NFL players already saving 'rainy day fund' for 2021 work stoppage – report
Sun Tzu, in “The Art of War,” wrote that “victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then try to win.”
With a potential war on the horizon between the NFL and the league’s players union, the NFL Players Association is taking Sun Tzu’s advice to heart ahead of the current collective bargaining agreement’s expiration following the 2020 season.
Sports Illustrated‘s Albert Breer reported that the union is building up a war chest by withholding licensing fees from players’ checks. Those fees come from things like the “Madden” football game, trading cards and other merchandise that uses NFL players’ names and likenesses without another contract (like an endorsement deal) governing the player’s appearance.
It’s an age-old system that has, for the most part, allowed video game companies and trading card makers to avoid the hassle of trying to hash out a price with the over 1,500 players in the league, and it also helps make the process more egalitarian, as the card companies aren’t paying $1 million to Carson Wentz and five bucks and a pack of chewing gum to the long snapper.
The revenue from those agreements, called the Group Licensing Agreement, comes to about $16,200 a player, 90 percent of the $18,000 the players pay in union dues each year (which is itself 3.75 percent of the league’s rookie minimum.
Essentially, withholding all that money over the next three seasons will generate tens of millions of dollars, not counting any interest or dividends the money generates if it is invested.
As Breer put it, “each guy who’s still in the league then will have a sort of rainy-day fund waiting for him.”
The union knows just how weak a position they can be in, since NFL contracts aren’t guaranteed and careers tend to be a Hobbesian state of nature — nasty, brutish and short.
In 1987, this led to “scab games” as players, just trying to provide for their families, crossed picket lines and ultimately broke from the union, bringing the strike to an end with the players getting none of what they demanded.
Likewise, during the 2011 lockout, this relentless salary pressure led to the players making concessions that would ultimately grant commissioner Roger Goodell practically dictatorial authority.
Regardless of your opinion on matters like national anthem protests, the simple truth is that the mere fact that Goodell and the owners could unilaterally address the issue without immediately voiding the collective bargaining agreement in the first place is because of the terms they were able to impose upon a union that made the 2011 lockout less of a negotiation and more of a surrender, at least from the players’ point of view.
The players union wants to prevent that in 2021. In order to do so, they’re going to need to provide the rank-and-file guys, the ones who aren’t already fabulously rich from salaries or endorsements, with a better alternative than simply to break ranks and either cross the picket line or put pressure on union leaders to capitulate.
The union is hoping that the war chest they’re building up will help defray the costs of a work stoppage and keep the one tool the union has to hurt the owners — actual game stoppages — on the table for the union.
As we have seen in every major sport, when owners are sufficiently determined to break their union, they are not above fighting a war of attrition; in “a fight between billionaires and millionaires,” as labor relations have so often been described, the billionaires tend to be better able to win.
After all, that’s how the NBA thrashed the players’ union in 1999, which was the beginning of the end of the famous fiscal irresponsibility of NBA players in the 1990s that was practically a cultural stereotype at that point.
When the basketball players came prepared for battle in the 2011 lockout, they were negotiating from a far stronger position, and as the 2011-12 season ran into canceled games, it was the owners who blinked, setting up the 66-game lockout season that year.
That’s the lesson football players are hoping to learn from basketball. Whether it works or not, we’ll see in three years.
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