Thanks to a tricky bit of tax code, the National Football League files taxes as a non-profit. Fairly shocking. This is a 9 billion dollar business. All 32 teams rank among the 50 most valuable sports teams in the world. All are right there with the titanic soccer teams of the world. I guess that the 32 NFL teams show a profit but the league as a whole does not. Who knows how they manage this? As a non-profit, the league must reveal to us all the salaries of their top executives. Our always prying society likely would have found those numbers anyway but now they are just handed to us. There are no more secrets. For a while during the NFL lockout of 2011, league commissioner Roger Goodell volunteered to work for the nice round sum of a buck. He was working for a dollar. Once the collective bargaining agreement was reached, Goodell's compensation went up quite a bit. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell earned $29.49 million in 2011. He earned $11.6 million in 2010. The guess here is that nearly 2/3 of his 2011 total salary came as a bonus for his "terrific" work in the lockout negotiations. It's a stretch to blame Goodell for the length and the grief of the lockout. I blame the league's idiot lawyers for pretty much all of the difficulties. One of those idiots was the league's general counsel, Jeff Pash. He also worked for a buck during the lockout. I don't think that he even earned that. He came out of 2011 with $8.8 million in total compensation. I hate seeing people nicely compensated for pretty much putting a halt to anything productive. Pash and his pack of clowns made the lockout more difficult than it ever needed to be but that's another story. This one is about the NFL's well compensated commissioner.
At a time when many businesses are struggling, the NFL is flourishing. Personally, I think that the NFL runs itself. The nation, even a lot of the world, stops for the Super Bowl. Fantasy football is no longer this tiny little thing that is only a thrill to a few. It's a monster. The Super Bowl and fantasy football alone show the presence and strength of the NFL in today's world. Roger Goodell is still a big part of that success. He's carried on the strong work of Joe Carr, Bert Bell, Pete Rozelle and Paul Tagliabue. The league leaders that came before created the blueprint that Goodell has been wise to follow. Other league's have stumbled while the NFL surges further ahead. A regular season football game easily outdraws a World Series game. That wouldn't have been believed twenty years ago. Now, it's simply accepted. While I don't agree with all of Goodell's ideas, I love his passion for the game. As a fan, I know that the league is in good hands but I'm just a fan. The opinions that do matter are of those that pay Goodell. The rich NFL owners are getting richer and they are obviously grateful to their employee.
"The NFL is the most successful and best-managed sports league in the world," Falcons owner Arthur Blank said in a statement obtained by The Sports Business Daily. "This is no small part due to Roger's leadership and the value he brings to the table in every facet of the sport and business of the league. His compensation reflects that."
The true face of the league are the players. Some do not share the owner's view of Goodell's compensation.
"How the hell can u pay a man this much money that can't run tackle or catch"
-tweet from Roddy White of Arthur Blank's Atlanta Falcons
I guess that the NFL is really no different from any other business that is having grand success. The owners see the largest piles of gold. The top executives, in this case Roger Goodell, see an outstanding, but smaller pile. The people actually doing the work, the running, tackling and catching, seeing the smallest pile of all. Unlike most businesses, the player's pile is still pretty damn big.
Congratulations Roger Goodell on your tremendous monetary success.
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