National Football League ordered to return $120 million wrongly withheld from players

Last week, an arbitrator ruled that over the last three years, the National Football League withheld approximately $120 million in ticket revenue from a pool of money shared with its players.

There are some revenue sources that the players do not receive a cut of, and it appears that the league tried to funnel the roughly $120 million into one of those exceptions without cause.

“They created an exemption out of a fiction and they got caught”, Smith told the WSJ.

In this arbitration, the NFLPA filed a grievance because “NFL owners had mischaracterized” a ticket revenue exemption that didn’t exist in the Collective Bargaining Agreement, according to NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith.

In an email, Brian McCarthy, a spokesman for the National Football League, referred to the ruling as the resolution of a “technical accounting issue under the CBA involving the funding of stadium construction and renovation projects”. The owners can withhold money from personal seal licenses (PSLs) and premium seating, and the players agreed to these terms. This ruling will put an additional $50 million players’ pockets and boost the 2016 salary cap by about $1.5 million. And as a result the salary cap for 2016 is going to increase by $2 million, from about $154 million to $156 million. A week ago NFL Network projected it as high as $155 million, but now that number could climb up near 7 million.

Despite the fact that it took the NFLPA three years to notice, the union sees the discovery of this discrepant and the arbitrator’s union as proof of its strength.

40 percent of that will now be handed back to the players, an amount which will boost the salary cap by around $1.5 million. “People have become accustomed to how we protect our rights when it comes to player discipline”.