As we endure the overblown run-up to Super Bowl XLI this week, there will invariably be much blather about the high incomes of the participants and professional football players generally. Frankly, given the risks of what these players face, they deserve every dime they make.
As this NY Times article reports, the life of even a relatively high-income NFL football player is no picnic:
[F]ootball playersí careers resemble life as Thomas Hobbes described it in the 17th century: theyíre nasty, brutish and short. The average football career lasts less than four years, . . .
The minority of players who do make it past a fourth year are still treated like (highly paid) temporary or contract workers. In baseball and basketball, teams must honor multiyear contracts, even if players suffer career-ending injuries or if their skills decline.
Not so in football. ìA person with a five-year contract will get paid only for the current year if he suffers a career-ending injury,î Professor [Skip] Sauer [of The Sports Economist fame] noted.
Star players with bargaining power have been able to protect themselves by negotiating guaranteed multimillion-dollar signing bonuses. But less-valued players are not able to extract those bonuses, and the relatively weak playersí union has not been effective in getting many concessions from owners, nor much protection for players hurt on the job.
The article goes on to mention the examples of former Houston Oilers Hall of Fame running back, Earl Campbell, who is partially disabled from the punishment he took during his football career, and the more recent case of former Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Andre Waters, who committed suicide after battling depression and brain damage caused by the multiple collisions he endured while playing football.
Along those same lines, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Stan Kroichick recently wrote this fine series of articles (see also here, here and here) on the 1981 San Francisco 49er’s, the first of that franchise’s four Super Bowl championships of the 1980’s (the 1994 team won another one) in which he chronicles the physical problems that the players on the 1981 team have endured over the 26 years since that magic season (and here’s another one examining the health problems of Wilbur Marshall, one of the stars of the 1985 Bears Super Bowl championship team). It’s a daunting tale and one that will be simmering just beneath the surface of the NFLís pomp and circumstance during Super Bowl week.
To say nothing of the NFL’s behavior regarding the possibility that its players are at significantly greater risk of dementia pugilistica. I may actually write on this in the near future.
I think too much is made of the fact that contracts are not guaranteed in football (as opposed to baseball and basketball). As Professor Coase teaches us, the parties adjust to the legal rule: we can thus predict that football players will receive more payment up front to compensate them for the risk that the contract will be voided on the back end and, indeed, signing bonuses are all but unknown in baseball and basketball, but comprise a substantial portion (around half) of football pay. If anything, the fact that contracts are voidable costs football teams money, because they’re transferring risk onto individuals who would surely take less money to have that risk assumed by teams that are better situated to handle it. (Of course, the hard cap creates complications, but most teams are under the cap, and one strongly suspects that teams constrained by the cap steer advertising money to players through local endorsements to get around the cap.)
Ted, I think you’re correct that the market for football players adjusts to the structure of the NFL, and that a CBA provision requiring guaranteed contracts would simply prompt the clubs to offer less in front-end bonuses and shorter contractual terms. However, it would be interesting to see how the market would develop if the NFL did not enjoy effective monopoly status and, instead, professional football developed in a model similar to, say, professional soccer in England.
The article keeps comparing a football player’s life to that of a 17th century laborer. Too bad “nasty, brutish and short” was coined as a description of life before civilization, not laborers:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/254050.html