Originally Posted by
Lurker64
Players do not, have not, and will not receive a share of NFL profits. Players are paid for their services, and they are entitled to as much as they can convince any NFL team that they are worth. This is, of course subject to external considerations like "the salary cap" (when there is one) or "nobody can pay you more money than they actually have." Profits are simply the total revenue a team receives above all costs incurred; costs like paying players, stadium upkeep and renovation, paying staff, etc.
The salary cap (and floor) are the determining factors in how much of the 9 billion and change goes to the players. The cap has been calculated on a formula based on total revenue minus offsets built into the CBA. So the total amount that the players receive has nothing to do with the profits that individual teams make, it is simply a function of the total revenue that the league brings in. Individual teams may reap large profits, or losses depending on things like unshared revenue, level of compensation to coaches and executives, miscellaneous market forces, etc.
The point has been raised by the owners that their profits have been shrinking to the point that they feel uncertain about their ability to continue to grow the game. This is a statement essentially saying that "our profits are not big enough." The solutions examined include such things are "growing the total pot" (e.g. the proposed 18-game season) as well as "reducing the fraction that the players get" (which is the main point of contention in the labor strife.)
The question at hand is not how should we split the total gross income of the league between the players and the owners in an equitable fashion. The question at hand is, at what level of profit should we consider a team's profits to be acceptable and any requests to increase those profits that come at the expense of others to be unreasonable.
From the perspective of the union, the players do not ordinarily care whether teams make large profits or any profits at all. The amount of money they receive individually is determined by their negotiated contracts and the amount of money that they receive collectively is determined by the terms of a collective bargaining agreement that disregards the profitability of individual teams and only considers the total amount of money brought in by the league as a whole. The only reason that the players have to care about the owner's profits in this situation is that ownership is claiming "our profits are insufficient." So the question raised by Patler is "at what point would a reasonable person conclude that the owner's profits are sufficient."
To answer this question, one does not need to know what the actual profits are. The actual profits are not relevant to questions of the form "If the profits were $X, instead of what they actually are, would that be sufficient? Would that be excessive?"
If you think you need to know what the profits actually are to figure out what it would be reasonable/unreasonable for them to be, then you're simply wrong. I do not need to know the actual cost of a sandwich to know that $.25 is too little to charge for the sandwich and $250 is too much. The same is true of NFL team profits. If each team is losing $250 million dollars a year, then we can all agree that profits are too large. If each team is making $250 million in profit every then we can agree that profits do not actually need to be increased further (given that $250m x 32 teams is $8b, which would mean only around 11% of the gate is actually spent.) The actual profit number that around which "that's probably enough" occurs is somewhere between -$250,000,000 and $250,000,000. All anybody is asking here is "given the facts about the value of teams, and the total revenue of the league, where between -$250m and +$250m does the 'that's just about enough' line fall?"
And giving an estimate to the answer to that question does not require any additional facts.
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