Lagartixa
Well-known member
So maybe the escalating price is the "fans" fault (Is this what you are implying by saying; "mixed up cause and effect"?) Conversely, maybe it is the "owners" fault. That is completely irrelevant to my referenced post. What is relevant is that a washed up ME3 can command a quarter billion-dollar contract. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't I say; "the collective NFL fan, is paying for Russell Wilson's inexplicable salary". Please inform me what is "mixed up" about that statement. Please explain how that is different from what you have just said and while you are at it, please explain the two opposing variants of "cause and effect". Elaborate the "mix-up", the "cause", and the "effect". Are you saying that the NFL is not passing these costs along to the consumer. That, instead, it is the consumer passing these inflated costs to the consumer? Is that what you are saying?
You presume the NFL is not greedy, but instead it is the adoring consumers that are bringing this upon themselves. OK. I'll buy into that. It only reinforces the fact that the league is on a perilous path. They owners can't even control their own prices. Those damned fans keep driving the ticket prices up and the owners are helpless to do anything about it. Regardless, that lack of control is not a good indicator with respect to long term economic health.
It's not a matter of somebody being at fault, and I certainly don't "blame" consumers. I also most certainly don't presume the NFL is not greedy. I'm just stating the facts about the economics of the markets in which the NFL participates.
The NFL and the various other companies that make money from NFL-related business or use advertising attached to NFL-related entertainment to attempt to attract revenue for their non-NFL-related businesses will charge as much as they possibly can for everything.
The NFL will charge as much as possible for its broadcast rights. Streaming platforms and radio and TV stations and networks will charge as much as possible for advertising on NFL games and other NFL-related programming. The teams and stadiums will charge as much as they can for tickets. Companies that sell NFL-related merchandise will charge as much as they can for it.
What decides how much they can charge is how much people are willing to pay. If they raise prices too high for the market, the loss in demand will outpace the per-unit gain from the last price increase, and their revenue, margin, and profit will fall.
What doesn't decide how much those things cost? Player salaries. Player salaries are a consequence of the current state of the market. The NFL and all the related businesses have raised prices to the current point, and they've found that their profits have been increasing. Further, as time has gone on, they've gotten better and better data and ways to analyze those data, so now there's quite a bit of science behind the pricing of all these things. They're not just taking a shot in the dark and seeing what they hit with price increases. They almost certainly have detailed probabilistic projections (that is, they're predicting a whole probability distribution over possible results, not just a point "most-likely" projection) of how much a given price increase will affect demand. And you can bet that they'll go with the result that maximizes profit. Different companies will prioritize different time windows over which profits would be maximized, but every one of them is trying to maximize profit over some time window.
With all this money moving around, it's NFL revenue that decides player salaries. The CBA specifies how much goes to player salaries. That's what I mean when I say you mixed up cause and effect. 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.
That's just not how it works. NFL teams and other NFL-related businesses don't raise prices to keep up with growing player salaries. NFL player salaries are determined by NFL revenues, as specified in the CBA.