Labor Discussion - Salary Cap, Local TV Sharing

[JCREW]

20 hours ago, Samurai Bucky said:

📊 2024 MLB Financials Comparison

Metric	Milwaukee Brewers	Los Angeles Dodgers	MLB Avg per Club
Team Valuation	$1.7 billion	$6.9 billion	~$2.7 billion
Revenue	$335 million	$752 million	~$403 million
Operating Income	$24 million	$21 million	~$20 million
Player Payroll	~$125 million	~$266 million	~$173 million
Gate Receipts	$97 million	$277 million	~$127 million
Sponsorship	Est. $45 million	Est. $90 million	~$63 million
Attendance	~2.3 million	~3.8 million	~2.37 million

This is so interesting. It suggests that if half of revenue went to players, basically all franchises would operate at a loss. Am I reading that right? I suppose that operating a stadium for 81 games a year is a higher cost than the other sports. 

This sounds childish, but I wonder what owners ACTUALLY, REASONABLY hope to achieve with a salary cap.  If they want to guarantee that they keep a bigger piece of the pie, the players are going to fight that tooth and nail. If they want to increase competition, a salary cap won't keep CHW, ATH, and PIT from tanking. 

Huge small market bias here, but both sides want things to change, so what to do? Here's another plausible list.

- more money goes to minor league, pre-arb, and arbitration players

- the owners get more taxation on extreme salaries or extreme payrolls (enough that it acts like a soft cap)

- some of that taxation goes toward player benefits

- some of that taxation goes toward revenue sharing

- penalties (payments into a player fund of some sort) for tanking or tiny payrolls

[BrewerFan]

1 hour ago, CheeseheadInQC said:

Maybe it would be different if the TV deals were set up differently, but outside of the Cowboys, who basically print money but don’t really act like it lately, I don’t know if the Packers would be at that big of a disadvantage these days. One estimate I saw had them 10th in revenue.

Yeah, the TV deals are a huge part of it. The TV deals are the reason the Packers got a check for 435 Million dollars on the first day of the league year. That covers them for the entire season. They can afford to pay their entire roster without doing anything else. 

As for where they rank outside of the TV money that everyone gets, it's just a guess as everyone keeps it quiet, but what I'm saying is the Packers wouldn't still be in Green Bay most likely without Rooney and Mara in particular agreeing on how the NFL was going to go forward. Revenue sharing and a salary cap. 

 

The reason the NFL was pushing them to move to Milwaukee in the 80s(when Milwaukee was a larger city and I would guess close to a top 15 market whereas now it's 30th or 31st). 

Manfred has made some statements that... infer he wants to keep moving toward something closer to the NFL's structure with TV deals. I don't know exactly how that'd look. I can't imagine how they could get close to what the NFL has, but even if more of the streaming goes through MLB, there's a pathway there to take a bigger chunk of the pie at least over the next 10-20 years and move toward something a BIT more equitable. 

I don't see a way MLB is ever going to be on a even playing field, but if they can get it where there's "only" a 150M dollar gap between the top payroll and the bottom, that'd be nice. That means a floor and a cap. 

[BrewerFan]

30 minutes ago, JCREW said:

This is so interesting. It suggests that if half of revenue went to players, basically all franchises would operate at a loss. Am I reading that right? I suppose that operating a stadium for 81 games a year is a higher cost than the other sports. 

You're going to have to explain how you arrive at that for me. 

[JCREW]

7 minutes ago, BrewerFan said:

You're going to have to explain how you arrive at that for me. 

Just the math I did on the brewers… it could be wrong. 
 

revenue of $335M

payroll of $125M

operating income of $24M

 

if the payroll had been $167.5M (Half of revenue), then it would be $42.5M higher than it actually was. 
 

if their operating income was only $24M, then spending $42.5M more on players would put them at a loss for the year. 
 

I'm not an accountant or an economist, so I may be understanding some of those terms wrong. I’d be happy to be corrected and be smarter tomorrow than I am today. 

[nate82]

I still believe the NFL is not competitive because of the salary cap and it is more so on how well teams develop a QB.  If you look at all of the bad teams in the NFL there is a repeating theme with nearly every single bad team.  The development of the QB or the lack there of is the real reason a team fails in the NFL over a period of time.  In the NFL you rarely see a young player go into FA and that has more to do with the sport than the salary cap.

A lot of a players prime years are locked up early in the NFL.  The NFL also doesn’t have the media issues MLB has.  If the Brewers were given nearly $500mm before each season started I believe you would see a higher team salary.  Unfortunately MLB doesn’t work like the NFL where it is the league handling the media revenue and not each individual team.

A salary itself wont bring parity in the league.  You would probably still see the same teams dominating.

[RightFieldCoder]

20 hours ago, nate82 said:

A lot of a players prime years are locked up early in the NFL. 

NFL also has non-guaranteed contracts. It's a lot easier to lock up good players if you know you can cut them later.

[thebruce44]

On 7/30/2025 at 4:39 AM, Frisbee Slider said:

10% decline in wild card viewership. Regular season declined, too.

29% decline in youth tackle football

CTE is a problem, as well.

 

NFL is more popular than MLB in terms of revenue and viewership. To me, it doesn’t mean baseball should copy football.

I appreciate reasonable people can disagree 🙂

Anecdotal, but I think this has more to do with the leagues attitude towards addressing controvercial issues. My perception is that they could have done more for player safety when more CTE studies started coming out. I also swore off the NFL indefinitely after the DeShaun Watson stuff. Of course, then Jordan Love got really good so I came back.