An NFL labor impasse primer

[stillers4me]

It's been a news-filled couple of weeks -- last-gasp mediation sessions, extensions of the talks, union decertification and 11th-hour litigation -- but the NFL's divide with its players is hardly a last-minute development. Rather, it's the result of long-term strategic planning by the team owners and their commissioner, Roger Goodell, and it is nothing less than an attempt at a total restructuring of the most profitable and popular enterprise in the history of sports.



In fact, shortly after the league's management and union concluded a collective bargaining agreement in March 2006, the owners began to consider the possibility of a lockout. Both sides took a step closer to that when the NFL Players' Association decertified Friday after extended talks. Why, the owners began to wonder five years ago, did they agree to a deal that gave the players nearly 60 percent of the league's income?

Although both sides prospered under the arrangement, the owners were not happy with it from the beginning. They believe their investments in their teams entitle them to greater profits, and a number of them have borrowed huge sums to build new stadiums. They watched as NHL owners used a lockout of the 2004-05 hockey season to impose a hard salary cap on players who pledged to fight any cap, so they know it can work.

The word "lockout" became a popular term among owners. According to witness testimony and documents filed in recent litigation over NFL television contracts, a lockout was on the agenda of all NFL owners' meetings in 2007 and early 2008. The NFL demanded that documents and testimony from Goodell and others in that litigation be kept under seal and away from public view, but excerpts and fragments were described in public documents filed last week in federal court in Minneapolis.........

................Internal NFL documents and testimony from Goodell two months ago show that the owners knew early in 2008 that "in order for them to get a new labor deal that works for them, they need to be able to sustain a lockout, which requires financing and requires proper planning." Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told his fellow owners that they "needed to realistically assume they were locking out in 2011" to obtain a CBA that "worked for them."



The key words are "financing" and "planning." Both were immediately evident in actions the owners initiated to set up the lockout...........

...............But the key issue is money. They players are happy with what they have and are not asking for more. They owners are not happy with what they have and are asking for more. With revenues approaching $10 billion per year and record-breaking television audiences, it seems likely that a compromise could be reached. If a new agreement extends over four or five years, for example, it could provide for a gradual increase of the owners' share and a gradual decrease of the players' share. With more money coming into the league each year, the actual dollars for each side would increase each season. No one would suffer a loss of real money. Is that so difficult to understand? ...........

Read more @ http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/comme...ory?id=6207473

[stillers4me]

So for everybody that keeps blaming the greedy players, remember that the owners have been planning to lockout the players for several years. When you say that the players never intended to compromise from "their offer", they are just trying to keep what they have. It's the owners that never intended to reach an agreement, but intended a work stoppage all along to take back what they gave before.

Nothing is black and white in any of this.