The incredible money of NFL football

Excerpts from an article in the Wall Street Journal:

But the highest-stakes action isn't taking place on the gridiron. It's out of sight, in boardrooms and over telephones, as Mr. Goodell and league owners are trying to get the players union to agree to a new collective-bargaining agreement. Negotiations have gone on for two years and if they're not settled by March 3, the NFL will suffer a work stoppage. The roughly $9 billion-a-year enterprise, in other words, might take next season off...

Another impediment to growth, the commissioner says, is that the 2006 deal failed to address the exorbitant compensation of rookies... In an open letter to fans this week, Mr. Goodell cited a recently published list of the 50 highest-paid American athletes. Five were NFL rookies. "Every other athlete on the list was a proven veteran," he lamented. He also noted that "in 2009, NFL clubs contracted $1.2 billion to 256 drafted rookies with $585 million guaranteed before they had stepped on an NFL field."

The NFL is a commercial juggernaut. Its annual revenue, at just under $9 billion, tops that of Major League Baseball ($7 billion), the National Basketball Association ($4 billion) and the National Hockey League (less than $3 billion).

When Forbes magazine recently ranked the world's 50 most valuable sports franchises, all 32 NFL teams made the list... The least valuable NFL franchise was the Oakland Raiders, which still beat out baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs, and basketball's New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers... NFL games accounted for the four most-watched TV programs of 2010, and 17 of the top 25. They also accounted for every one of the 15 most-watched cable TV programs...

That brings us to the NFL's peculiar challenge today: selling hope to its own players. Namely, owners have to convince players that accepting a pay cut immediately—of 18%, according to the union's calculations, or 9% according to the owners'—will make them better off in the long term.

The owners argue that the league will stagnate unless they get more cash to invest in it—which, in turn, will cause the players' 60% share of revenue to stagnate. Alternatively, if owners can invest more in the league, they can grow it so that players ultimately get, say, 55% of a considerably larger pie...

Still, the union doesn't seem to be buying what the league is selling. Little has changed since last year, when union chief DeMaurice Smith said that, on a scale of one to 10, the chances of a work stoppage are a 14...

The players can't take a cut in an average salary of over $1 million per year? The owners need a larger "pie" to divide among everyone?  Neither group gets any sympathy from me.