The tug war continues in the NFL

Players and team owners keep on holding on tight to their interests towards a new CBA that would end with the lockout.

Not like we are trying to play Dr. Emmett Brown and Mart McFly, asking you to take a ride through space and time going back to your childhood days, but do you remember those days when you used to play tug war with your friends? If you do that’s probably the best example to describe what has been going on in the NFL since March 11, day that the longest lockout in league history began.

Almost four months have been consumed in this tug war with the team owners pulling towards their interests and the NFL Players Association doing the same on their end. This week they will continue their dispute in Minneapolis, after the unsuccessful attempts to settle held before at Chicago, Long Island, N.Y., Maryland and Massachusetts.

These four days of negotiations that will be held from Tuesday to Friday represent the fifth consecutive week of talks, and also the longest commitment in a round of confidential talks that prior to this had not been extended for more than three days.

This week the meetings will have the figure of U.S Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan as mediator, with the goal of agreeing on good terms before the 8th District Court of Appeals is forced to take an arbitrary decision about the new collective bargaining agreement, in a hearing scheduled for September 12th.

Despite running against time, both sides have no rush to reach an agreement, for they are not looking for a quick resolution, but rather a satisfactory one. This is the reason why things haven’t settle, because no fair deal has been reached yet, and until this happens no new CBA will be signed to end the dispute.

How to fairly divide the revenue of a growing $ 9.3 billion industry is being the biggest obstacle towards an agreement. With the old CBA players were receiving a 60% share, but the owners where charging a $ 1 billion credit off the top. The problem was that after owners’ claimed their share, only around 53% of the revenue was actually being received by the players.

Information leaked last week by ESPN journalist Chris Morten sen gave an idea of how the new CBA will look like: it would drop the players’ share to 48% and in compensation team owners will be resigning to their $1 billion credit off the top.

But despite Mortensen being a reliable source, negotiations are still taking place and changes in those percentages are subject to change. What can be taking for granted from the information leaked by him is that both sides are closed to a resolution today than what they were a few weeks ago, when not even their legal representatives were present. By Friday evening we should have an update of how much progress was done in these four days of talks. Hopefully we’ll have some good news for you in our next note on the lockout.

Scheduled to begin in about a month, training camps still have options of being held on time, and both sides are optimistic about it.