Post by Funkytown on Jul 3, 2019 8:56:07 GMT -6
The important thing to know about the current state of collective bargaining talks between the NFL and its players union is that the sides are, in fact, talking. This is a big deal because if you go back 10 years, to the tail end of the previous CBA, they weren't. The owners had decided to opt out of the deal and lock out the players after 2010 in an effort to swing the revenue split back in their favor. They did just that.
This time around, with two full seasons left to play before the CBA ends, the two sides have already begun talking and are scheduled to ramp up talks this summer. There's even some motivation to get the new deal done before the 2019 season starts, which would head off any chance of an ugly work stoppage and allow the league to lean hard into its "NFL 100" marketing campaign and renegotiate its TV deals in peace.
That all sounds great, but it's not likely to be that simple, right? This is a complex negotiation with pitfalls, impasses and points of agreement, the specifics of which no one can foresee from this side of it. Collective bargaining, for the vast majority of you who've had no direct experience with it, is not a cut-and-dried series of issue-for-issue concessions. To some extent, everything has a price. And if you're, say, the NFLPA, and a couple of months from now you find out that one of the owners' main priorities is a thing you didn't expect, that might change your mind about a thing on which you didn't expect to compromise. It would be a mistake to enter a negotiation such as this with a single make-or-break issue in mind, and the experienced negotiators involved here understand that.
With all of that in mind and with full knowledge that there's a long way to go on this and we don't know on which issues the major compromises will eventually be made, let's look at some of the main issues around which these CBA talks could revolve. Think of it as a handy guide for following the talks to come. It would be our pleasure if you'd keep it bookmarked and refer to it as necessary over the coming months.
The two macro categories into which these issues fall are pretty simple: economic and non-economic. They've been dealt with separately in talks so far -- both in talks between players and owners and in talks between staffers for both sides. The NFLPA has asserted publicly that it isn't interested in conceding on economic issues, so that's worth remembering as we begin with the economic ones.
The revenue split
The current CBA provides that the players' share of revenue average at least 47% of all league revenue over the 10-year life of the deal. It is here that the NFLPA takes some of its most significant criticism over the 2011 deal because the main top-line success of the owners' lockout strategy was to reduce the players' share from where it was in the 2006 deal. In that deal, players got 60% of league revenue, but the NFLPA would point out that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison because under the previous agreement, the players got a share of net revenue (meaning after the owners took money off the top), while the current one grants the players a share of the gross revenue and gives the players more say in how much the owners take off the top, when and for what purpose.
Regardless, you can expect the players' side to push for an increase in the players' share of gross revenue in the next deal. This is as simple a principle as you're likely to encounter in the coverage of the negotiations. The players would like to get more of the money the league generates, and the owners would like to keep it the way it is.
The takeaway: Odds are there will be some (or several) financial concessions made on one side or the other that affect the final resolution here, and one of the biggest from the owners' side is the one we'll deal with in the next section.
This time around, with two full seasons left to play before the CBA ends, the two sides have already begun talking and are scheduled to ramp up talks this summer. There's even some motivation to get the new deal done before the 2019 season starts, which would head off any chance of an ugly work stoppage and allow the league to lean hard into its "NFL 100" marketing campaign and renegotiate its TV deals in peace.
That all sounds great, but it's not likely to be that simple, right? This is a complex negotiation with pitfalls, impasses and points of agreement, the specifics of which no one can foresee from this side of it. Collective bargaining, for the vast majority of you who've had no direct experience with it, is not a cut-and-dried series of issue-for-issue concessions. To some extent, everything has a price. And if you're, say, the NFLPA, and a couple of months from now you find out that one of the owners' main priorities is a thing you didn't expect, that might change your mind about a thing on which you didn't expect to compromise. It would be a mistake to enter a negotiation such as this with a single make-or-break issue in mind, and the experienced negotiators involved here understand that.
With all of that in mind and with full knowledge that there's a long way to go on this and we don't know on which issues the major compromises will eventually be made, let's look at some of the main issues around which these CBA talks could revolve. Think of it as a handy guide for following the talks to come. It would be our pleasure if you'd keep it bookmarked and refer to it as necessary over the coming months.
The two macro categories into which these issues fall are pretty simple: economic and non-economic. They've been dealt with separately in talks so far -- both in talks between players and owners and in talks between staffers for both sides. The NFLPA has asserted publicly that it isn't interested in conceding on economic issues, so that's worth remembering as we begin with the economic ones.
The revenue split
The current CBA provides that the players' share of revenue average at least 47% of all league revenue over the 10-year life of the deal. It is here that the NFLPA takes some of its most significant criticism over the 2011 deal because the main top-line success of the owners' lockout strategy was to reduce the players' share from where it was in the 2006 deal. In that deal, players got 60% of league revenue, but the NFLPA would point out that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison because under the previous agreement, the players got a share of net revenue (meaning after the owners took money off the top), while the current one grants the players a share of the gross revenue and gives the players more say in how much the owners take off the top, when and for what purpose.
Regardless, you can expect the players' side to push for an increase in the players' share of gross revenue in the next deal. This is as simple a principle as you're likely to encounter in the coverage of the negotiations. The players would like to get more of the money the league generates, and the owners would like to keep it the way it is.
The takeaway: Odds are there will be some (or several) financial concessions made on one side or the other that affect the final resolution here, and one of the biggest from the owners' side is the one we'll deal with in the next section.
Rest at the link above.
Stupid NFL
... and neither is this Chris guy.