The arguments that unfold in the podcast are both very blunt and very nuanced. The blunt part: the owners argue that the players got too good of a deal last time around, and with costs rising, they need to get some money back. Here’s Murphy from the Packers:
Murphy: [A] couple things have changed that have impacted the current agreement. I think the biggest thing is stadium financing. It used to be that municipalities, and cities, and communities would pay for the building of stadiums. And you go way back and, you know, they were combination baseball-football stadiums that cities would build. Now, there are football-only stadiums, and they’re being built by the individual owners. So that’s a big expense that, you know, we didn’t have in 1993 when the agreement was, our system was agreed to. …
You know, the current agreement started in 2006 — and I don’t want to get into too many of the details, it will just bore everybody to death — but just from a broad perspective, our player costs have grown at eleven percent from — well, since 2006, while our total revenue has grown at an annual rate of about 5.5 percent, so just about twice the rate of the growth in player costs relative to revenue. It’s obviously not a healthy situation, it’s not sustainable.
