Quote:
Originally Posted by Bingo
I haven't dug into the details, but from a distance I think this is more about escrow timing than anything.
The escrow true up will solve whatever the revenue short fall is ... in time. But if they set the ratio to games played when the actual pie shrink will be more than that. And if that's the case some teams may not make it out the other side.
It's not a simple proration.
Did some digging on revenues and roughly the following seems to be true.
Total Revenue - $5B USD
Tickets & Concession 44% or $2.2B
TV 49% or $2.4B
Other 7% or $0.4B
If they play say 56 games it's not as simple as 56/82 * $5B. The proration works for TV and it works for "other", but the first category becomes zero.
At zero for tickets and concession etc the pie shrinks to $1.9B or 38% of the 2018-19 season.
That's not easy to finance as you wait for the escrow smoothing to fix things.
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And arguably it's the owners who are taking on 100% of the extra costs for testing, the bubble whatever. So yeah that's a tough sell for an owner to advance 80% of expected salaries when they're receiving 38% of expected revenues.
As Jiri said earlier, the essence of the players argument seems to be the owners should be floating this differential (because interest rates are low) which will ultimately be paid back by future players.
Although I am not very pro player in this, there is an argument to be had that the cost of this type of generational event should not be borne exclusively by current players and makes sense to spread out over time. That's where having a union comes in handy.