Although soccer has become more and more popular in America over the past several decades, the NFL remains the undisputed king of all U.S. sports. Still, an aging soccer player is about to trump the highest-paid football player.
Alex Silverman of Sports Business Journal reports that Inter Miami of Major League Soccer will give Lionel Messi a compensation package worth $50-60 million per year. The amount includes signing bonus, salary, and equity in the franchise.
Yes, equity in the franchise. Something no NFL player has. Something no NFL player will ever get. Even if a player such as (to name just one name) Patrick Mahomes deserves it.
Messi turns 36 on Saturday. His best days on the pitch are behind him. And yet he’ll still make more than the best players in the NFL, including a piece of an ever-appreciating asset.
The problem for NFL players (and the saving grace for NFL owners) is the salary cap. The importance of having money to pay other players keeps players like Mahomes from wanting what they deserve. It changes their perspective from money to legacy, sacrificing what they should desire for what they crave.
It’s a great scam, something the players agreed to more than 30 years ago when the landmark Collective Bargaining Agreement was put in place. It gave players true free agency with the caveat of the franchise tag. It also gave owners the built-in sob story that if they pay one player too much, they won’t have enough to pay everyone else.
With the compensation for players fully and completely transparent (if only ownership revenues were so easily known), the owners benefit from the ability of media and fans to criticize a player who blows the curve and, in turn, knocks the team’s salary cap out of whack.
The MLS has a salary cap, too. But its Beckham Rule allows for the rules to be disregarded when necessary to attract star players, like Messi.
Imagine if the NFL had something like that. Something that would acknowledge that the greatness of a given player transcends the team-by-team spending limit. That a player has such inherent value to the league that the normal rules will be ignored in order to get and to keep the player under contract.
Of course, the NFL doesn’t need that. There are no stars to be attracted from other leagues in other countries, no true competitor for Big Shield. The NFL grows its own stars — and then it keeps those starts from getting what they should with a salary cap that chokes off their expectations under the guise of team.
It’s brilliant. It’s foolproof. The media and the fans line up behind it, and the best players have no choice but to accept that they’ll never get truly and fairly compensated for what they bring to the game. So they abandon that pursuit and focus instead on winning as many championships as possible.
After all, it doesn’t cost the team very much in the grand scheme of things to buy the player and his teammates a big, fancy ring that, for the best and most important player on the team, becomes an inexpensive replacement for the money he should be making, but isn’t.
