January 11, 2026
NFL
2011 NFL season almost didn’t happen
In May 2011, a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA), a multiyear contract between the owners and players was in hot dispute. One of the main things this contract highlighted was the revenue distribution between players and owners. The big question was what percentage of revenue should go to the players.
The owners wanted:
$2 billion off-the-top credit to support investments before any split of revenues
Players would receive approximately 58% of what remained from the off-the-top credit
The players wanted:
No off-the-top credit
50-50 split of all revenues
The conflict got out of hand, and sneaky tactics were starting to be employed. At one point an appeal to US Congress was made for some form of intervention.
Before all was lost though, the owners finally came up with a clever structure of revenue sharing. They pressed the notion of ditching the talks about which party gets which percentage. Instead, and here comes the novel part, they would divide all the revenue into distinct buckets, three to be exact.
The final agreement was solidified August 4, 2011.
The players get:
55% of League Media revenue, e.g. TV rights
45% of NFL Ventures/Postseason revenue
40% of Local revenue, e.g. stadium revenue
So after all was said and done, the players actually only get 47% to 48% in the first year of the contract.
Whoa! Why go to all this trouble to make three buckets then??
The proposal won because it allows both sides to see a form of victory. The players can claim that they get more of the revenue for fans tuning in on TV to watch their games, while the owners can claim they get way more local revenue when fans actually come in to watch the games live at the owner’s stadiums.
This case study is a great example of the power of “Framing”. Framing is where you can have almost identical proposals in an negotiation, in this case from a revenue sharing perspective, but have them presented in completely different ways, e.g. overall percentage vs three stream buckets. So when you negotiate anything, keep in mind that presentation is important, no matter how fair the deal.