Associated Press columnist Jim Litke became the latest person in the national media to paint both sides in a sports labor dispute as spoiled, ungrateful and greedy in his column headlined: NFL labor talks: Who’s greedier, the millionaires or billionaires?
This is an almost insane question to ask. Just read his column, which we ran in the Register Star. Yet he answers his own question by writing,”You can’t go wrong picking either side.”
Really.
Litke lays out the dispute well. The NFL currently takes in $9 billion in revenue. It gets to keep the first $1 billion, then gives the players 60 percent of the remaining $8 billion as part of their salary cap agreement. The owners now want to take $2 billion off the top, and then split 60-40. The players say how about taking nothing off the top and splitting things 50-50. Or they’ll take even a little less than 50-50.
Anyway, Litke notes “the owners are smart enough not to plead poverty” after the NFL had record TV ratings this year.
And he writes:
The players are essentially arguing for the status quo, and with flawless logic. The league has never been more popular, and everyone is already making money hand over fist.
So why is it greedy for the players to argue for the status quo under a salary cap model that the owners insisted upon?
I can’t remember ever hearing professional athletes threaten to strike because they were demanding more money. In fact, unions are often almost as eager as owners to put caps on rookie salaries. No, the only thing players want is to keep their rights to become free agents or to be paid as much as their employer WANTS to pay them.
It’s always the pro sports owners who want guarantees that their businesses will remain not just profitable, but wildly profitable.
The average NFL team is now valued at over $1 billion. Anyone who has owned his team for over a decade has at least doubled his investment just in the net worth of his team, not even counting his annual profit.
But owners always want players to give up even more. They want a rookie salary cap. They want to lock the players into even longer rookie contracts. They want them to give up $600 million in salaries.
What do the owners ever give up? Will they give $1 billion back to the TV networks on their next contracts, as they want the players to give back? Will they return any personal seat licenses to their fans? Will the teams that got public funding for their new stadiums give several hundred million back to their cities now that every city and state is in a tax crunch?
Didn’t think so.
So the answer is easy. There is only one greedy side in this dispute. And it’s the side that’s threatening to close it’s doors.
When businesses are losing money and facing foreclosure, employees holding out for the status quo might be seen as greedy. But when that business is making record profits, demanding the status quo is eminently reasonable, even modest.
Both sides in this looming NFL labor mess are wealthy, but it’s only the side that’s 100 or 1,000 times MORE wealthy that wants even more.
Good point about the public funding. Even Jerry Jones got some subsidies from the city of Arlington, TX. In most cases, the taxpayers have been responsible for building the stadium, with the owners collecting the money. Getting rid of the pro sports leagues’ anti-trust exemption is long overdue. Let them abide by the same rules that other businesses do.
I have always felt the salaries of athletes were way out of whack! Keep screaming for more and the employer keeps caving in. Ah, but the employer isn’t without gettting his/her share, too. So they both whack the average person who attends the games by raising the cost of tickets.
Those that have are so consumed by greed that they no longer care what sacifices are made for them to continue their lifestyle.
We have become a society of me, me, me….what is in it for me! Until we realize that we are all part of the whole, we will destroy this great land we live in.
When employees/players are already earning what the average person will never realize in 2 or 3 lifetimes, let alone one, they add to the problem. Surely, no employer is going to take from his own pocket to facilitate this….he/she will pass along the added costs in tickets, products, services, whatever.
My earnings are considered near poverty, a far cry from what they were just 10 years ago. I am happy to have a job, even if the earnings are what I made back in 1980.
Greed will kill this nation, if we don’t get off the me, me, me ride!
A. Streck, the players aren’t asking for more and the salaries aren’t out of whack. Truth is, they are artifically low because they have agreed to limits and a salary cap for no good reason except the owners said they would shut down the league without it; virtually every NFL team has always made money, so they never needed players to give back in salaries. And salaries have little to do with ticket costs. Owners will always try to make as much money as they possibly can, regardless of what they pay the players. Jerry Jones was making more money than any owner in football even before he started selling advertising at Cowboys Stadium and opening up new revenue streams that no one else had ever opened up before. And, even with all that, you could argue that ticket prices remain too low. If tickets were priced at their true worth, you wouldn’t have ticket brokers making millions around the country by buying the tickets and then selling them at a higher cost to consumers.
It’s a bubble; no different than what happened to tech, housing, and now the public sector. Public education, including College, is at the tipping point of bursting. When the branches are too heavy for the tree, the tree will topple over.