Owners have enough cash to sit out 2011, even after court ruling.

[Beef]

(03-17-2011 02:44 AM)cooperbh Wrote:  For those who keep regurgitating the above tripe, please write down the following and underline it:

NFL football players are not employees. They are contract workers.

As a former contract worker in the music business, I can assure you that if an owner of a venue that I was contracted to regularly perform in told me one day that he needed to start taking a larger cut of the door to cover "expenses," I'd damn well insist on knowing exactly what those costs were before I would even consider renegotiating my contract and taking that pay cut. Especially if my act was the largest draw in town and solely responsible for bringing in the vast majority of his customers.

Think it would it sway me one bit if this owner painted some sob story about how he needed that extra cash to build a brand new venue because he could make so much more money owning his own building than leasing the current one, and that eventually a slice of that money would trickle its way down to me? Would it sway anyone with a brain?

I definitely see your point, but there's still big differences between your story & the NFL one.

The owners have other reasons for not opening the books. If you think players & agents asking for big contracts is out of hand now, wait until they know how much is really available. And how bad will owner dissention get between small markets vs. big markets once they know each other's bottom lines? And how about when one of these owners wants to sell his team? Have you ever heard of negotiating power & leverage? They'll have NONE if their books are open.

And to show a contradiction to the "contract employee" argument... I've had construction contractors work on my house, finishing my basement & doing landscaping work. I didn't tell them how much money I had. If I did, I would have had no leverage & they would have asked for more. Actually, they would have demanded the limit I could pay, every single one of them & I would have had no leg to stand on to argue with.

Contractors do a job for a fee. A pre-negotiated fee that's mutually acceptable. "Negotiated" being the key word. The only reason for a Contractor to want to know the Contractee's worth is so they can take away leverage & ask for the limits, period.

The players obviously have a "number" that will certainly sustain them & take care of every need they could possibly dream of. But instead of finding out that number & asking for it, they're asking for more. They want to know what the max is that the owners can do without & that's what they want. They want to sit here & tell the owners they're making too much money & need to share more because that's "fair".

The owners have every right to lose money or make ridiculous & enormous returns on their investment. It's the whole concept of free market capitalism, which has 2 sides as well. This whole debacle reeks of the age-old battle between Conservative vs. Liberal, Republican vs. Democrat, or free market vs. Keynesian. And obviously you can see which side i'm on. As a business owner myself, I think it's BS if someone is telling me I make too much money so I need to spread the wealth around. Fuck that noise.