all these awful contracts, these guys are doing it to themselves” refrain. The only contract that affect the owners’ bottom line at this point is the CBA itself.