The NFL believes that turmoil within the NFL Players Association has left the league’s business (as one source put it earlier this year) “constipated.”
An enema isn’t coming any time soon.
Speaking to Albert Breer of SI.com, NFLPA executive director JC Tretter made it clear that he knows what the league wants — and that he’s not prepared to engage in negotiations on those or other issues.
“They want 18 games,” Tretter told Breer. “They want 16 international games. They want to lower our revenue share. They want to have us pay for more of the costs of operating the business — socializing costs, privatizing profits. They’ve said all these things publicly at this point. And that’s a long list of really shitty things for players. . . . Play more, travel more, get less money, take or cover the costs of billionaires’ businesses and then not have upside to make as much money as you can, like, that is a list where everything goes in the wrong direction.”
The league’s desire for 18 regular-season games and 16 international games per year has become so established that it’s viewed as inevitable. And while 18 and 16 may happen sooner or later, Tretter isn’t on board with it happening soon.
As to shrinking the player’s share of money, Commissioner Roger Goodell mentioned that topic during the press conference following the owners’ May 2025 meetings.
“We did spend time today talking, at length, about areas of our Collective Bargaining Agreement that we want to focus on,” Goodell said at the time. “The two areas that we spent time on were really the cap system itself, the integrity of that system, how’s it working, where do we need to address that in the context of collective bargaining, when that does happen. That was a very lengthy discussion.”
So the NFLPA knows what the NFL wants. Tretter is in the process of figuring out what his constituents want.
“I’ve been clear to the guys, this can’t all be based around what the league wants,” Tretter told Breer. “Like, we as players need to figure out what we want, period. And I don’t think we’ve done a good job of truly knowing exactly what our guys want. My job is to go and figure that out and make sure I know, we know, and player leadership knows exactly where our membership stands, both as an entire group but also as individuals.”
So when will Tretter be ready to talk turkey?
“Right now, there’s just no timeline for when we would be ready,” Tretter told Breer. “And I’m not going to let an artificial timeline dictate that because in the end we do have a deal for another five years. So we have runway.”
Technically, they have five years of runway. The current CBA expires in March 2031.
Still, the league wants to get an expanded season and international footprint in place. The sooner that happens, the more money the players will make.
And here’s the inescapable reality. What the NFL wants and what the players want ultimately will be influenced by how determined each side is to achieve their goals. History tells us the league is far more willing to shut it down than the players are.
The clear imbalance in the willingness to use the nuclear option hovers over everything. For now, then, the effort to find out what the players want should include an effort to get them to understand that they may have to be ready to take a lockout — or initiate a strike — to get there.
Given the realities of the industry, most of the players who are currently on NFL rosters won’t be when the CBA expires. Thus, the messaging should extend to college players who are and will be earning NIL money over the next five seasons.
They need to be advised to start squirreling some of that cash away in the event that, come 2031, the members of the union will be ready to call the billionaires’ bluff and accept as much as a full season of not playing football, and not getting paid.
Read the full article here