Behind closed doors, on the increasingly rare occasions when the two sides meet, the rhetoric doesn’t make its way into the room. Still, genuine progress won’t be made until the parties focus their efforts not on scoring points with the public but on working out their differences as partners, not enemies.

Millionaires vs. billionaires
Efforts to win over the fans won’t matter because nothing either side says or does will change the fact that this labor dispute represents a protracted tug-o-war between millionaires and billionaires.

Regardless of the manner in which this squabble resolves, the paying customers realize that the rich will continue to get richer and that the only open question is whether one side will get richer at a faster rate than the other.

So give it up, guys. As you fight over who’ll get the larger stream from the increasingly expanding money fountain, you’re taking a chance that, eventually, the fans will decide to start shutting off the faucet.

The role of retired players
For the first time in years, the NFL and the union genuinely care about retired players. So what has caused the parties to embrace the notion of doing the right thing?

Both sides realize that winning over the retired players could result in winning over the fans.

And the retired players realize what’s going on, so they’re wisely holding each side’s feet to the fire as they try to leverage the best possible deal. If, in the end, this labor mess results in meaningful changes to the manner in which retired players are treated, it’ll arguably be worth every ounce of worry and stress that it caused.

Revenue sharing

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In 2006, getting a labor deal done hinged on the owners devising a strategy for working out the problem of unshared revenues. Though the teams have shared television money and ticket proceeds for decades, the development of other forms of revenue (such as high-priced luxury suites) that don’t fall within the sharing obligation created a disparity between big-market and small-market teams.

The union pushed for a supplemental revenue sharing plan in 2006 due to the realization that no effort to devise a player compensation formula based on total football revenue would succeed absent some mechanism for funneling more money to the lower-earning clubs.

The system adopted by the league doesn’t amount to a permanent fix. Though the owners have done a great job of keeping the issue under wraps, it continues to loom over the entire process.

No sense of urgency
Apart from all of the various problems, issues, and/or factors, the biggest challenge facing the parties comes from the fact that, with less than a year until the current labor deal expires, neither side seems to be sufficiently interested in working out a new agreement.

As mentioned above, no sense of urgency will arise until they agree on when the deadline arises.

So, basically, we’re right back where we started. And that tail-chasing vibe seems to best characterize the current status of the efforts to solve the labor issues that threaten to disrupt the game in 2011, for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century.

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