Posted by Sabrina B. @gametimegirl – i will be devastated if there’s no football next year! They better work that ish out!
The NFLPA speculates that an NFL lockout, should games be sacrificed next season, could lead to an average lost revenue of $20 million per game that is not played.
An independent commission collected publicly available data for the union, numbers that were used to project stadium revenue with 10 different teams over the past decade, to come up with the figure.
The revenue lost would not just be player salaries, either. According to Jesse David of Edgeworth Economics, the independent firm that was commissioned to compile the data, about 30 to 50 percent of those dollars would come from player salaries. The remainder would come not only from the team’s employees, David said, but also from the local economy derived from fans attending games.
David said the numbers show the range of lost money on a per-game basis would be between $12 million and $40 million, depending on the NFL city, and their 10 case studies included numbers from cities with new stadium facilities, such as Indianapolis, Dallas and Houston. The firm speculates that as many as 3,000 jobs could be lost, even temporarily, with a lockout.
“We’re talking about salaries paid to anybody who is associated with the game, including players and the folks who work at the stadium, the folks in the front office, and all of the associated businesses that earn money when a game goes on, such as local hotels, restaurants and the like,” David said.
Predictably, the NFL has disputed the union’s numbers. They say it doesn’t paint a complete picture of what NFL teams’ ledgers say, as those numbers are not readily available except in the case of the publicly held Packers.
In response to NFLPA union head DeMaurice Smith’s recent statement that, based on these studies, an owners lockout could lead to as much of a loss as $5 billion to the Amercian economy, NFL spokesman Greg Aiello told Bloomberg that the union’s figures should be disregarded because they were not derived from a noted economist, investment bank or government agency.
“It is a series of numbers pulled from thin air in a misguided attempt to inject politics into the collective-bargaining process,” Aiello said in an e-mail. “There is a fair deal to be done and soon if the union will bargain with the same fervor it displays in creating economic fairy tales.”
The union pieced together the aggregate numbers from studies that were conducted by cities, teams, development agencies and other economic sources. Most of the information gathered came from reports of new stadium or proposed renovations in order to seek public funding, so it’s clear that most of the numbers are based on projections more than hard figures.
To date, NFL teams have refused to “open their books,” as Smith is fond of saying, in order to show the losses they are claiming as the reason they chose to opt out of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement. It’s a key sticking point for the union in their desire to find out exactly how much teams are in the red in order to get a new deal done.
The union has tried numerous approaches to gain public sentiment in their battle against the owners for a new CBA. This latest approach clearly shows their desire to paint a picture of just exactly what a long-term lockout would mean — not just to rich players and rich owners, but also to the thousands of citizens and football fans in each NFL city.
“Given the economic conditions we see today and (that are) projected over the next year or two, with unemployment at nine percent or higher, I think it would be unlikely to expect any mitigation in the economy,” David said.
Eric Edholm, ProFootballWeekly.com
