The Gantt Report
I’m tired of listening to my friends debate about the National Football League’s labor dispute.
Whenever million dollar professional athletes bicker with billion dollar team owners the outcome is always the same, only the fans lose!
I can walk pretty well. Work on the treadmill has been very, very good to me. But I couldn’t run away if a tsunami was chasing me off an island beach.
However, on the other hand, if someone paid me $100 million dollars to run a football I’d be like Jim Brown and Gayle Sayers all rolled into one.
I’d be happy to take a professional sports team if any owner doesn’t want to own a team any more.
Truth is pro football players don’t want to stop playing football and team owners do not want to stop their team ownership.
In the current dispute both sides want more money and guess what? They both are going to get it!
How? Get ready for increased ticket prices, increased concession prices, increased parking prices, increased advertising prices, increased licensing fees, increased jersey and paraphernalia prices and so on, will fund the extra money players want.
Most of us look at professional football as a game, but it is not so much a sports game. It is a money game. If players are so sorry that they lose ten or fifteen games in a season and miss the Super Bowl, they will still get paid what millions they are owed. If owners make bad trades, sign poor performing players and coaches and have off-field crime and other issues to deal with, owners will still make billions of dollars.
The minimum wage to stand on the sidelines and hold a clipboard (if you are a third string quarterback) is way more than $8 an hour. It may be closer to $8 million a year.
Everybody makes money in professional sports towns. Money is why governments tax the people and tax businesses to finance constructions of huge luxury stadiums that will be obsolete in a very short time period. No matter, the new stadiums will have new skyboxes that can be leased for millions of dollars more. While we’re at it, let’s have some concerts and a big prize fights in the football stadium that tax payers financed and make the football team owners more millions.
Now, as a businessman, I would never listen to my employee’s demands that all business revenue should be split with them. The employees invested zero time and money in putting the business together and have zero liability if something unpredictable occurs.
When gasoline prices increase, people drive less. If pro football players and team owners roll the dice and make fans pay for their greed with increased ticket prices, perhaps fewer fans will buy season tickets and attend a game to see who can win the greed contest!
