After the NFL suffered the biggest courtroom loss in the history of American sports, PFT asked the NFL whether the potential $14.1 billion loss would impact the salary cap.
Here was the question: “I have people asking me if this will affect [the] salary cap. My understanding is that the verdict won’t but potential changes to Sunday Ticket resulting from the verdict could. Is that accurate?”
Here was the answer, from a league spokesperson: “Right. Salary cap is based on revenue. It’s premature at this point to know if there will need to be changes.”
That might have changed.
Via Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal, some owners wonder whether a portion of the verdict can be foisted onto the players.
The argument is simple. The NFL and the NFL Players Association roughly share all revenues on a 50-50 basis. The money from DirecTV for Sunday Ticket and from CBS and Fox for games televised on “free” TV went to the owners and to the players. If the league has to pay back money it has already received from the networks, why shouldn’t the players pay back some of the money they received, too?
The NFLPA was previously made aware of the possibility. It’s unclear whether the union is taking it seriously. I’ve scoured the current CBA for any language that would justify clawing back revenues already earned and distributed to the players, via the cap. I don’t see anything.
Given that the current CBA was negotiated in 2020, five years after the current antitrust litigation was filed, the league could have tried to sneak language into the deal that would support an effort to take back money from the union if the case went south.
Of course, the absence of contractual language doesn’t stop the owners from trying to make the players share in the responsibility for the league’s antitrust violation. On one hand, the players benefited from it. On the other hand, they’re not the ones who did it.
Why should the players be responsible for a business strategy gone wrong that they didn’t devise? Why should they have to suffer the brunt of a worst-case scenario that the owners created by rolling the dice, for 30 years, on the possibility that pricing Sunday Ticket in a way that drove fans to watch the games available in their local markets would blow up in their faces?
Maybe the players would have recognized the potential antitrust violation, and would have argued for a different approach. Maybe the players would have refused to allow the NFL to insist on Sunday Ticket being a “premium” offering that gouged the most avid fans if they had a voice in how the double-dipping was done.
Again, it doesn’t stop the owners from trying to spread the pain to anyone but themselves. They didn’t get that rich by being stupid. If every one of them is potentially going to have to come up with $440 million, they’re smart enough to try to find someone else to foot the bill.