You're to Blame for NFL's Latest Labor Mess
By Scott Soshnick - Mar 4, 2011
You're to Blame for NFL's Latest Labor Mess: Scott Soshnick - Bloomberg
Anxious fans keep asking who’s to blame for the National Football League’s collective bargaining quagmire.
Does responsibility rest more with owners or players, factions that, as parents in the playground might say, can’t play nice.
Management and labor can’t agree on the best way to share, get this, more than $8 billion in revenue.
After years of chronicling sports leagues and their labor squabbles, as well as much rumination and a careful analysis of the facts, here’s the answer on who’s to blame: You, that’s who. The enabler in all this sports greed gone wild is the fan, a word, let’s remember, that’s derived from fanatic. And fanatics rarely act sensibly. Fanatics allow their zeal to cloud reason.
And the NFL has lots of fans, many who are unhappy in the dysfunctional relationship but stay hitched anyway. Fans just keep going. They keep watching, keep paying. They just keep supporting a league and industry that repeatedly shows that they don’t give a damn about the linchpin of it all. Lip service begets lockouts. And yet, fan loyalty lives. It’s those blindly loyal customers who will make this a lockout without consequence, which is why owners won’t think twice about shutting down the U.S.’s most popular sports league for however long it takes to get everything they want.
Contrary to what a dour NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell will assert in the coming days, weeks and maybe even months, there’s no risk to the owners. They’ll collect their money. Dollars deferred, yes, but they’ll get it. Until fans make autumn Sundays about something other than football, the owners simply cannot lose.
Record Viewership
The biggest source of revenue for teams is television. Seems the NFL sets a record every time an important game is played. Green Bay’s Super Bowl win over Pittsburgh drew the biggest audience in American TV history. Take away the eyeballs and advertisers disappear. Take away commercials and revenue shrinks. Take away revenue and you kill the gargantuan rights fees networks pay to the NFL. See how this works? You, the fan, control everything, except, it seems, your insatiable appetite for football.
David Stern, commissioner of the National Basketball Association, which faces its own labor woes -- yet again -- once told me he wasn’t concerned about the fans that made noise about swearing off the game, staying home and never again watching.
Their emotion, he said, was all the proof he needed that they’d come back. Let’s just say NFL enthusiasts are making a lot of noise.
‘Let Us Play’
Folks like Jillian Ricard, a Miami Dolphins follower who showed up in Washington, where owners and players were negotiating, armed with a T-shirt that read “Block the Lockout - Let Us Play” and a petition with 150,000 names of fans. Ricard carried binders that included a letter to owners, imploring the lords of football to let the games continue.
“We the fans of the NFL demand that you NOT lock out players in 2011,” the letter reads. “The players want to play football and we passionately want to see America’s most popular sport.”
As if owners are supposed to start caring about their customers and their needs and wants now. Owners will prattle about mounting losses. The New York Jets didn’t even wait for a lockout to begin before letting it be known that assistant coaches face a 25 percent pay cut.
Back for More
Goodell proved a deft grandstander, too, telling the world he’d work for $1 should there be a work stoppage. As if owners won’t shower their mouthpiece with tens of millions once he gets them what they want.
No matter how poorly fans are treated they come back for more.
Does anyone believe that a lockout would end Ricard’s relationship with the Dolphins or the NFL? Of course not.
You know those disclaimers that fund managers have to include in their literature, the one about past performance being no indicator of future success.
It’s the opposite in sports. Fan behavior after previous lockouts, in all sports, is the best indicator of what’ll happen this time. Owners are counting on it when they consider that lost ticket sales, which are about 25 percent of revenue, pose the greatest risk to NFL teams.
History shows that fans flocked to stadiums after previous work stoppages.
“Attendance rebounded fairly quickly after a strike/lockout and reached or surpassed previous levels within two to five years,” Standard & Poor’s analyst Jodi Hecht wrote in a report.
There’s going to be a lot of finger-pointing before this is resolved. Reserve yours for the mirror, where blame, like objects, is often closer than it appears.
Scott Soshnick is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
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Apart from the cynical but rather true point that people/consumers are just idiots who deserve to be exploited, robbed and otherwise fucked, what I like about management-labour dispute in environment like banks, the NFL or Hollywood is that these areas, where 'super-star economics' prevails, are the last places where "labour" has retain some degree of power and can strike back at the management/capital owners.
Elsewhere, globalisation made sure that labour was commoditised and its price crushed. There, these guys and gals do do something/have something that cannot be easily replicated. Hence they have pricing power.
And thus, they're the last true communists... Ironic, innit?
Like Banking, the NFL is a metaphor for Class struggle...
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