Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…And I think the thing that keeps the competitive balance in place, even as revenue diverges is the salary cap. Yeah, this is a great place to talk about that. Let's go to 1993 and talk about the first time free agency and the salary cap comes into the NFL, how that's computed and how that impacts the sort of leverage going forward. The league has been negotiating with the Players Association for a while, I think since the sixties in various collective bargaining agreements. But the 1993 one is unique. The NFL didn't really have free agency for a while. And in 1993, players finally got it, at least as long as a player had been in the league for four years. In exchange, there was a salary cap put in, capped at some fixed percentage of the amount of revenue that the league generates. That today is actually a pretty high number. It's 48.8% or something like that. Players are effectively a partner in the league because the league's success ends up being their success, not necessarily evenly distributed among all players by any means, in fact, quite the opposite. But at least players are virtually guaranteed in whole to make close to half of the league's overall revenue. But how does that work with local and national revenue? Well, since it is based on the total revenue, if a team makes a whole bunch of local revenue, they're going to have no problem making the obligation that they have to pay the players. And you're saying that that fixed amount is a league-wide aggregate, including all the local revenue from all of the teams.…

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