Players Union Wants Free Agency

There is a completely untrue myth that free agency=team poverty. This is in no way true, but is a typical myth spread by owners who enjoy their power over the careers of their employees. Baseball, with its screwed up system, is always held out as the example here, but the analogy is deeply flawed.<br />
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Equalize the revenue stream for the clubs and mandate a percentage that each club HAS to spend on player contracts (salary floor) and you can have free agency that will benefit the league and the players. Players are uniquely talented individual contractors and deserve the power over their very brief playing careers bound in a voluntary partnership contract with a club. Club owners should rightly be suspicious about sharing revenue with other clubs, but if you mandate a salary floor you can keep club owners from using the shared revenue for yachts, trips and non-team expenses. (And believe me, this happens.)<br />
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This will only improve the product on the field, introduce just compensation for players that is proportionate to the league's economy of scale and provide a foundation for growth in the future. <br />
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The players are right to demand free agency, and the owners are self-servingly short-sighted in the extreme to oppose it.

There is a completely untrue myth that free agency=team poverty. This is in no way true, but is a typical myth spread by owners who enjoy their power over the careers of their employees. Baseball, with its screwed up system, is always held out as the example here, but the analogy is deeply flawed.

Equalize the revenue stream for the clubs and mandate a percentage that each club HAS to spend on player contracts (salary floor) and you can have free agency that will benefit the league and the players. Players are uniquely talented individual contractors and deserve the power over their very brief playing careers bound in a voluntary partnership contract with a club. Club owners should rightly be suspicious about sharing revenue with other clubs, but if you mandate a salary floor you can keep club owners from using the shared revenue for yachts, trips and non-team expenses. (And believe me, this happens.)

This will only improve the product on the field, introduce just compensation for players that is proportionate to the league’s economy of scale and provide a foundation for growth in the future.

The players are right to demand free agency, and the owners are self-servingly short-sighted in the extreme to oppose it.