When NFL commissioner Roger Goodell gave his Super Bowl press conference in Houston last week, most of the attention focused on his hilariously implausible answers to questions about his relationship with New England and the departure of teams from St. Louis and San Diego.
Gosh, I’m sure I would be welcomed back to New England, Goodell said, and gee, we were so very sad to leave those markets, and everyone chuckled to themselves and wrote their stories.
But the commissioner was also asked about the possibility of forming an NFL development league and he said something unexpected: maybe.
It has long been the case that the NFL is a multi-billion dollar business that relies on the U.S. college system to provide training and grooming, free of charge, to its future employees. The NCAA is the greater villain in the arrangement because it also makes billions that it shares with everyone in the system but the actual players, but that system only exists because the NFL forces elite young players to go there. If Goodell and friends actually did create a development system that would allow college-age players to bypass college and start earning a paycheque, the big NCAA schools that pay millions of dollars annually to their coaches might come around to the realization that they ought to throw a little of that toward the athletes.
The entrenched system is still a very long way from crumbling, but it is at least a tremor.
In Canada, the closest approximation we have is the relationship between the NHL and the Canadian Hockey League — the major junior leagues that develop teenage players until they enter the pro ranks. No one would suggest that the CHL is anything at all like the money factory that is, say, NCAA football, but it also provides a training ground for athletes who might otherwise be earning paycheques from NHL clubs or their affiliates. Both sides are happy with the arrangement; the CHL clubs have free labour, minus a monthly stipend, in their “student-athletes” and the NHL doesn’t have to worry about those players until they are drafted at 18 years old. It works for everyone, unless you happen to be wearing skates.
But now, the tremor, which could soon become much more of a shock. An Alberta judge ruled on Tuesday, as part of a lawsuit seeking minimum-wage pay for CHL players, that member clubs of the WHL and OHL will have their financial records unsealed as part of the discovery process. The CHL’s resistance to formally paying its players is entirely based on the argument that many of its clubs would be bankrupted by such a burden. It has said in court that the average club loses money annually.
The judge has essentially said: prove it.
Related
- CHL teams must reveal financial records to players seeking minimum wage, judge rules
- Argument against paying junior hockey players evokes another league that fought compensation — the NHL
“The defendants are making use of the documents so it would be entirely unfair not to allow the plaintiffs to use the documents to reply,” Justice Robert Hall told the Court of Queen’s Bench, Postmedia reported Tuesday.
He also rejected a request that the information in the records be released without club identifiers, meaning the public won’t have to guess which teams are making money and which teams are not, according to their records.
The class-action lawsuit has yet to be certified, and it could be some days before the information is released, but this is an absolutely huge moment in the long debate over whether major-junior players should be paid a salary that recognizes they often perform in arenas where thousands of fans have paid decent money to see them.
This is the point at which we find out if the CHL has been full of, er, it.
Is it true that a majority of clubs lose piles of money, and that their owners see the enterprise as an altruistic way to give back to the community and provide a place for young players, most of whom will never play in the NHL, to finish their careers? Or have the dire financial straits of many clubs been exaggerated by a league that wants to protect the profits from a system that has served them well for a long time?
It wouldn’t be surprising to discover that both of the above scenarios are a little bit true. When the Quebec Remparts play in front of 13,000-plus fans at an NHL arena missing an NHL tenant, and the London Knights sell out 9,000-plus tickets every night, while teams in places like Owen Sound and Kootenay play in front of a few thousand fans at most, it’s clear there’s bound to be a big disparity between their earnings, especially when labour costs are fixed.
But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? This system has evolved to the point where certain clubs sure look like revenue machines, and the whole operation supports the bi-annual hosting of the big-money world junior championship in Canada, and meanwhile some clubs claim poverty. The industry isn’t profitable, the CHL executives insist. And the argument to sustain that system mostly comes down to: this is the way we have always done it.
Perhaps we shouldn’t.
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