The NFL has the biggest profits of any league, has the highest revenues of any professional league, and the largest valuations of any professional American sport. You would think that with all that money that the 32 privileged owners of this sport, might have the luxury of providing the players of this very violent sport with fair compensation which would include, guaranteeing the contracts that the players sign with management, but that would be far from the actual case in fact. The owners, not too surprisingly, see football as a business, and as a business they are loath to want to “guarantee” large sums of money to players when the owners know that players’ careers are capable of essentially ending on any given play within the brutal collusions that are part of this sport as well as the players aging incredibly fast so as to make their value to management diminish considerably.
In the NFL, guaranteed contracts are up to the owner’s discretion, and at their discretion, the owners collectively have decided almost in unison, that the guaranteed part of the contract should be minimized which is, obviously, of enormous benefit for the control of labor expenses for management but a disservice to the players themselves who invariably in almost every case, will never see the money that they are earning in the NFL in any other part of their life while seeking to continue to making a living. This means, that should a player be cut or injured, often times, the balance of money due to them, that is to say all monies of his contract that are not guaranteed to be his, will often times, disappear.
The go-to excuse that owners use for the minimizing of guaranteed contracts is that they are required to fund unpaid fully guaranteed contracts into escrow so as to ensure the payment to the players involved, but in actuality, that so-called issue, is something that could easily be mitigated by the structuring of bonds, loans, or material assets, as being pledged against the monies that are due to the players. In addition, as one might imagine, the franchise owners are invariably some of the most richest, successful, and privileged people in all of the world, hardly lacking in credibility, or access to money, with financial advisors and legal staff that would be easily capable of structuring whatever needed to be done in such a manner so as to satisfy guaranteed contracts.
The issue of the paucity of guaranteed contract money in comparison to the actual size of the contracts as announced to the media, comes down to the simple fact that the owners wish to maximize their leverage, their flexibility, and to improve their bottom line, by essentially reneging on contracts with the players, with minimal penalties or fallout to the ownership itself.
One must remember, there are only 32 owners in the NFL, in which they are all familiar with the other, and pretty much all of them have the same basic idea, which is to maximize their profit and worth, without placing themselves in the unenviable position of paying money to players who are broke-down, too old before their time, or useless to their enterprise. The owners, unlike the players, are here to stay, whereas the players are just a commodity which value of such clearly fluctuates.
While playing in the NFL can be very lucrative for those that make the grade, the fact that so many players have had their careers terminated by injuries and suffered too the ill effects of the game long after their career is over; it seems a clear injustice that when it comes to collecting their final negotiated paycheck that there often isn’t the promised money for them there.