CLO2: Analyse factors affecting organizational behaviour at all levels of organizational system. (C4, PLO2) Player - Owner Disputes Are Unnecessary It seems there's always a major sports league on the verge of a strike. In the past few years, Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Hockey League (NHL), and the National Football League (NFL) have had major labor disputes. When greed meets greed, guess who loses? Yes, the fans. A few years ago, an entire NHL season was cancelled due to a labor dispute (NHL owners staged a work stoppage or "lockout" that lasted 311 days). The main issue? How to divide the more than $2 billion in revenues generated by the league. The average NHL player earns an annual salary of $1.35 million, and that doesn't include income from endorsements, appearances, merchandise, and so on. The owners aren't hurting, either. Most are millionaires many times over. Los Angeles Kings owner Philip Anschutz is reported to have a net worth of $7 billion. The NFL is a variation on the same theme. During the 2011 lockout, during which the player's union temporarily disbanded so it could claim it wasn't a union, the owners and players fought over how to divide $9 billion in revenues. The average player makes $1.9 million a year. The average net worth of an NFL owner is $1.4 billion. And each side squabbles over getting more. Yes, players get injured. Some lives are permanently damaged. But do you think being a construction worker, farmer, police officer, fisher, or loading-dock worker is a piece of cake? How often do these groups strike? They earn far less than professional athletes (the average fisher earns 2 percent of the average salary of an NHL player!), but they do work year-round, which is much more dangerous. Meanwhile, ticket prices for sports events continue to soar. In the past 20 years, major league ticket prices have increased at double the rate of inflation. But what are the owners and players focused on? How to line their pockets even further. Was it any surprise when Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, fuming over the dispute, called NFL players "modernday slaves"? (He earns more than $10 million a year.) Billionaires feuding with millionaires. These are unseemly- and unnecessary-conflicts. Sports teams are an easy target. It's true that most major league players are well rewarded for their exceptional talents and the risks they take. It's also true that owners who are able to invest in teams are wealthy-investors usually are. But do the resources on each side mean their conflict should just melt away? The reason these disputes happen is that real interests and real money is at stake. The operation of major league sports is a complex business. The owners and players can be caricatured, but if you delve a bit deeper, you can see that their disputes are fairly natural. Let's look at hockey. NHL clubs spent 76 percent of their gross revenues on players' salaries and collectively lost $273 million the year before the lockout. The NHL tried to convince players to accept a wage structure that linked player salaries to league revenues, guaranteeing the clubs "cost certainty." Understandably, the players' union resisted, arguing that "cost certainty" was nothing more than another term for a salary cap. They argued in favor of retaining the "market-based" system in which players individually negotiated contracts with teams, and teams had complete control over how much it spent on