WSJ: NFL Withheld $120M From Players

Dr. Gonzo

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/nfl-withheld-millions-from-players-1456189111

Integrity, blah, blah

The National Football League has been ordered to return what its union calculates is more than $100 million to the pool of revenue that it shares with its players.

The ruling, handed down last week by arbitrator Stephen Burbank, found that the NFL owners had mischaracterized what Players Association officials say is roughly $120 million of ticket revenue during the past three years by creating an exemption that had the effect of keeping about $50 million in salary out of players’ pockets. The NFL Players Association, which discovered the discrepancy during an ongoing audit of league finances, filed a grievance on the matter in January.
 

Granite Sox

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Another log on the fire...

Mr. CBA with another "miscalculation".

Now that Blatter/Platini have been pushed aside, there may be no more corrupt leader in organized sports.
 

AB in DC

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The owners can't be very happy about this. Will Goodell find a fall guy to pin this on? I would bet that Kraft will try to get Jeff Pash fired -- and if Pash's fingerprints are on this, he may very well succeed.
 

Slow Rheal

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Yeah, this has got some serious legs, and the PA is going to hammer it. This has got to be a direct violation of the CBA, right?
 

Joe D Reid

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On mobile so having a hard time linking, but Deadspin is saying this will cause the salary cap to go up by $1.5M next year.
 

JohnnyTheBone

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Goodell's bloated annual salary based on a percentage of overall profits? If that number was artificially inflated, then he has collected more money than he was entitled to. The thought of him writing a sizable check to the union makes me giddy.
 

OCST

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Getting harder and harder to follow this sport. What a bunch of fucking scumbags.

It's been argued (by me and others) that football will go the way of boxing. The counter-argument is something like - it wasn't the brutality and maiming that turned people off of boxing, it was the corruption and inanity of the sport's governance.

Well - football looks like it's 2 for 2 on the "just like boxing" scorecard.
 

mauf

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Getting harder and harder to follow this sport. What a bunch of fucking scumbags.

It's been argued (by me and others) that football will go the way of boxing. The counter-argument is something like - it wasn't the brutality and maiming that turned people off of boxing, it was the corruption and inanity of the sport's governance.

Well - football looks like it's 2 for 2 on the "just like boxing" scorecard.
Let's not get crazy. $120mm over a 3-year period represents something like 1% of the players' share of league revenue over that period. That doesn't mean it's OK, but it does mean that comparisons to Don King are more than a little overblown.
 

OCST

Sunny von Bulow
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Let's not get crazy. $120mm over a 3-year period represents something like 1% of the players' share of league revenue over that period. That doesn't mean it's OK, but it does mean that comparisons to Don King are more than a little overblown.
I see your point, but I'm not inclined to agree. I don't have all the facts, and if it turns out that this money wasn't legitimately owed, or even if there's a good-faith dispute as to whether it's owed, that's different. If it's a straight up ripoff, then the fact that it's only $120mm doesn't make me feel any better.

Remember, this is the same league that cries poverty in other contexts. $120 mil would buy an awful lot of sideline cams.
 

garzooma

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Mar 4, 2011
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Florio has a couple of postings on this. The first is more or less a rehash of the WSJ article. The second is a good deal more biting. NFL teams "unilaterally began to remove amounts from general admission tickets sales, dubbing the amounts “Incremental Gate VTS” (whatever that means)." Note that according to the WSJ article, the categories teams were allowed to waive, "personal seat licenses, premium seating, and from mega-deals with corporations to put their names on stadiums", were quite clear. So it's hard to see how the teams could just mistakenly think they could exclude money from general admission. Nonetheless, apparently the NFL tried to hold on to the money, since the arbitrator "decided that the NFL will be required to rectify the situation for the 2013, 2014, and 2015 league years, rejecting arguments from the NFL based on the notion that the NFLPA waited too long to make the claim or otherwise waived it."[italics added]

As to why the NFL would pull such a stunt:
Because the CBA contains no provision that would penalize the league for getting caught pulling a fast one (whether it was nefarious or not), there’s no clear incentive for the league to not use fuzzy accounting. If the union catches it, the league pays what it already would have paid. If the union doesn’t catch it, the league gets free money.

 

Harry Hooper

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Stuff like this and charging fees for the salutes to vets, the NFL's greed knows no limits.
 
Dec 21, 2015
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Stuff like this and charging fees for the salutes to vets, the NFL's greed knows no limits.
Call me when the NFL insists that the USA change its laws to prevent any mention of the word "football" that it doesn't approve of, any image of a shield or an oblate spheroid, and prevents the wearing by spectators of products that compete with NFL sponsors - and if the USA doesn't comply, the NFL insists it will cease playing games in this country.
 

Koufax

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While it doesn't compare with the other transgressions, asking Katie Perry to pay to perform at half-time of the Superbowl has to go on the list of examples of over-the-top greed.
 

Tyrone Biggums

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There's only one way for Roger to cover up this latest transgression. Fine Patriots another 1st rounder and 1 million dollars. Media and fans will eat it up. Forget about stealing money.
 

wutang112878

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The NFL is really just dense and stupid. ~$1.25M a year per team is really a small sliver of money in the grand scheme of things especially when you consider the new TV deals.

Meanwhile, you are risking:
  • The relations with your fans who have every reason to think you are scum of the earth at this point
  • The attention of the federal government or IRS when its evident that you cant be trusted
  • The relationship you have with your players and giving them motivation to really band together so they could really put up a good fight in the next round of CBA talks
Eventually one straw will break the camel's back on one of these issues and eventually its going to cause you to lose viewers its inevitable. So it really amazes me that they are so dense that they dont realize they shouldnt screw up the good thing they have going.
 

Jed Zeppelin

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So it really amazes me that they are so dense that they dont realize they shouldnt screw up the good thing they have going.
I think the problem here is that money, rather than football, is what the league sees as the good thing they have going.
 

wutang112878

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I think the problem here is that money, rather than football, is what the league sees as the good thing they have going.
I realize that, its just some people are actually intelligent enough to realize that maximizing every dollar of profit today isnt necessarily the behavior that maximizes your profit in the long run.