I think part of the problem is that people identify with their TEAM vs the player. I’m a STL Cardinals fan. Drafting Albert Pujols in the 13th round was one of the most insane value adds in modern baseball history. And I love Pujols to death but when he left the Cardinals - and for the record that was devastating to me - I still rooted for the Cardinals, not the Angels, right? So you want your team to have team friendly contracts and hopefully amass a lot of talent and win.
And as a corollary, the “overpaid players!!” trope is one that resonates deeply. For some reason “over rich owners” doesn’t hit the same way.
Dammit, you beat me to this point. But I'm not even sure it's a "problem." That's how team sports work. Of course the NFL media is going to conform to this viewpoint. As a labor guy, I want all of these people to Get Paid; as a Bears fan, I want the Bears to win the Super Bowl, not for Caleb Williams to get the most money.
Which means, I suppose, that the best way to avoid hypocrisy is to be extremely pro-player during CBA negotiations, and very pro-team in individual contract negotiations. I'm fine with that, and it feels like the media at least leans in that direction.
Absolutely. And throw in the revulsion at someone making more money than you (but not the owner, again, unclear reasons) and no one roots for their team to overpay
Not just other people, but the players themselves have a major interest in the performance of the team. A top player taking a salary cut stings a lot less if it means the team can afford a super-bowl roster.
I'm not sure I see what you see. In the work world it is generally the case that salespeople have a pretty clear scoreboard regardless of age - you produce or your fail. But outside of sales I notice that mediocre old white guys really jam things up if they can't be pushed out. Younger people are generally better and more productive (I said "generally" not "always"). My wife is a veterinarian. In her early years she couldn't believe the lousy quality of care from old experienced vets that was allowed compared to what she and more recent classes had learned in vet school. Are you arguing for protections for less valuable performers?
Since a healthy and growing economy with maximum productivity is best for a community or country (not really a close call on the data) a more sound plan would be to run as efficient a possible with a comfortable social safety net.
So, apologies in advance for the pedantry, but I think there's a substantive point worth making here. The NFL doesn't have an all-purpose antitrust exemption; only MLB has that (for purely historical and frankly nonsensical reasons). Certain NFL activities that would pose antitrust issues ARE protected from antitrust scrutiny by specific doctrines: The Sports Broadcasting Act allows NFL teams to pool their broadcasting rights and sell them as a mandatory bundle to broadcasters, and the labor exemption to the antitrust laws allows NFL teams to form a bargaining collective when they're negotiating with the NFLPA. But beyond that, the NFL doesn't really have special protection from antitrust cases, and has been sued successfully on antitrust theories a few times over the years.
Most notably, the NFL doesn't have any kind of antitrust exemption that would shield it from liability for anticompetitive acts designed to close the market to a rival football league. Famously, after the USFL went out of business in the early 90s, they brought an antitrust suit against the NFL and won; no one remembers that because the jury awarded only $1 in damages, finding that the USFL was doomed by its own mismanagement and not anything the NFL did. There are lots of reasons why it's somewhere between difficult and impossible for a second professional football league to form, but the NFL's ability to violate the antitrust laws when competing with a rival league isn't really one of them.
Sure, but unless a next-generation Al Davis somehow brings a lawsuit changing the current understanding of how antitrust law applies to sports leagues, there's not much legal support for the idea that leagues MUST admit all teams that apply for membership.
Which is kind of the more general point I'm trying to make, I guess: NFL teams' bargaining power with the players comes from the fact that they're entrenched, more by market forces than market manipulation, as THE professional football league that can command sufficient revenues to pay NFL-caliber player compensation, rather than an ability to engage in otherwise illegal behavior thanks to a special status under the antitrust laws.
Good column. Hadn't really thought about it in these stark terms before.
It's interesting to me to contrast this situation in the NFL with the true pro player system that is European and English Football (the derided proposal for the Super League has just morphed into the Premier League turning into the Super League). Players are played much closer to their true value. Fans expect owners to lose tens of millions of dollars every year.
I’m an LA Kings fan, and when we were on our Stanley Cup runs around 10 years ago, Dustin Brown, the captain of the team, got a contract that was a little more than what he was probably worth at the time. I remember talking to fans who thought we should dump him almost as soon as he began to age. The man captained our team to their only Cup wins in team history, but fans wanted to see him gone because he ‘wasn’t living up to his contract’. It didn’t matter what he had done for the franchise. As a fan, I don’t care how much my teams players make—I’m not paying their salaries. But most fans only care about what you’ve done lately and it really blows.
"[Sports] media is media and media is clubby, based on insiderism and dedicated to protecting those with clout"
That's what I feel about Defector, who undertake a different kind of insiderism, but an insiderism nevertheless. But then again, they'd never offer this kind of analysis. It'd ruin their "immaculate" vibes...
Oh, they mass-quit DSA Twitter when people found out they got in bed with someone from Bain Capital to help run their business. It's a pattern with them: First sign of conflict, and they're suddenly the Judean People's Front Kamikaze Squad, performatively mass quitting rather than actually putting up a fight.
This same dynamic of pretending to run your favorite team exists in MLB, but there’s been a fair amount of pushback in the form of *cheering* overpays for veterans, and an insistence that every team can afford to put their payroll at eleventy billion dollars because hey, they had enough to buy the team, of course they’re good for it!
(Also, Tom Brady taking a haircut would never be accepted by the MLBPA. To this day, they have made it clear to the players that their salary negotiations have an impact on their fellow players)
And too be fair, what Nutting and the Pirates are doing, cheaping out when Paul Skenes’ brilliance is obvious, and Connor Griffith may give them a generational shortstop, points directionally to the “lol, money machine go brrr” attitude towards signing every free agent on the planet. And they should do *some* of that! But there’s a happy medium of not going full McKinsey, treating your players as just “assets”, and lighting money on fire for the players.
Maybe I'm wrong about this but I'm pretty sure the CBA sets yearly total player compensation. That is, of course, bad because it limits the players' compensation and reflects the effective labor monopsony held by the NFL. But within that framework wouldn't paying any given player more mean paying other players less?
salary cap vs league revenue is the big one. If that is fair, then I can accept a lot of pay and player movement restrictions in professional sport that are unacceptable in the wider world.
If you just let the market rip, on players payments and movement, you will end up with a few very rich clubs absolutely dominating (funded probably by the grossest rich people on earth), which undermines the whole idea of a sporting competition. A sporting competition is not, and should not be, a free market.
I think you nailed it: salary cap vs revenue. To respond to FdB’s take, more cap space and a shorter rookie contract term would seem to be moves in the right direction. I think he also missed a spot: owners want a longer season and the players don’t, for perfectly good wear-&- tear reasons. The league is also pushing the envelope on foreign games, which contribute nothing other than elevated marketing exposure, turn travel time into an unnecessary issue, and deprive teams of a home game. I’ve been watching for a long time and wonder what place fans merit in discussions of the overall picture. The open greed of owners has made it excessively expensive for families of modest means to get into stadiums, while tax deductible corporate expense accounts fill luxury boxes with mildly interested schmoozers. Symbolic protest is all we’ve got left. So I highly recommend that everyone become Packer fans asap. They won’t be moving to Indiana.
I really enjoyed the article (and all your work), and your analysis here is right on. This anti-player bias surprises me less than it does others because the media is more beholden to the fans of the team than the players, and the fans, as James noted in his comment, tend to be far more concerned with team goals than any individual achievements. Your Mahomes example was a great one and hit home for me. I'm a lifelong Chiefs fan, and it thrills me that Mahomes is getting paid well, but it is a MUCH bigger deal to me that the team keeps winning, so when Mahomes is willing to restructure his contract to make it more team-friendly (as he does almost every offseason, fortunately without actually giving up money), that feels like a huge win. When the media explains it as a team-friendly situation, it appeals to the fans. I can see how the media can (and maybe should) be more cognizant of the individual aspects of these contracts, but as long as the fans are more interested in team success, the media will likely always skew in that direction.
I’m more of a baseball fan personally, but it seems like the unwritten assumption that underpins much of advanced sports analysis is that efficiently spending money frees up funds that can be spent to improve the team in other ways.
Yet the major sports leagues are full of examples of owners who invest as little as possible in their teams and make a fortune regardless.
There is only one LA Dodgers so far. Yankees probably would have won a World Series recently without Giancarlo Stanton clogging the payroll and the lineup.
My Orioles would be set back for years by another Chris Davis disaster.
Being efficient with money and picks is a must for franchises.
I’m not saying it’s not an important thing. But not every owner treats their team like that. Not every team is “trying to win”. The players always are, but I think some owners don’t care as long as they can pocket a certain amount each year.
THE NFL has done better than most employers at rewarding highly skilled employees relative to earnings they help generate. Is there any emplyer that has done better?
Total Wage bill as a % of total turnover
55% NFL
55% EPL
50% NBA
45% MLB
45% Dentons
35% Goldman Sachs
20% OpenAI
17% Amazon
15% IPL
15% McDonalds
13% Google
10% Meta
Not challenging the argument of the piece, I have the same frustration with complaints about EPL wages where people apparently think club owners deserve a bigger slice of the pie than the players generating ALL of he value, but this is much more pronounced in Indian Premier League Cricket for example.
Freddie will also appreciate the irony that OoenAi has higher wage costs than other tech companies. If AI is going to lower salary costs for companies around the globe isn't the first place that it should be evident at the AI companies best placed to harness the power of AI?
The fallacy of this argument is that the universe of players is not the sum of the current active rosters. There are dozens if not hundreds of players on practice squads, the Canadian Football League, or sitting on their couches who would be ecstatic to get a call to play for the league minimum. And who is to say the next Kurt Warner bagging groceries is less worthy of a contract than a current veteran? The labor market is restricted only in the sense that the rules of the game are 11 players on the field, and 32 teams in a league. Change that and you don’t have a product.
Your sympathy, Freddie, seems to be with the comparatively well paid pros rather than the many who get shut out at the factory gates by the bosses.
As for the salary cap, I completely agree with the basic unfairness of that. However, the players union and their leaders share culpability. That nefarious arrangement has been agreed upon each time the union contract comes up. The majority of union players voting for it had to make the calculation that they would never be salary cap victims, so let their better and comparatively higher paid union brothers pay the price.
I am reposting an edited post in which I made a critical erroneous phrase substitution.
The fallacy of this argument is that the universe of players is not the sum of the current active rosters. There are dozens if not hundreds of players on practice squads, the Canadian Football League, or sitting on their couches who would be ecstatic to get a call to play for the league minimum. And who is to say the next Kurt Warner bagging groceries is less worthy of a contract than a current veteran? The labor market is restricted only in the sense that the rules of the game are 11 players on the field, and 32 teams in a league. Change that and you don’t have a product.
Your sympathy, Freddie, seems to be with the comparatively well paid pros rather than the many who get shut out at the factory gates by the bosses.
As for the franchise tag, I completely agree with the basic unfairness of that. However, the players union and their leaders share culpability. That nefarious arrangement has been agreed upon each time the union contract comes up. The majority of union players voting for it had to make the calculation that they would never be franchise tag victims, so let their better and comparatively higher paid union brothers pay the price.
> the correct strategy for NFL success is building through the draft, exploiting the rookie pay scale, letting aging veterans walk before they get paid, being disciplined and minimalist in free agency, stockpiling compensatory picks, and using the franchise tag to squeeze one more year of abuse out of a player before he reaches open market. This is the received wisdom in NFL media circles. It’s also, when you stop to think about it, a comprehensive guide to maximizing owner profits at the direct expense of the players those owners employ.
This is true, but at the same time these are elite, hyper competitive athletes who want to win, and on some level understand that taking a haircut on a restructured salary frees up resources to address the team's deficiencies elsewhere, therefore improving the team's chances of winning. Football famously requires more teamwork and cooperation that any other major sport, and I doubt anyone gets to that level without being a decent teammate. Granted some of these offers are more offensive than others, but the NFLPA report cards that come out every year do a decent job of showing how the reputation of different teams among players (and why the league wants to keep it from being published).
Here is my question to you: do you think a worker-friendly nfl, with dramatically different rules around compensation, the draft, the salary cap, etc. would be as fun to watch? Do you think these anti-worker rules contribute in some way to the success of the product? Or can we have our cake and eat it too - meaning, abolish the draft, pay players what they are worth, forget the franchise tag..and all of those things will not detract from the entertainment?
It’s fine with me if someone ends up arguing that the worker rights angle is more important than the on-field entertainment angle. But I have a hard time totally accepting the idea that there isn’t a tension between the two. This is a classic FdB style argument, imo
It seems the issue is context, or where you draw boundaries. You mention that analysis of player compensation without the boundaries (including all human value/occupation/compensation) might yield the conclusion: “this player is well paid”. But when drawing lines around the league, the comp appears poor. Another way you say it is basically “in a truly free market they would earn more”, which is probably true, at least at first. But I don’t think it’s fair/appropriate to selectively jump back and forth in framing. It’s the boundaries that give the whole thing meaning, at every level. The RB only has value because the field has a sideline, the line of scrimmage is fixed, a bit of leather and string is arbitrarily said to be the focus of value. If a truly “free” market button were to be pushed, 32 teams may eventually devolve into 15 consistently competitive teams (or 10 or 2). Or in an even more “free” market, the field could be made wider or longer, or there could be two balls or no balls. They could all start to use sticks and beat one another. That would all change what kinds of players get comped and how much. My point is that it’s the restricting of freedom that makes the whole thing hold together and that it operates at every level (including the economics). For a thing to be a game, lines have to be arbitrarily drawn somewhere. Once drawn, the inherent incentive structure plays itself out and the results are basically inevitable. It’s like any closed system. It’s not really about what’s fair or just, it just IS. Now it occurs to me that your primary criticism is about the commentators, and it seems to me that you’re right about everything you said there. But what it is about the structure/boundaries that makes them that way and can/should it be different? Freddie deBoer: Come for the Marxism, stay for the sports analysis! I deeply appreciate your work btw.
I think part of the problem is that people identify with their TEAM vs the player. I’m a STL Cardinals fan. Drafting Albert Pujols in the 13th round was one of the most insane value adds in modern baseball history. And I love Pujols to death but when he left the Cardinals - and for the record that was devastating to me - I still rooted for the Cardinals, not the Angels, right? So you want your team to have team friendly contracts and hopefully amass a lot of talent and win.
And as a corollary, the “overpaid players!!” trope is one that resonates deeply. For some reason “over rich owners” doesn’t hit the same way.
Dammit, you beat me to this point. But I'm not even sure it's a "problem." That's how team sports work. Of course the NFL media is going to conform to this viewpoint. As a labor guy, I want all of these people to Get Paid; as a Bears fan, I want the Bears to win the Super Bowl, not for Caleb Williams to get the most money.
Which means, I suppose, that the best way to avoid hypocrisy is to be extremely pro-player during CBA negotiations, and very pro-team in individual contract negotiations. I'm fine with that, and it feels like the media at least leans in that direction.
Absolutely. And throw in the revulsion at someone making more money than you (but not the owner, again, unclear reasons) and no one roots for their team to overpay
Not just other people, but the players themselves have a major interest in the performance of the team. A top player taking a salary cut stings a lot less if it means the team can afford a super-bowl roster.
I'm not sure I see what you see. In the work world it is generally the case that salespeople have a pretty clear scoreboard regardless of age - you produce or your fail. But outside of sales I notice that mediocre old white guys really jam things up if they can't be pushed out. Younger people are generally better and more productive (I said "generally" not "always"). My wife is a veterinarian. In her early years she couldn't believe the lousy quality of care from old experienced vets that was allowed compared to what she and more recent classes had learned in vet school. Are you arguing for protections for less valuable performers?
"protections for less valuable performers" would be Socialism, so yes. :-)
Since a healthy and growing economy with maximum productivity is best for a community or country (not really a close call on the data) a more sound plan would be to run as efficient a possible with a comfortable social safety net.
I agree, but everyone here knows that Freddie is a very vocal Socialist.
So, apologies in advance for the pedantry, but I think there's a substantive point worth making here. The NFL doesn't have an all-purpose antitrust exemption; only MLB has that (for purely historical and frankly nonsensical reasons). Certain NFL activities that would pose antitrust issues ARE protected from antitrust scrutiny by specific doctrines: The Sports Broadcasting Act allows NFL teams to pool their broadcasting rights and sell them as a mandatory bundle to broadcasters, and the labor exemption to the antitrust laws allows NFL teams to form a bargaining collective when they're negotiating with the NFLPA. But beyond that, the NFL doesn't really have special protection from antitrust cases, and has been sued successfully on antitrust theories a few times over the years.
Most notably, the NFL doesn't have any kind of antitrust exemption that would shield it from liability for anticompetitive acts designed to close the market to a rival football league. Famously, after the USFL went out of business in the early 90s, they brought an antitrust suit against the NFL and won; no one remembers that because the jury awarded only $1 in damages, finding that the USFL was doomed by its own mismanagement and not anything the NFL did. There are lots of reasons why it's somewhere between difficult and impossible for a second professional football league to form, but the NFL's ability to violate the antitrust laws when competing with a rival league isn't really one of them.
But they are shielded by the fact that I can't just set up my own NFL team and pay players what I think they're worth
Sure, but unless a next-generation Al Davis somehow brings a lawsuit changing the current understanding of how antitrust law applies to sports leagues, there's not much legal support for the idea that leagues MUST admit all teams that apply for membership.
Which is kind of the more general point I'm trying to make, I guess: NFL teams' bargaining power with the players comes from the fact that they're entrenched, more by market forces than market manipulation, as THE professional football league that can command sufficient revenues to pay NFL-caliber player compensation, rather than an ability to engage in otherwise illegal behavior thanks to a special status under the antitrust laws.
Good column. Hadn't really thought about it in these stark terms before.
It's interesting to me to contrast this situation in the NFL with the true pro player system that is European and English Football (the derided proposal for the Super League has just morphed into the Premier League turning into the Super League). Players are played much closer to their true value. Fans expect owners to lose tens of millions of dollars every year.
The media covering football (soccer) has its own structural problems and biases. Read this story... https://sportingintelligence832.substack.com/p/here-we-go-the-lowdown-on-football?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1jtwy
This guy is A) one of the biggest "stars" in the soccer media ecosystem B) makes the people covering the NFL look like Edward R Murrow.
He regularly steels material and passed it off as his own and is on the Saudi payroll.
He might be on of the worst examples but I can't say that on the whole soccer is covered "better" than the NFL
I’m an LA Kings fan, and when we were on our Stanley Cup runs around 10 years ago, Dustin Brown, the captain of the team, got a contract that was a little more than what he was probably worth at the time. I remember talking to fans who thought we should dump him almost as soon as he began to age. The man captained our team to their only Cup wins in team history, but fans wanted to see him gone because he ‘wasn’t living up to his contract’. It didn’t matter what he had done for the franchise. As a fan, I don’t care how much my teams players make—I’m not paying their salaries. But most fans only care about what you’ve done lately and it really blows.
"[Sports] media is media and media is clubby, based on insiderism and dedicated to protecting those with clout"
That's what I feel about Defector, who undertake a different kind of insiderism, but an insiderism nevertheless. But then again, they'd never offer this kind of analysis. It'd ruin their "immaculate" vibes...
Huh. So they aren’t an extension of what used to be DSA Twitter?
Oh, they mass-quit DSA Twitter when people found out they got in bed with someone from Bain Capital to help run their business. It's a pattern with them: First sign of conflict, and they're suddenly the Judean People's Front Kamikaze Squad, performatively mass quitting rather than actually putting up a fight.
This same dynamic of pretending to run your favorite team exists in MLB, but there’s been a fair amount of pushback in the form of *cheering* overpays for veterans, and an insistence that every team can afford to put their payroll at eleventy billion dollars because hey, they had enough to buy the team, of course they’re good for it!
(Also, Tom Brady taking a haircut would never be accepted by the MLBPA. To this day, they have made it clear to the players that their salary negotiations have an impact on their fellow players)
And too be fair, what Nutting and the Pirates are doing, cheaping out when Paul Skenes’ brilliance is obvious, and Connor Griffith may give them a generational shortstop, points directionally to the “lol, money machine go brrr” attitude towards signing every free agent on the planet. And they should do *some* of that! But there’s a happy medium of not going full McKinsey, treating your players as just “assets”, and lighting money on fire for the players.
Maybe I'm wrong about this but I'm pretty sure the CBA sets yearly total player compensation. That is, of course, bad because it limits the players' compensation and reflects the effective labor monopsony held by the NFL. But within that framework wouldn't paying any given player more mean paying other players less?
salary cap vs league revenue is the big one. If that is fair, then I can accept a lot of pay and player movement restrictions in professional sport that are unacceptable in the wider world.
If you just let the market rip, on players payments and movement, you will end up with a few very rich clubs absolutely dominating (funded probably by the grossest rich people on earth), which undermines the whole idea of a sporting competition. A sporting competition is not, and should not be, a free market.
I think you nailed it: salary cap vs revenue. To respond to FdB’s take, more cap space and a shorter rookie contract term would seem to be moves in the right direction. I think he also missed a spot: owners want a longer season and the players don’t, for perfectly good wear-&- tear reasons. The league is also pushing the envelope on foreign games, which contribute nothing other than elevated marketing exposure, turn travel time into an unnecessary issue, and deprive teams of a home game. I’ve been watching for a long time and wonder what place fans merit in discussions of the overall picture. The open greed of owners has made it excessively expensive for families of modest means to get into stadiums, while tax deductible corporate expense accounts fill luxury boxes with mildly interested schmoozers. Symbolic protest is all we’ve got left. So I highly recommend that everyone become Packer fans asap. They won’t be moving to Indiana.
I really enjoyed the article (and all your work), and your analysis here is right on. This anti-player bias surprises me less than it does others because the media is more beholden to the fans of the team than the players, and the fans, as James noted in his comment, tend to be far more concerned with team goals than any individual achievements. Your Mahomes example was a great one and hit home for me. I'm a lifelong Chiefs fan, and it thrills me that Mahomes is getting paid well, but it is a MUCH bigger deal to me that the team keeps winning, so when Mahomes is willing to restructure his contract to make it more team-friendly (as he does almost every offseason, fortunately without actually giving up money), that feels like a huge win. When the media explains it as a team-friendly situation, it appeals to the fans. I can see how the media can (and maybe should) be more cognizant of the individual aspects of these contracts, but as long as the fans are more interested in team success, the media will likely always skew in that direction.
I’m more of a baseball fan personally, but it seems like the unwritten assumption that underpins much of advanced sports analysis is that efficiently spending money frees up funds that can be spent to improve the team in other ways.
Yet the major sports leagues are full of examples of owners who invest as little as possible in their teams and make a fortune regardless.
There is only one LA Dodgers so far. Yankees probably would have won a World Series recently without Giancarlo Stanton clogging the payroll and the lineup.
My Orioles would be set back for years by another Chris Davis disaster.
Being efficient with money and picks is a must for franchises.
I’m not saying it’s not an important thing. But not every owner treats their team like that. Not every team is “trying to win”. The players always are, but I think some owners don’t care as long as they can pocket a certain amount each year.
THE NFL has done better than most employers at rewarding highly skilled employees relative to earnings they help generate. Is there any emplyer that has done better?
Total Wage bill as a % of total turnover
55% NFL
55% EPL
50% NBA
45% MLB
45% Dentons
35% Goldman Sachs
20% OpenAI
17% Amazon
15% IPL
15% McDonalds
13% Google
10% Meta
Not challenging the argument of the piece, I have the same frustration with complaints about EPL wages where people apparently think club owners deserve a bigger slice of the pie than the players generating ALL of he value, but this is much more pronounced in Indian Premier League Cricket for example.
Freddie will also appreciate the irony that OoenAi has higher wage costs than other tech companies. If AI is going to lower salary costs for companies around the globe isn't the first place that it should be evident at the AI companies best placed to harness the power of AI?
The fallacy of this argument is that the universe of players is not the sum of the current active rosters. There are dozens if not hundreds of players on practice squads, the Canadian Football League, or sitting on their couches who would be ecstatic to get a call to play for the league minimum. And who is to say the next Kurt Warner bagging groceries is less worthy of a contract than a current veteran? The labor market is restricted only in the sense that the rules of the game are 11 players on the field, and 32 teams in a league. Change that and you don’t have a product.
Your sympathy, Freddie, seems to be with the comparatively well paid pros rather than the many who get shut out at the factory gates by the bosses.
As for the salary cap, I completely agree with the basic unfairness of that. However, the players union and their leaders share culpability. That nefarious arrangement has been agreed upon each time the union contract comes up. The majority of union players voting for it had to make the calculation that they would never be salary cap victims, so let their better and comparatively higher paid union brothers pay the price.
I am reposting an edited post in which I made a critical erroneous phrase substitution.
The fallacy of this argument is that the universe of players is not the sum of the current active rosters. There are dozens if not hundreds of players on practice squads, the Canadian Football League, or sitting on their couches who would be ecstatic to get a call to play for the league minimum. And who is to say the next Kurt Warner bagging groceries is less worthy of a contract than a current veteran? The labor market is restricted only in the sense that the rules of the game are 11 players on the field, and 32 teams in a league. Change that and you don’t have a product.
Your sympathy, Freddie, seems to be with the comparatively well paid pros rather than the many who get shut out at the factory gates by the bosses.
As for the franchise tag, I completely agree with the basic unfairness of that. However, the players union and their leaders share culpability. That nefarious arrangement has been agreed upon each time the union contract comes up. The majority of union players voting for it had to make the calculation that they would never be franchise tag victims, so let their better and comparatively higher paid union brothers pay the price.
> the correct strategy for NFL success is building through the draft, exploiting the rookie pay scale, letting aging veterans walk before they get paid, being disciplined and minimalist in free agency, stockpiling compensatory picks, and using the franchise tag to squeeze one more year of abuse out of a player before he reaches open market. This is the received wisdom in NFL media circles. It’s also, when you stop to think about it, a comprehensive guide to maximizing owner profits at the direct expense of the players those owners employ.
This is true, but at the same time these are elite, hyper competitive athletes who want to win, and on some level understand that taking a haircut on a restructured salary frees up resources to address the team's deficiencies elsewhere, therefore improving the team's chances of winning. Football famously requires more teamwork and cooperation that any other major sport, and I doubt anyone gets to that level without being a decent teammate. Granted some of these offers are more offensive than others, but the NFLPA report cards that come out every year do a decent job of showing how the reputation of different teams among players (and why the league wants to keep it from being published).
Here is my question to you: do you think a worker-friendly nfl, with dramatically different rules around compensation, the draft, the salary cap, etc. would be as fun to watch? Do you think these anti-worker rules contribute in some way to the success of the product? Or can we have our cake and eat it too - meaning, abolish the draft, pay players what they are worth, forget the franchise tag..and all of those things will not detract from the entertainment?
It’s fine with me if someone ends up arguing that the worker rights angle is more important than the on-field entertainment angle. But I have a hard time totally accepting the idea that there isn’t a tension between the two. This is a classic FdB style argument, imo
It seems the issue is context, or where you draw boundaries. You mention that analysis of player compensation without the boundaries (including all human value/occupation/compensation) might yield the conclusion: “this player is well paid”. But when drawing lines around the league, the comp appears poor. Another way you say it is basically “in a truly free market they would earn more”, which is probably true, at least at first. But I don’t think it’s fair/appropriate to selectively jump back and forth in framing. It’s the boundaries that give the whole thing meaning, at every level. The RB only has value because the field has a sideline, the line of scrimmage is fixed, a bit of leather and string is arbitrarily said to be the focus of value. If a truly “free” market button were to be pushed, 32 teams may eventually devolve into 15 consistently competitive teams (or 10 or 2). Or in an even more “free” market, the field could be made wider or longer, or there could be two balls or no balls. They could all start to use sticks and beat one another. That would all change what kinds of players get comped and how much. My point is that it’s the restricting of freedom that makes the whole thing hold together and that it operates at every level (including the economics). For a thing to be a game, lines have to be arbitrarily drawn somewhere. Once drawn, the inherent incentive structure plays itself out and the results are basically inevitable. It’s like any closed system. It’s not really about what’s fair or just, it just IS. Now it occurs to me that your primary criticism is about the commentators, and it seems to me that you’re right about everything you said there. But what it is about the structure/boundaries that makes them that way and can/should it be different? Freddie deBoer: Come for the Marxism, stay for the sports analysis! I deeply appreciate your work btw.