Huge differences in what MLB guys want and NFL players can get
The stink Major League Baseball players are making about a proposed 50-50 split of reduced revenues as part the owners’ plan to return to play in the coronavirus pandemic contrasts starkly with what veteran NFL players stand to lose.
Namely, their jobs.
Canceled games. Games played in empty stadiums. The possibility of both exist in professional sports leagues worldwide, as everyone searches for safe ways to re-start amid the COVID-19 virus.
As MLB negotiates a possible course back to playing, it’s clear baseball players don’t want to be like the NFL.
And it’s clear—yet again—that NFL players are wishing they were like baseball players.
This week MLB owners presented to baseball’s players union plans to re-start their season. It proposed a reduced, 82-game schedule played in stadiums without fans beginning in early July. Owners are reportedly seeking an unprecedented 50-50 split in MLB revenues for 2020.
Baseball revenues are assuredly going to be drop from previous years because of the COVID-19 virus, and absolutely will if MLB plays about half as many games in empty or reduced-capacity stadiums.
Baseball players who have had guaranteed salaries for as long as they’ve been alive don’t like lower paychecks. At all.
“A system that restricts player pay based on revenues is a salary cap. Period,” MLB players’ union executive director Tony Clark told The Athletic.
A salary cap? In baseball?
Whoa! What in the name of Curt Flood is going on here?
But that’s the way life’s been for NFL players since 1994.
It’s a huge “hell no” for baseball players in 2020. Even in a pandemic.
“This is not the first salary-cap proposal our union has received. It probably won’t be the last,” Clark said. “...That the league is trying to take advantage of a global health crisis to get what they’ve failed to achieve in the past—and to anonymously negotiate through the media for the last several days—suggests they know exactly how this will be received.”
The last time MLB owners tried to put a salary cap into their game, the players went on strike. That was in 1994. It lasted seven months. It cost the sport more than a billion dollars and canceled its World Series.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has said about 40% of MLB revenue is tied to in-stadium money on game days, including ticket sales, concessions, parking, ballpark advertising, luxury suites and programs. That’s 40% of baseball’s revenue at risk by canceling games or playing in empty stadiums this summer into fall.
In the NFL, the majority of league revenues are also from television and the minority is from game-day gate and related money. NFL teams don’t exactly advertise their balance sheets as privately owned behemoths. But looking at the readily available annual revenues for the Green Bay Packers, the league’s only publicly owned franchise, gives a prime example of what pro football teams make.
In 2019 the Packers reported 42.6% of total annual revenue came from local and game-day revenue. That’s opposed to 57.4% of $478 million in Green Bay’s total revenue coming from national revenue sharing (mainly television money) with the other 31 teams.
The Packers, with its rabid fan base and constantly sold-out Lambeau Field, are at the top end of the league in local revenues.
Though televised NFL games in empty stadiums this fall will still bring in the bulk of the league’s expected revenues, more than 40% of each team’s profits are in jeopardy because of the coronavirus.
CBS Sports conducted what it said this week was “dozens of interviews with team and league sources over the past month.” CBS determined “games without fans would cost $70 million in gate receipts per team.”
And the outlet, an NFL broadcast partner, called that $70 million in losses per team “a conservative estimate.”
Money. That, of course, is why the league intends to play all 16 games of the season, per the 2020 schedule it released to much hopeful hoopla to a sports-starved society last week.
Billionaire NFL owners aren’t going to swallow those expected financial losses by themselves.
But NFL players are more likely to have a delayed effect compared to their brethren in baseball, if games are canceled or played in empty stadiums this year.
Article 12, section 1, paragraph a.(xii) of the collective bargaining agreement the NFL players’ union ratified with owners in March states: “If one or more weeks of any NFL season are cancelled or AR (“All Revenue” for any League Year substantially decreases, in either case due to a terrorist or military action, natural disaster, or similar event, the parties shall engage in good faith negotiations to adjust the provisions of this Agreement with respect to the projection of AR and the Salary Cap for the following League Year so that AR for the following League Year is projected in a fair manner consistent with the changed revenue projection caused by such action.”
Translation: if games get cut in 2020, the NFL is likely see a first-ever reduction in salary cap next year, in 2021.
That would mean more veteran players getting cut next year because of high salaries, more than already happens each year in pro football.
Take the already precarious future of Seahawks Pro Bowl veteran left tackle Duane Brown. He’s 35 and coming off knee surgery in December. The final year of Brown’s contract is 2021, at a scheduled cap charge of $13 million. That’s the fourth-highest hit on the Seahawks for next year. He’s behind only Russell Wilson ($32 million cap charge in 2021), Bobby Wagner ($17.2 million) and Jarran Reed ($13.5 million).
Lower revenues would make Brown even more likely to retire or be released next year than he already is.
There’s the ongoing case of Jadeveon Clowney. A possibility of a lower NFL salary cap in 2021 could be some of the free-agent pass rusher’s thinking while he waits out the travel restrictions from COVID-19. Clowney is waiting to be able to get to get physical exams with other teams this summer, or later. Passing those tests following core surgery in January would theoretically prove himself medically worthy for other multiyear contract offers to leverage the one he’s had from Seattle since March.
If Clowney settles now for far less than he’s been seeking, maybe a one-year deal to try free agency again next year at age 28, it’s possible he would find another depressed market with a lower salary cap for the league in 2021.
That’s the stark, fundamental difference between the NFL and the bickering about revenue-sharing going on right now in baseball.
In the NFL, nothing is guaranteed.
Veteran baseball players are balking over reduced revenues in 2020 knowing their contracts are guaranteed for future years—whether they hit .120 in a shortened season this year, or whether they don’t even play. At age 37, Robinson Cano is guaranteed to get $20,250,000 this year and again next year to play—or not play—for the Mets. That’s because of the fully guaranteed, 10-year, $240 million contract the Mariners gave the then-slugging second baseman in December 2013. Seattle traded him to New York barely halfway through that contract.
Though not exactly poor, to be sure, an NFL player can only dream of being Robinson Cano.
NFL players get paid base salaries beginning only when a season does. A delayed start to the season means delayed paychecks. Their base pay ends when the season does, after week 17 (scheduled to end Jan. 3).
And that’s if the team needs you that long.
D.J. Fluker and Justin Britt are not going to get the combined $10.5 million in non-guaranteed salaries they were expecting for 2020. The Seahawks cut their starting offensive linemen last month to save cap space.
Britt’s was the coldest cut of all: the veteran discarded by the team that drafted him, while he was grinding through endless days and months of rehabilitation from a season-ending knee injury in 2020.
Even NFL games in front of fans this year, if they happen, are likely to bring lower revenues—and thus veterans released and a lower salary cap in 2021.
Medical experts and public-health officials are discussing the feasibility of stadiums spacing fans into every other seat and/or every other row rather than packing them together as usual, to maintain social distancing at games. That means the capacity crowds of 68,000 or so fans at Seahawks games could become 34,000 or fewer—and revenues decreasing accordingly.
Lower income could lead to NFL teams going farther below the league’s salary-cap ceiling of $198.2 million than they originally budgeted. As Sports Illustrated outlined this week, the league’s CBA has a minimum level teams are to spend of the cap each year: 89%, but there is “insufficient CBA accountability” to ensure teams spend that minimum amount on player salaries. Enforcing that 89% minimum comes only once every four years; the CBA mandates league inspections of team’s books for player salaries happen only every four years.
If there was ever a year for teams to skimp on players’ salaries with the intent to make them up two or three years from now—when they hope COVID-19’s economic effects will have diminished—it’s this year.
So as baseball players gripe about lower shares of lower revenues in their sport in the coronavirus, NFL players have a more fundamental concern.
They hope they can get any pay, at all.
This story was originally published May 13, 2020 at 4:01 PM.
