>"The NFL has managed this shift quite remarkably, in a fashion that has gotten them so that virtually very team is profitable"
Professional football's labor economics are radically different from other sports. They have virtually no development costs associated with talent - development of talent is largely done by universities (many tax supported).
In addition the market value of players is based upon barter - trades typically don't involve transfer fees, they involve other players sometimes and usually involve draft picks.
Draft picks are interesting because high round picks are associated with a greater out of pocket expense for the team receiving them should they choose to exercise the pick - i.e. the signing bonus and salary of the first overall pick are substantial outlays, whereas a second round pick will involve less money.
>Professional football's labor economics are radically different from other sports. They have virtually no development costs associated with talent - development of talent is largely done by universities (many tax supported).
The NHL has a similar system, though. They draw on NCAA and international minor league talent, neither of which are paid for by the league.
The NBA is similar, though I would argue that the out of high school and "one and done" draft rules have hurt the league much more than anything else.
> The NHL has a similar system, though. They draw on NCAA and international minor league talent, neither of which are paid for by the league.
Not at all. Most NHL talent development is done through an extensive farm system affiliated with and financially supported by their NHL teams, similar in some but not all respects to the MLB.
Prospects pursuing the NCAA route vs junior leagues and the AHL are widely regarded as inferior, facing significantly less stiff competition. A typical player (ie, more than 50% of current players) would grow up advancing through various levels of midget hockey, forgo college to play in one of the CHL leagues (QMJHL, WHL, OHL), from which they would be drafted by an NHL team and assigned to their AHL or ECHL affiliate. This is true even of international players, who are often sent from their home countries to stay with Canadian host families while playing in the Canadian junior leagues.
Making the NHL out of NCAA is the exception, rather than the rule. The system is much, much less subsidized by tax payer funded schooling than the NFL's.
The big difference is that NFL players are typically drafted at the age of 22 after they've gone through college. NHL players are typically drafted at 18.
Very few of them go the NCAA route. Those that do go that route can't be paid in any way by NHL teams, so these players are just like their NFL brethren with the exception that NFL players are a known commodity coming out of the NCAA. NHL teams picked their players before they entered college, so it's a little bit of a crap-shoot whether or not they'll turn into an NHL player.
Those who don't go the NCAA route either play for the CHL or in Europe. When they turn 18, if they don't make their respective NHL teams, they typically join a teams AHL affiliate or maybe even their ECHL affiliate. Both of those lower tiers are supported by the NHL clubs.
Other collegiate sports offer scholarships, but not like football. NCAA Division I schools have 88 scholarships apiece. Division I hockey, 18. There are more Division I football scholarships in Texas than total Division I scholarships for hockey. Division II with its 65 football scholarships per school dwarfs a handful of DII hockey schools with 13.5 scholarships each.
The resources for developing football players probably exceed those of any other sport in the world, e.g. Nick Saban earns a salary comparable to managers at top footballing clubs. And the NFL pays for none of it.
This really isn't much more than a fluff piece giving an excuse for bad management.
It ignores many of the detailed issues and instead makes it entirely about overall revenue using unsourced and likely made up numbers. Missing was any reference to revenue sharing and fact that some teams are turning large profits while others are losing money year after year, but the league insists on keeping teams in unsuccessful locations. The Phoenix Coyotes are a great example of this full of bad business decisions from the start, and only got worse when Jim Balsillie got involved. This shows little evidence of a successful long term plan.
I am not a fan on unions in general, but I see this as a typical issue with American business. Bad decisions are made and instead of management taking responsibility, the blame is simply put onto labour costs, wages are pushed down and the same mistakes happen again.
The title was the best part of this piece. It included hardly any details and doesn't even come to a conclusion about what was revealed other than that the owners have more money than the players (and that the NFL has more money than the NHL).
At minimum it should have discussed what the issues both parties disagreed with. For starters, it wasn't that the owners "still think they deserve to make an attractive profit on this game".
This article seems poorly researched and poorly reasoned. Most observers are crediting the end of the lockout not to "the players realizing the owners were willing to scuttle the season", but instead to the players having voted to authorize the NHLPA to disclaim their representation of the players, effectively removing the players from the union, thereby opening the owners up to anti-trust lawsuits.
Only once the NHLPA took that step did the league seem to start negotiating in earnest, having previously pursued a strategy they hoped would break the union as it did during the previous lockout.
It's essentially the same tactic that ended the NBA lockout.
I disagree about the disclaimer of interest threat ending the lockout.
If you look back to the previous two lockouts, you'll see that the NHLPA was bullied (or felt like it) and wanted that to end. The hiring of Donald Fehr, a known hard liner on the side of labor with a history of labor disputes. When Fehr was hired, there was going to be a lockout. Almost no negotiation was done prior to the actual lockout which is par for the course for the NHL but something new for the NHLPA. Fehr's strategy was to make lockouts in the future not seem like such an painless move for the NHL and he did so.
As the process moved from forward after the lockout, it was the NHL negotiating with itself. All of the proposals the NHLPA suggested were only small ideas of what could eventually be in the final agreement. Each successive comprehensive NHL proposal incorporated some of the ideas the NHLPA had suggested. It wasn't until Bettman announced that there would need to be at least 48 games in the season for it not to be cancelled and that the deadline for that amount of games would be Jan. 19. Only when that deadline approached did we see the NHLPA actually counter an NHL proposal with their own, comprehensive proposal. That's when the horse trading began and the deal was done relatively quickly after that point.
Donald Fehr's strategy all along was to drag his feet for as long as possible to not only get the best deal for the NHLPA but to, more importantly, frustrate the NHL and show them that a lockout is not an easy button for labor disputes.
That's an inventive take on the owners demanding the players give up 15% of their profit stake on top of 10-35% cuts to salaries, contract rights, health benefits, and licensing rights.
The owners started with a ridiculous offer and maintained the same ridiculous offer through the negotiations. In the end, the players union was forced to fold because the players did not have the same financial resources as the owners did to weather a lost season. The players union was negotiating against itself the entire time; the owners got everything they wanted.
Donald Fehr's strategy all along was to drag his feet for as long as possible to not only get the best deal for the NHLPA but to, more importantly, frustrate the NHL and show them that a lockout is not an easy button for labor disputes.
If that was his goal, he failed, miserably. It also ignores the previous two NHL lockouts, which did not turn out so badly for the players union.
Bettman is undeniably an awful commissioner. He was instrumental in forcing the expansion that created the teams that can't make a profit. He has been the driving force for 3 lockouts now.
It's a fault of management, not a fault of the players who have given up ground in each lockout. The leafs are a billion dollar team, the coyotes are worth almost nothing. Cutting player costs by a few million per year wont change this dynamic.
Fortunately for everyone outside of Glendale, this is an 8 year (minimum) deal. Over that period the Coyotes won't make it, Columbus doesn't look like they'll make it, and the Panthers might not either. I think the _length_ of this CBA is the most transformative part. There's nothing Bettman can do now except move or shut down franchises.
What I find incredibly interesting about sports "unions" is that the unions use the threat of disbanding as a labour tactic. In every other industry, if the labour union even hinted at disbanding, the owners would ask "How can we help you along?" In North American sports leagues, the owners fight it.
You have to wonder exactly who is benefiting from Players Associations?
That isn't incredibly interesting at all. The members of Players Associations are the best at what they do in the entire world. Leagues immediately suffer financially when these players aren't competing. Leagues are contractually obligated to fulfill agreements to various television networks, which is impossible if the best players are not competing. Likewise, teams make a large amount of money on the likenesses of players through advertising and merchandising.
Players Associations differ from most other unions because of artificial constructs like free agency, the draft, and the salary cap which are ultimately beneficial to both the players and the leagues. Beneficial, but illegal in the US. PAs collectively bargain with the leagues and give their right to sue for these things away in order to secure long term benefits agreements with sports leagues.
Disbanding the union in order to file an antitrust suit is the nuclear option, and the owners know it.
The collective bargaining agreements are prefered by the Owners because they limit free agency. Without such limitations the idea of an amateur draft falls apart - absent an agreement prospects could negotiate with any team because (IANAL) otherwise limiting their rights would be illegal.
Strikes would not happen if US sports leagues were based around free market principles rather than monopolies that set artificial restrictions on athletes salaries and conditions.
Your approach is more or less what happens in world soccer. Clubs like PSG or Manchester United essentially purchase their championships. Libertarianism doesn't make for very interesting games or teams.
I think sports leagues could do with a little less privatization and a little more Green Bay.
Depending on one's definition of successful. Is the EPL the most popular league? Probably. Are the EPL teams the least profitable and most indebted? You bet they are! To the tune of 3.9 billion USD of debt across the league.
This is a lockout and not a strike, for one. Two 'free market principles rather than monopolies' - monopolies and free market principals are synonymous. They are not in opposition to one another (except in libertarian-land).
At-will employment wouldn't make sense in professional sports. Imagine a team that got eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. A player could give two weeks notice and then join a team that was still competing.
Contracts would still exist, as well as a few other rules, but for the most part there wouldn't be things like a salary cap.
European club soccer is much closer to this model and it both creates really strong competition at the top end and a large spread between the top and bottom teams in a league. It is also very difficult to move from the bottom to the top without a huge amount of outside revenue.
Pro sports leagues in North America tend to operate as a monopoly, allowed because they have a union to balance it out. That's why both the NHL and NBA settled their lockouts right before the unions were able able to de-certify (NHL) or file an anti-trust (after decertifying in the NBA) lawsuit.
European club soccer is much closer to this model and it both creates really strong competition at the top end and a large spread between the top and bottom teams in a league. It is also very difficult to move from the bottom to the top without a huge amount of outside revenue.
No, it doesn't. The disparity in athlete talent and revenues between teams which make the Champions League and those which don't is greater than the disparity between say, the NFL and high school football. For the past decade, the winning teams of the Champions League and its feeder legs have all been one of the top 3 highest-spending teams in their respective leagues. There's simply no contest between, say, Manchester United and some random Irish club. In contrast, most of the professional American leagues reduce the talent disparity enough that either team could realistically win a match.
I may not have picked the best wording, but basically I'm agreeing that overall the disparity is very high. The upside is that games like Man City v Man U or Real Madrid v Barcelona end up being very entertaining.
The flip side of that is you would decimate small market teams who don't have the funds to compete with much larger markets. That means "buying" power for salaries would be centralized to a handful of teams, while the rest of the league would be less and less competitive until they would have to fold.
Also, don't you think wages would be higher without unions? The collective bargaining is allowing professional sports owners to suppress all salaries. If there were no unions/collective bargaining, at the very least, the top players would immediately start to see much much bigger contracts. No sure if the journeyman player would benefit as much.
Yes, wages for the best players would be higher, but wages for everyone else would be lower. The unions are designed to protect the majority of the players at the cost of the truly elite players.
I don't think that woud be true across the board - financially successful teams, like the New York Rangers, would likely pay more across the board in order to get better players.
Professional football's labor economics are radically different from other sports. They have virtually no development costs associated with talent - development of talent is largely done by universities (many tax supported).
In addition the market value of players is based upon barter - trades typically don't involve transfer fees, they involve other players sometimes and usually involve draft picks.
Draft picks are interesting because high round picks are associated with a greater out of pocket expense for the team receiving them should they choose to exercise the pick - i.e. the signing bonus and salary of the first overall pick are substantial outlays, whereas a second round pick will involve less money.