Last Sunday, the National Football League’s Green Bay Packers celebrated their fourth Super Bowl victory in franchise history, defeating the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25. Yet now that the Super Bowl media circus has subsided, and Packers quarterback and game MVP Aaron Rodgers has taken his obligatory march in a Disney World parade, a labor dispute between the league’s team owners and the NFL Players Association is receiving greater visibility. The NFL’s collective bargaining agreement is set to expire on March 3. The owners opted out of the current agreement two years early, arguing that the players’ cut of the profits is too large (59.5 percent after a $1 billion credit is given to the owners). The owners are also pushing to extend the regular season by two games, to 18. But unless a deal gets done soon, the NFLPA expects the owners to impose a lockout, thus suspending next season indefinitely. In fact, the NFL owners‘ attempt to squeeze more profits from players is emblematic of what is happening to workers across the country, most of whom do not have anywhere near the amount of bargaining power as the NFLPA. As CAP’s David Madland and Nick Bunker wrote, “These negotiations are important not just to NFL fans but to all Americans because they show that collective bargaining — the process where unionized workers and management negotiate wages, benefits, and working conditions — can create significant benefits for both workers and owners.”

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING WORKS: Despite the owners’ complaints, teams and players have both prospered under the current agreement. The median player salary in 2009 stood at nearly $800,000 per year, an increase of 9.4 percent since 2006. While NFL teams are reluctant to open their financial books to the public, according to Forbes Magazine, the average NFL franchise is worth just over $1 billion (although these figures have been disputed). If true, an NFL franchise’s value has increased 16.2 percent, which Madland and Bunker point out is “a growth rate that is faster than the median player salary increase.” Anti-trust exemptions have also benefited the NFL’s owners, allowing them to maximize profits from marketing. As Time Magazine notes, “Public indicators of the game’s overall health are overwhelmingly positive. The sport is setting ratings records every week, revenues are strong, and ESPN is reportedly close to agreeing to increase the fee it pays the NFL to telecast Monday Night Football to around $2 billion annually, an increase of at least 65%.” In a statement, a representative for the NFL told The Progress Report that “the teams agree wholeheartedly that collective bargaining is critical, which is why they are committed to negotiating as much and as often as possible to get a deal that works for all sides. Each side bears responsibility for working as hard as they can to get a deal and avoid a work stoppage.

SO WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?: “What happens in these disputes is that economic issues are presented as moral issues — good versus evil,” said Fay Vincent, a former commissioner of Major League Baseball who presided over the sport’s 1990 lockout. “But it’s hard to look at these circumstances and not see a case of owners’ wanting their cake and eating it, too.” Why should progressives care about wealthy NFL players? “Liberals should care and side with labor, even if some of the players do make a lot of money,” progressive blogger and economist Duncan Black wrote this week, adding, “This is about how the pie gets split, and that matters even if it is a really big pie.” Indeed, it does matter. High-profile NFL players are privileged multi-millionaires, but this is not the case for most players in the league, many of whom make the league minimum $300,000 and only stay in the league for just under four years on average before retiring. The wear and tear on the player’s body in an increasingly violent sport often leads to early retirement. A recent independent study found that, as Esquire reported, “Not only are pro-football injuries and concussions at a nine-year high, but brain-related injuries are the most common specified type of injury in NFL games.” And the New Yorker noted last week that retired NFL players “are five to nineteen times as likely as the general population to have received a dementia-related diagnosis” due to brain injuries. Steelers star receiver Hines Ward said of the NFL, “They don’t give a fuck about concussions. And now they want to add on two extra games? Are you kidding? Come on, let’s be real.” Citing health issues, Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita said adding two games to the regular season “is completely unacceptable.” It “feels like a slap in the face,” he said.

WHAT ABOUT THE FANS?: NFL football has grown to be America’s most popular and most lucrative sport, thus, the party in the dispute most often ignored is the fans. The New York Times reports that “[c]urrently, 10 N.F.L. stadiums are 100 percent publicly financed and 19 are at least 75 percent publicly financed.” As Brian Frederick, executive director of the pro-fan lobby group Sports Fans Coalition, wrote this week, “Taxpayers (most of whom are NFL fans) have spent over $6.5 billion subsidizing NFL stadiums around the country, with nearly $4.5 billion of that coming in just the last 10 years” — a fact that has increased profits for both players and owners. “These stadium subsidies are important because they are what give the fans leverage and why this all matters in the political realm,” said Frederick, who is promoting a petition to “Save Next Season.” And while cities with NFL franchises stand to lose money if a lockout were to take effect, there is no doubt that thousands of those working in and around the stadiums will be out of a job and many local economies will suffer as a result. As Philadelphia Eagles lineman Winston Justice noted, “It will hurt local business owners, employees at restaurants, hotels, and all of the great people who work at Lincoln Financial Field [in Philadelphia], on game day, just to name a few.”