Unloading Evans and replacing him with a minimum-salary young player cuts the Bills' costs by about $3 million this season, which is more than profits would rise if every seat were sold. Losing cheap is fine, and getting nothing for Palmer generates a nifty excuse for a weak 2011 season.īuffalo, 11 consecutive years out of the playoffs, just traded one of its few established performers, Lee Evans, to the Ravens for a middling draft pick. Cincinnati management does not make winning its first priority. When in this situation, teams with winning mindsets shrug and trade the unhappy star for whatever they can get - think Green Bay with Brett Favre or Philadelphia with Donovan McNabb. What's the point of getting nothing for Palmer? The point is to shed Palmer's large salary while creating an excuse for another bad season. The Bengals, a low-spending team, are refusing to trade Carson Palmer, who says he retired but actually wants out of the Queen City. When this is taken into account, seeming nonsense suddenly makes sense. If your first goal is financial results, losing cheap can look a lot sweeter than winning expensive.
Contrast that with not spending up to the cap, which can add $20 million to $30 million to the bottom line. Because most teams are in the middle of that calculation, going all-out to win with player and coaching salaries will add considerably less than $10 million in profit on packing the stadium. That's a $10 million swing between the best case and the worst case for filling the stadium. That suggests the 2010 attendance leader, Dallas, had a $21 million profit on seat sales, while 2010's worst-drawing team, Oakland, had a ticket profit of $11 million. The $30 estimate is a simplified number, but suppose it's roughly accurate. Had they not, the profit per seat would have risen to $25 or $30. The Packers' expenses were high in 2010, as they appeared in four road playoff games. For 2010, the Packers sold 566,362 tickets and reported an operating profit of $10 million - about $18 per occupied seat. This jibes with the numbers reported by Green Bay, the sole NFL club that discloses financial data. Winning can help sell tickets, but even a clunker season will fill most of the house.Īccording to a financial officer for an NFL team, after ticket price, concessions and parking are added up, and then the visitor's share, overhead and taxes are deducted, each sold home seat represents around $30 in profit.
In 2010, even given a slack economy, the league average was 94 percent of seats sold, and every team except Oakland and City of Tampa sold at least 80 percent of its home seats. Most teams go into the season knowing they will sell about 90 percent of their seats no matter how they perform a few know every seat will sell regardless of performance. But the revenue swing between packing the house and having a poor gate just isn't that great. Ticket sales can vary and generally are where the profit resides.
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As all NFL teams save the Packers are privately held, and of those all save the Raiders are family businesses, money that is not spent on players goes into the pockets of the owner and his relatives.Įach NFL team gets exactly the same national TV payment whether it's winning big on "Monday Night Football" or losing badly and never aired nationally. Victory is nice, to be sure, but losing cheap can be remunerative. In the NFL structure, a cheap team that loses might have more profits than an expensive team that wins. But there's something more basic happening. Player expense might not equate to wins, of course. Yet many NFL teams are not spending anywhere near as much as they could. The $125 million each NFL club will receive this season from the league's many national television contracts will cover player expenses, while ticket sales and local marketing cover overhead, and then some, even for small-market clubs. It doesn't roll over to next season.Ĭash flow is no problem for any of the teams with ample salary-cap space. Another six teams have at least $10 million unused. The Bucs, Jaguars, Bengals, Bills, Broncos and Browns have at least $20 million each. The Chiefs have nearly $33 million of unused cap space.
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The result is that many NFL teams have oodles of unused cap space, yet made few if any moves in free agency. Fans of perennial cheapskate teams will like the provision, too.īut the must-spend clause does not take effect until 2013. This is a provision NFL players are going to like quite a bit. The new collective bargaining agreement adds a hard salary floor, mandating that nearly all cap space be spent each year - as cash, not as amortization of past bonuses. One reason NFL action is so competitive is the league has a hard salary cap.