Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti hopeful about labour deal
There is a whole lot of confusion and very little clarity on the subject of the labour dispute between the National Football League (NFL) and the players union (NFLPA). The two sides have disclosed little to no information regarding the progress or subject
of the negotiations except to say that they are not going well.
Unless the players union and the league can sign a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) by 4 March, NFL owners have threatened to lockout the union. No formal bargaining session has been held since November, but somehow the owner of the Baltimore Ravens
is optimistic.
“I just have to have hope that a bunch of smart people on both sides of this argument are going to get it done,” Bisciotti said Thursday. “I still believe that we're going to have a full season next year.” Bisciotti said that the underlying reason for the
dispute was that the revenue sharing arrangement that the two sides had come to in the current CBA was not working out for the owners.
Bisciotti said, with a surprisingly straight face, that the owners were putting in more money than they were getting back from the NFL. He admitted that revenues had been rising but so were their expenses.
“Everybody keeps talking about the health of the league because they keep seeing revenues go up. They don't know that expenses are rising at a higher rate than those revenues,” Bisciotti said. “If you were a public company, your stock would be going backward.
That's what we're trying to protect against.”
The owners take a percentage of the total revenue off the top and spilt the rest about 60-40. The players get around 60 percent of that revenue. However, the League wants to take a greater share off the top before the revenue is split.
The Players union isn’t ready to accept that the owners are struggling to make profits and insists that if they want players to take a pay cut, they must open up their finances to the players union for review.
However, the owners aren’t willing to let the union inspect their financial records. The league said that the money taken off the top would be used to cover expenses, and invested back into the NFL to create more opportunities to generate money. The league
insists that if the players union agrees to a new revenue sharing arrangement, the overall revenue would increase and the players won’t actually suffer a pay cut. The union though, is sceptical.
Despite the difficulty of the task at hand, Bisciotti is certain that a deal can be worked out. “We've got some work to do, there's no doubt about it,” he said. “But it doesn't do me any good not to be optimistic. I know how intelligent and committed our
group is to getting a deal done.”
Also present at the annual Ravens press conference was team president, d**k Cass. He made it clear that if any games were cancelled due to work stoppage or for any other reason, fans would be refunded. He also said that the Ravens would not be hiking their
ticket prices. “We do look at ticket price increases every other year. We looked at it this year and decided it's not a good time to raise ticket prices, so ticket prices are remaining the same,” Cass said.
Cass said that the possibility of a lockout was one of the reasons why the franchise decided not to raise ticket prices. Cass added, “And then we looked around the league, and there weren't a lot of teams raising ticket prices this year.”
Ravens officials and the owners also discussed the 2010 season in the conference. Bisciotti confirmed that Coach John Harbaugh would be getting a contract extension. He also praised quarterback Joe Flacco. “Clearly he (Flacco) improved, and I'm still very
happy to have Joe Flacco as our quarterback,” Bisciotti said. “I think he's where we want him to be.”
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