Greed is a hell of a drug.
Yes it is.
No. Not in the least bit debatable. The market supports the current prices for merchandise, football-viewing subscriptions, and tickets, and it supports the current rates that advertisers pay football-carrying broadcast networks, so it supports the giant contracts the broadcast networks are paying the league. So the money is there, and it would be stupid to ask corporations to lower the prices below what they can charge, because that's not how our economic system works. Now, given that the NFL is taking in all those billions, I want as much as possible of that money going to the people who actually make the sport worth watching. An NFL player is in the top 2000 people in the world at what he does without even considering position specialization. When you include position specialization, an NFL player is in the top 128 or so in the world at what he does. The current world population is about 8.06 billion, of which we can eliminate half by gender and let's say 3/4 by age, leaving an effective population of just over a billion. That places
any NFL player, even a Seahawks backup interior offensive lineman, in the top 0.000013% in the world at what he does, that is, in the top 13% of the top 1% of the top 1% in the world at what he does. And that's in an industry that generates many billions of dollars. To the extent there's anything wrong with the players' compensation, it's that it's very strongly artificially
deflated by the ridiculous salary cap, which is just a way for the greedy-ass owners to artificially keep the players from getting their fair market value (that is, to steal from the players).
What does an owner bring to the NFL? Money and only money. And money
by definition is fungible, so the owners are fungible, but the players are absolutely not. Change the owners, and the game stays the same. Replace the players with the next tier, and the game doesn't get close to being as good. If I wanted to watch shitty football, there are internet broadcasts of high-school football on Friday nights and many options for watching "college football," the nicer name for the NFL's minor leagues. I'm not interested. But I'm happy to pay my under-$100 annual subscription to the international edition of NFL Game Pass. What's the difference? NFL games give me opportunities to see human beings exploring the limits of the application of athletic ability to gridiron-related skills. The CFL, the NFL's minor leagues, and high-school football don't offer that.





YESSSSSSSS!
Your route took a little detour into some owner-friendly-media-based nonsense about whether the players are overcompensated, but you ended up at exactly the right destination.