Agree to disagree.
You cannot convince me that the player salary structure is not passed to the consumer, whether directly or indirectly.
Then you haven't understood the economics of the NFL. The CBA specifies the salary cap in terms of revenues. That is, total salaries are a function of revenues.
You want the salaries to be driving price increases, possibly because you once heard a mediot blaming rising prices on salaries, but the way it actually works is the exact opposite of that. Price increases drive revenue changes (and as I said in the previous comment, teams and other companies that make money from NFL-related business are using some pretty sophisticated methods to predict the results of price changes on demand, so they have a pretty good idea of how much a given price increase will affect demand in the short-term future. That means that increasing prices are a sign that the companies involved have determined that demand is likely to increase, stay about the same, or decrease sufficiently little that even with the decrease in demand, revenue and profit will still increase.
But again, the CBA specifies the salary cap as a function of revenue, which is the exact opposite of how you want to believe it works.
That twenty bucks per game that folks are paying to YouTube for season ticket is most definitely subsidizing escalating player salaries. You would have a much better argument a couple of decades ago, but the threshold was crossed when folks were forced to become cable subscribers to get games. Now they are forced into becoming streaming subscribers for specific channels as well.
It's true that salaries rise with increasing revenues, and it's true that the companies involved are smart enough not to raise prices so much that overall revenue and profit are likely to decline, but the causality goes the opposite way from how you want it to work.
Prices influence demand. Demand and prices together determine revenues. As detailed in the CBA, the salary cap is determined as a percentage of revenues. There is no causality in the reverse direction.
This isn't a matter of the NFL negotiating with networks for advertiser dependent/free-radio-wave broadcasts anymore. This has evolved into DIRECTLY CHARGING consumers for access to games. The genie is out of the bottle. Pay per view similar to watching a heavyweight boxing match.
OK, but again, price increases modify demand, and then demand and price together determine revenue. The salary cap is a function of revenue, which is a function of prices, so salaries depend on the prices of things, not vice-versa.
You're entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.
The fact that companies have raised prices, and that this is very likely to lead to increases in the salary cap, means that increasing prices are driving increasing salaries, and not the opposite.
Further, I want you to go back and read my posts and find a specific example where I said that player salaries dictated the market.
That's not what I said you had said. I said you had said...
You pay for it in a systemic way because through broadcast and streaming rights, through ticket prices, the NFL is passing along all of these escalating salary structures to its consumer.
And then I said that that's the opposite of how it actually works. I then explained how rising prices drive the rising salary cap, and not vice-versa.
I'm not disagreeing with you saying that the NFL is getting too expensive to follow for some people. That's true. But those price increases are happening because the companies involved believe they'll increase their profits even if gridiron football gets to be too expensive for working-class people to follow. The players and their salaries are not responsible for this. Exactly the opposite, in fact. The increases in player salaries are the result of increasing revenues and the fact that, as described in the CBA, the salary cap is calculated as a function of revenue.
I said that escalating costs are subsidizing player salary structures. Consumers are systemically being billed for escalating player salaries. That statement is true.
No it isn't. The salary cap depends on revenue, and revenue depends on price, both indirectly through demand being a function of price and directly through revenue being a function of price and demand. So price changes drive changes in the salary cap, and not vice-versa.
That statement is absolutely true. Where, exactly, do you think player income is coming from? Just TV commercials? Think of it like this. Would the ownership of a given team pay any player a quarter billion dollars of their own personal money? Of course not. They are going to pay them with consumer money and advertiser money.
Yes. And the amount of that money that they pay to players is fixed by the CBA. Prices determine revenues, and then, as spelled out in Article 12 of the 2020 CBA (and corresponding sections of previous CBAs), the salary cap is a function of revenue. So prices affect revenues, and then revenues affect salaries. Salaries rise because prices increased, the price increases were not big enough for the loss of demand to outstrip the increase in prices, so the pool of money available for player salaries got bigger.
That is why they don't bat an eye to pay ME3 a quarter billion dollars. Because it isn't their money. It is the advertiser's money, and it is YOUR money.
Yes. It is. But the amount they can pay the players depends on prices. Prices for the different things that contribute to NFL revenue are not set as a function of salaries. The salary cap is set as a function of revenue.
