FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The NFL just drew 57 million viewers for one game in 2010.
And there stood NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on Friday at Super Bowl XLIV, spending much of his annual press conference addressing the possibility of a work stoppage in 2011.
Why is it the more money a business makes, the more bickering there is about how to share it?
The public doesn’t seem to care about any future work stoppage, not with the huge audience that tuned in to the NFC championship game two weeks ago between Brett Favre’s Minnesota Vikings and the Hurricane Katrina-surviving New Orleans Saints.
Concerns within the NFL industry, though, heightened Thursday when NFL Players Association boss DeMaurice Smith said the likelihood of a 2011 work stoppage was 14 on a scale of 1 to 10.
“I sure hope he’s wrong, and I sure hope it doesn’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Goodell said.
The owners don’t like the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) they approved by a 30-2 vote just four years ago. They want to renegotiate the CBA so that it reduces the players’ revenue share of nearly 60 percent.
“There are things we agreed to that we shouldn’t have,” Goodell said. “We need to go back and get that fixed.”
Goodell added that of the $3.6 billion in new revenues the league has generated since March 2006, the players have received $2.6 billion. He added that the owners are $200 million worse off now than they were four years ago.
The players believe the owners have long prepared for a work stoppage by arranging to collect their billions of rights fees from their network partners even if the game does shut down.
Goodell denied that ownership is strategizing to break down the union through a protracted work stoppage.
“You don’t make money by shutting down your business,” Goodell said.
Mike Klis: 303-954-1055 or mklis@denverpost.com
