An additional $50 million or so will be available for teams to spend. The formula for the player’s side of the money means approximately $50 million gets added into the overall player-side revenue, thus raising the cap around $1.5 million, give or take.
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The NFL owes its players some money.
The bump in cap space for your favorite franchise is likely welcome news, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is another example of the National Football League operating under pretty sketchy circumstances at the expense of its own players.
But the owners made a decision to category roughly $120 million of revenue under a “waived gate” class, and unilaterally decided that they didn’t have to share that with the players.
There are certain portions of the collective bargaining agreement – the latest version of which was agreed to in 2011, ending a four-month lockout – in which teams can exclude portions of revenue from the shared pool. The NFL Players Association, which discovered the discrepancy during an ongoing audit of league finances, filed a grievance on the matter in January. Players, however, are supposed to receive 40 percent of local revenues (which mainly consist of tickets sales), 45 percent of sponsorship deals and 55 percent of media revenues.
“People have become accustomed to how we protect our rights when it comes to player discipline”, NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith told The Wall Street Journal.
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The NFL issued a statement to the Wall Street Journal describing the incident as a “technical accounting issue under the CBA involving the funding of stadium construction and renovation projects”. Even if the NFLPA distributed the $120 million evenly to every player in the league, that would only be about $70,000 a piece. “We are equally diligent when it comes to getting our share of revenues”.
