Editor's Note:
The following was originally posted as a column for Nitsky's Notes on The
Projector's website. The original can be found
at http://theprojector.ca/stories/view/nitskys-notes3
Labour
issues have found themselves in the sports pages with increasing frequency over
the past several years. From football to hockey and basketball, it feels as
though owners of one league or another are always squabbling with their
players. Terms like revenue sharing, salary floor and collective bargaining
agreement (CBA) have become just as common as hat trick, shutout or winning
streak in every fan’s vocabulary.
The NHL, NFL,
and NBA all agreed to new collective bargaining agreements with
their respective players’ unions since 2011, ending or avoiding lockouts. While
in some cases, deals led to rollbacks of salaries or higher television
revenues, in all three major leagues deals led to increased salaries for many
players.
In
March of 2013, the CFL signed a $40 million per year television contract
with TSN through 2018. The deal is more than twice as much as
the previous television contract, which paid the league $15 million per year.
With
an expiring CBA, the CFL Players’
Association (CFLPA), which has been notoriously inept in the past, saw dollar
signs. They promised their players the world. Revenue sharing. A salary floor.
More guaranteed money.
Dollar
signs are understandable. Professional athletes have a very small window where
they can earn a living. Especially in a league like the CFL,
where rookies and role players are making as little as $50,000 a year, anything
the players’ association can do to help them maximize their earning potential
is needed.
The CFLPA eventually
ended up caving in negotiations. Revenue sharing, the hill they had promised to
die on, never came close to happening. But there’s one issue the CFLPA also
conceded that’s being overlooked, one that could prove disastrous in the
future. This issue deals with player safety and head injuries.
Sports
fans have been beaten over the head with concussion talk for the last several
years. Brain trauma, the quiet room and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)
are as common as revenue sharing, salary floor and collective bargaining on the
sports pages.
The CFLPA had
a chance to make a stand for the health of their players with this CBA.
The players had asked for independent neurologists — without any allegiance to
the team, which, in theory, means they would have no motivation for sending
potentially injured players back onto the field. The CFL,
inexplicably, refused to bend to this basic request to improve player safety.
When
Donald Washington was laying in a crumpled heap on Investors Group Field during
the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ preseason opener on June 9, days before the players
would vote to ratify a CBA that refused to
protect them, I couldn’t help but wonder what the league was thinking.
No
revenue sharing, no salary floor, those things all make sense. The CFL and
its teams have a hard enough time making money. Business margins are tight, and
I don’t blame them for squeezing out every penny they possibly can.
But
risking the health of your workforce and your most valuable assets isn’t just
bad politics, it’s bad business. As research on CTE and
concussions continues to progress, both the CFL and
its players union are bound to find they’ve come up with a broken business
model.
Unfortunately,
that realization might just come at the cost of too many broken players.
