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Eric Grubman's brand of football isn't meant for SportsCenter's highlight reel. Yet it tends to be fan-friendly in its own way. On a November day at the National Football League's Manhattan offices, Grubman—a former Goldman Sachs (GS) investment banker who is the NFL's executive vice-president of business operations—shuttles between meetings about foreign TV deals, overseas games, and stadium improvements. Along the way he's often looking out for the customer. He wants universal Wi-Fi access at the stadiums. ("You could order food right over your phone," he says.) He's also in favor of in-stadium broadcasts of the footage game officials use to review challenged plays. ("The fan at home sees every angle of the disputed calls," he says. "Why shouldn't the fan at the game?")
Grubman, however, may soon become the bane of football fans everywhere. As the league's top money man, reporting directly to Commissioner Roger Goodell, he's at the center of a labor dispute that could make Super Bowl XLV the last NFL game for a long time. While the Feb. 6 matchup between the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers is the biggest date on the football calendar, most players and team owners have their eyes fixed on Mar. 3. That's when their collective bargaining agreement expires. Until a new one is in place, there likely won't be any more games, raising the prospect of a lost 2011-2012 season.
Grubman, 52, dresses casually, at least by the NFL's corporate standards. Today he's wearing a cardigan and slacks, and his black hair, streaked with silver, is swept back. The overall effect suggests a New England professor more than a U.S. Navy officer-turned-investment banker, which is Grubman's actual career path.
When he describes the standoff between owners and players, however, Grubman is all business. Over a light lunch at The Huddle Café, the NFL employee canteen, he explains that the problem, as he sees it, is one of labor myopia. "The players are too concerned with how you divide the pie," Grubman says, "while we're trying to grow the pie so that there's more money for everybody." As he delves into the issue, though, he concedes a larger point. The owners opted out of the current collective bargaining agreement because, he says, "They made a bad deal. They realize it now."
The "bad deal" went down in 2006, when the owners voted 30-2 in favor of the fifth extension of a labor agreement first enacted in 1993. The new deal raised the salary cap, allotted nearly 60 percent of the league's total revenues to player salaries, and inaugurated a revenue-sharing plan in which the 15 top-earning teams subsidize the 17 less profitable ones. What made sense in the boom times of 2006 soon proved onerous. In May 2008, the owners unanimously voted to pull out of the two-year-old agreement, setting the clock ticking for Mar. 3.
With time now running out and Grubman and his colleagues negotiating in private with NFL Players Assn. Executive Director DeMaurice Smith, details of the talks remain sketchy; Grubman declines to fill them in. Smith, however, has highlighted two particular concessions sought by the league and its owners. First, they're seeking to decrease the players' share of total revenue. Second, they're asking for two games to be sliced from the four-game preseason and added to the regular season's schedule.
Both ideas are hugely unpopular with the union. "We give back $1 billion," says NFLPA President Kevin Mawae, "and increase our risk of injury by playing two additional games." Meanwhile, the two sides are fighting over what a potential lost season, with its billions of dollars in forfeited salaries and revenue, should be called—and who would be to blame. "Work stoppage" is the term the NFL prefers. "Lockout" is what the players call it. After all, "it's the owners who opted out of the contract," says George Atallah, the NFLPA assistant executive director. "The players want to play." The owners say missed games are inimical to their interests, too.
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