Talking NFL revenue, player contracts, union leverage and the future of American sports leagues all over the world with our returning champion and super agent Leigh Steinberg, who joins Nestor to discuss the lineage of the billions of dollars and jobs of the NFL offseason as another Super Bowl tournament begins with his quarterback Patrick Mahomes watching football this weekend and waiting for another chance for a Lombardi Trophy.
Nestor Aparicio and Leigh Steinberg discuss the NFL offseason, including player contracts, load management, and coaching changes. Steinberg emphasizes the competitive nature of NFL players and the importance of stability in coaching. They also touch on the revenue split between owners and players, noting the significant impact of TV contracts. Steinberg highlights the challenges of player health, particularly concussions, and his efforts to address these issues through a new foundation. They also discuss the integration of gambling into sports and its potential risks. Finally, they briefly touch on the differences between NFL and MLB revenue models and the importance of community engagement in sports.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
NFL playoffs, Super Bowl, player contracts, load management, coaching stability, player health, revenue split, TV contracts, gambling integration, youth leagues, player safety, concussion foundation, brain health, Urban League, player retirement
SPEAKERS
Leigh Steinberg, Nestor Aparicio
Nestor Aparicio 00:02
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Welcome home. We are W, N, S, T. Am 1570 Towson, Baltimore and Baltimore, positive. We are positively into the playoffs. It is a Festivus for the rest of us. Luke is trying to gather up and make his way on his sled through the snow out to Owings Mills for all things Lamar and Steelers this week, and it’s football season. We’re not doing the Super Bowl this year like we did for 27 years on radio row. We’re doing a cup of soup or bowl. We’re going to feed some local food pantries during Super Bowl week. And I will miss this guy, but I don’t miss him because we’ve become acquainted in the real world. We check in a couple times a year when he’s working on all sorts of things with players. And he’s got the one guy sort of not doing much this weekend, taking a weekend off. He is the agent for Patrick mahomes. He’s the agent to the stars. And I must say, Lee Steinberg, as I have purchased some 1971 NFL belt buckles from my youth, I must say. And I still tell you this every time I had a number 10 red Steve Bart kowski jersey that I wore to the skating rink in 1978 nobody knew who he was, but I’m like that, Lee Steinberg guy. He represents quarterback. So I go, I come at this honest as far as how far back I go, how are you? How’s life in the in the Marina del Rey,
Leigh Steinberg 01:23
the life is great in Newport Beach. And, you know, we’re just getting ready for the playoffs. Well, you
Nestor Aparicio 01:32
experienced some fun out there with the Dodgers. I had an eye out on you, and I’ll get to some baseball and all of this. The question I had, I mean, I’ve come to you when Lamar has been between contracts in contracts your own guy, you got him sealed up with the champagne at the liquor store in Kansas City a couple years ago, after the first one, I find it fascinating than the new era where players say, I’m not going in the game, or Load management or finding even more creative ways to try to get out of their situation in the your best Jerry Maguire, or are there three different kinds of advice? Or is there only one kind of advice you would ever give a player about saying, I’m not going in the game, coach, I’m I’m opting out. You
Leigh Steinberg 02:18
know, you see that in in football bowl games by collegiates, but you certainly don’t see it in pro football, these players are the most competitive human beings on the face of the earth. Obviously, Patrick mahomes was injured, but he went ahead and played in in the games the last week of the season. They had really nothing at stake, so they wouldn’t risk it, but try stopping players from getting involved. They want to play every play, and they’re most competitive people on the face of the earth. And remember, in games that are, quote, meaningless. Players have incentives in their contract. Players want to have good game film to show they want to be retained by their team, or they want to be hot free agents. So nobody ever talks about sitting out in football. Well,
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Nestor Aparicio 03:20
I think when I looked over the weekend, I saw a lot of competitive football for a meaningless week in some of these games, and saying guys do play hard because they have agents, they have families. They want jobs, tapes rolling, all that goes on. But now we’re into what my partner, Brian Billick, always like to say, that the season for play and the season for pay and obviously for coaches. Since I made this date with you, Antonio Pierce has been removed in Las Vegas. So just right before this phone call, it is a wild week for billionaires and the people that they manage. And I’m an ex communicated media member after four decades. Lee, so I know of how all of this sort of works, but when you’re getting these jobs and you’re given 10 months, 11 months, in the case of Jared mayo, whom the craft family knew, it is a vicious business this time of year, and I never mind a player wanting to take care of their body if they feel as such. Well.
Leigh Steinberg 04:20
In terms of Black Monday, I think this year it’s been more like light brown Monday, because there haven’t been as many firings. The whole key to winning in sports is stability, and every time a team makes a coaching change, it destabilizes the players. It breaks continuity. Players have to do a brand new system. So the real key is to find the right coach, and this year was the greatest example of how powerful coaching is. If you look at Dan Quinn and the command. And you look at Jim Harbaugh and the chargers, and you look at Sean Payton and Denver, all three coaches took teams with pretty much the same roster, um, except they got a new new quarterbacks in Denver and and in Washington, but they had to pick them and turn those into playoff teams. So this is a critical hire. I’m afraid today that we have a situation where billionaires bought these teams and they have a fast trigger finger, and suppose somebody had said to Dan Quinn in an early losing year, were just going to fire you, he never would have got to Detroit the way it is. So having some patience and believing in your system before you rush into changing coaches is key. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 05:56
you mentioned three guys that have been the Super Bowl, Dan Quinn and Atlanta before, and obviously Sean Payton won a Super Bowl, so there is a pedigree in a stock and then Bill Belichick can’t get a job, right, and goes to the colleges. So it is, in a way, Mike Rabel is trying to get in. My friend Marvin Lewis has been trying. There are only 32 of these seats. Not all of them are great jobs, although I have argued with several guys who’ve sat in those seats that they’re all great jobs, no matter what job it is, even the browns, even these places where they they’ve really had trouble winning football games and and you, you do quite do I have the right coach? Do I have the right General Manager? The Giants have done that this week and saying we’re not doing that. We feel like we have competent people here. Maybe we need to change the players. Oh,
Leigh Steinberg 06:42
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it’s a matter of changing the culture and turning it around in terms of how players prepare in the off season, how they practice, how they assimilate the playbook, what they’re like in critical situations, and a good coach can change the culture in a team pretty rapidly, and that’s what we saw in those three examples this year. And I mean, if Bill Belichick had a chance to to coach in the NFL. I don’t think he’d be at North Carolina.
Nestor Aparicio 07:26
Lee Steinberg is our guest super agent and our friend who visits with us from time to time. It is a great week, Pittsburgh, Baltimore week. We got a lot of things going on with contracts and the time for pay, but there is the play of what’s going on on the field from a Players Association angle, and from going back to Steve Bartowski and unionization and everything that’s happened, what I see in Baltimore is a team that came here 30 years ago under the we’re small town art was trying to find a new life here and all of that to this thing, where It really feels like 32 international silos that seek to play in Mexico City Brazil, all led by Roger, all led by money, all led by Amazon, and an international culture that the man who saved my wife’s life is a German. I’ma call him a kid now. He’s in his 30s. He was 19 when he saved her life. But when he wrote to me, he wrote to me as an American, identifying what an NFL fan he was, and I thought he’s got to be only 19 year old kid in Germany that’s watching No. I mean, I know you’ve been over there. I know you’ve had symposiums all through Europe, and seeing it catch on. Are you satisfied with how much money the players are getting by and large, and the way that it has been distributed over your 50 years of doing this. Lee,
Leigh Steinberg 08:42
right now they have a revenue split which gives the owners 53% and the players 47% there was a time before the last collective bargaining agreement, the one before this. There was a time back in 2010 where the players were getting 55% and the owners were getting 45% so I’d rather that split be more heavily in favor of players, but the amount of money is astronomical, and it’s mostly because of television. 71 of the top 100 shows last year Nielsen rated were NFL football broadcasts or pre game or post game shows. And that means that football is not only the most popular sport in this country by two to one, it’s the most popular form of televised entertainment, and because of that, the TV contracts are stunning, and the amount of revenue coming into the sport is is massive, and that doesn’t count stadium revenue and naming rights and merchandising and member. Billion all sorts of things in terms of overseas, remember that the sport the world cares about is soccer and so, and
Nestor Aparicio 10:12
find that out next year. We get to World Cup here, right,
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Leigh Steinberg 10:16
exactly. And so in America, the NFL dominates, and after that, college football, but overseas, it’s soccer, but they’re doing the best thing they can by playing in Brazil and playing in in Europe and having a number of games in London, because to really get the sport to catch you’ve got to start at a younger level, and they would need to develop youth leagues in all of those places, because if you played the sport yourself, or seen if played live, you have a better attachment.
Nestor Aparicio 10:53
Lee Steinberg is our guest. Are you shocked by it? That would Pete Rozelle come back and be shocked by this. I often think I lost John Steadman a quarter of a century ago. I wonder if they would conceptualize $50 million quarterbacks
Leigh Steinberg 11:10
if Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep when I started with Steve BARTKOWSKI, when each team was making $2 million as chair of the National television contract and Bartowski contract, which made headlines across the country because it was sports economics run amok. He made $40,000 his first year, and then 60 and 100 and 130 and he got a bonus that stunned everyone. It was $250,000 yes, they would be in the elders would be in considerable shock to see what’s happened. I mean, just think Nestor about the changes in college football in the last year, conference realignment, n, i, L, and now we have gambling integrated into pro football and making Sergeant you now can go into the Washington commander stadium and place a bet. Stunning the fact that you have a college player making $15 million from his university, and that the whole currency of recruiting would be how much money a player can make for those four Super conferences. It’s an entirely new world.
Nestor Aparicio 12:37
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You pleased with it? Did you see it go in this direction?
Leigh Steinberg 12:40
No, I think NHL was the law of unintended consequences. They were trying to get a little more money to make it fair for college athletes. They would have been happy with $10,000 now you have a player commit a quarterback to LSU, and Michigan alum comes along and offers him $14 million it’s pretty chaos. Any transfer a knocks back his commitment and commits to Michigan. The transfer portal is like free agency for college players. So so much of what we thought of as football at the younger level has been replaced. Those four conferences are elevating, so they’ll sign all the best college players and and eventually the NCAA will go away for those conferences, and they’ll negotiate their own TV contracts and everything else. So it’s a, again, a startling new layout in in sports
Nestor Aparicio 13:54
and as a revenue stream for the league. It’s, it’s almost incalculable. You know, I have the Executive Director of the Maryland lottery on every week. And I’m sponsored by the lottery. I give lottery tickets way on my crabcake tours when it doesn’t snow. And we were talking about state distribution in November, December. We’re two years into mobile here, where, you know, you mentioned going, that’s in our state, by the way, the commander stadium is is in Maryland, and it’s unique to Maryland. It’s unique to a lot of things, not to Europe or India or other places where they gamble on sports in the back, like the way we think of horse racing, or we have thought about horse racing in this culture, but the notion that it’s been whatever the estimates were, in every case, it’s far greater to the mobile than any of the the brick and mortar ever thought. And then it’s just a far greater distribution to here. It’s occur. When it’s education plan. It’s a lot of different things that the state’s planning to use this money. But five years ago, these hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue were going to bookmakers, the mafia, the black mark, wherever it was, whatever that was. It’s now been. Institutionalized right before our very eyes, and Super Bowl winning quarterbacks are given their picks. And it’s really a part of the vernacular very, very quickly on Sunday night football that I know whether some tight ends over under on 65 yards. And it starts to sound like I feel like I know more about that than red or black in a casino or taking a card in a blackjack in it is interesting to me, because I feel like I know a lot about football, but I know enough to know I don’t think I could ever make money gambling on at least I don’t think I could Well,
Leigh Steinberg 15:29
the problem is that it’s inevitable that an athlete will give in. Who’s compromised on gambling debts is going to give inside information to a bookie. It’s it’s or shape performance to get out of a difficult circumstance. And the thing that keeps pro sports and collegiate sports hopping is your assumption that the games are real and played on an even playing field, and if all of a sudden we have one of these things. And we came close with with Porter in being kicked out of the NBA for for revealing prop bet information, and we came close with show a Otani, but sooner or later, it’s going to be an incident, and it will shake the foundation of of sports and is an existential threat. So that’s something they didn’t factor in, to say nothing of the fact that we are going to create out of this with the ubiquitous non stop advertising for betting, a whole new generation of gambling addicts
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Nestor Aparicio 16:48
well, and also folks that aren’t into Baltimore on my chest, or I like this, or I like that, they just want to win their bets. And and I, I do feel like the stadia, in a general sense, are emptying out, and the appetite for attending is less than it used to be. Certainly, in my city, it has been, and we have a very successful football team and a very successful baseball team here. All of a sudden, Lee Steinberger is our guest. He’s going to be doing some stuff that the next time I have him on, hopefully in and around the Super Bowl, and my cup of soup or bowl as well. I want to take a little baseball with you, because I think top to bottom. When I was thinking about you today, it’s like I could do my homes, or I could do Lamar, I could do contracts or any of that stuff. But I wanted to take more big picture with you about the NFL and its growth that you’ve been a part of, and I know you’ve been involved in baseball. You already said, Ohtani to me, and my last name is Aparicio, so I come at this honestly, the stability of Major League Baseball. Mr. Big pants here. Rubenstein. Medal of Honor this week, $2 billion buys the team. They’ve spent no money in the off season. They’ve made very few structural changes. They have this incredible $300 million lean with mass in and the network and all the problems they have. They can’t figure out how to get the game to me when I drive to Ocean City on a Friday night where I can just pay for it, stream it, have it. It’s been so poorly run here for so long, but the team’s good. They get some pitching. They spent some money. They’re moving the fences. They’re doing all of this stuff. And I always think this is my 34th year on the radio. So I go back to Camden Yards coming online the strike in 94 Cal Ripken Angelo’s, all of that. And I think to myself, if baseball just could have solved the original sin and got some sort of salary control for a floor and a ceiling, something that they’ve never would have taken cap. No one wanted to hear, and no one to hear any of that, maybe even on the agent side, but it really feels like in a baseball town, it’s such an imbalanced it’s not imperfect. It’s it’s flawed. You know, it’s a flawed system all the way around. Feels good to be a Dodger person. I’m a Jana Marie Smith person as well, and I have a Dodger hat and I’m good, but it feels like nio feels like there’s different leagues going on here in baseball, and has been for a long time. The
Leigh Steinberg 19:08
problem is it’s a major source of revenue in football. It’s a national contract. And major source of revenue, besides attendance in baseball is a local TV contract, and market sizes are just different. I mean, within an hour and a half of where I’m sitting in SoCal, there are 17 million people who live here, and it can all get the broadcast signal. So obviously you’ve got that. And then we happen to have a hedge fund that owns the team, so that they have inexhaustible amounts of money, so that there’s differences. But you would assume, if that was true, that the Dodgers and the Yankees and the. Phillies would have won the World Series every year and they haven’t. So the truth of the matter is that good organizations can can triumph above that. In other words, if it followed that payroll was the only indicator of team success, I would agree with you, but it’s not. And
Nestor Aparicio 20:27
I think over the long haul, I’d rather have 300 million in my piggy bank than a buck and a quarterly I mean, I you know, and over the long haul, you know, you’re going to make mistakes with money. The Yankees have been, the team’s been doing that, but being in the Baltimore seat, and they’re trying to sell me tickets and sell me credibility again, and not boot PAL and Cal Ripken and Louis, none of that sell me the credibility of a chance to win and what we’re doing, and they’re not investing in the off season. I’m speaking your language in the agent side, the Boro side, saying, Come on. You know, pay up to get up, people will come out and support this at a higher level, but it feels poor mouthy to me, and it’s very easy to poor mouth in a small market where DC got the other team and got the money, and, and, and to your point, you said hedge fund, right? I thought that’s we were getting here. I didn’t think we were really getting the padres, or maybe even what the Tigers were for a period of time, but I did think that it buying a depressed franchise for 1,000,000,008 that was coming with 600 million in civic money to fix up Camden Yards. That wasn’t coming with any encumbrances of contracts other than maybe Chris Davis and the bobby Bonilla day or whatever. But nothing you know that was real money, sunk money, and this brand with all of this potential, I just sort of thought they would go 100 million further in every year on payroll the first five years, just to spiffy the place up and think like, let’s get in here and be, maybe not a heavyweight, but let’s go in and play and it. I don’t want him to be the Mets. And I’m not talking fanboy I’m talking perception of what the franchise is, and it’s, it is being held back by real revenue, right? The real revenue is, there’s not a lot of real revenue. And I, I think Mr. Rubenstein knew that coming in, but I there is that point that if they’re only going to spend to what they’re making here, it’s not going to go well, Lee, I mean, I live here, I know that, and that’s unfortunate.
Leigh Steinberg 22:25
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I follow you temp, it goes the other way, because what you can do in football, in baseball, which you cannot do in football, is sell more seats. So the truth is, because there are 81 home games, you can increase attendance and increase your revenue base. Basically, NFL franchises are completely sold out, and they sell out every weekend across the country, but baseball doesn’t, and the other thing a team like the Dodgers do is they turn out 50,000 fans a night, and so that stadium, still, I grew up a Dodger fan, and you would go to games, they built a cultural tradition where you went to a Dodger game. It didn’t matter who they were playing or who was pitching. It was just the experience of going to the stadium. And they said even the angels that are very poor team does very well in in attendance. So you have to build that culture going to the ballpark. And how they built it was, was Little League nights and triple A student nights and rotaries nights and Fauci nights, and so it’s part of its building into the community. Well, I
Nestor Aparicio 23:47
love, love, love the night of Chavez Ravine with the sun setting. So, uh, you’ll get me out there for that, Lee. I always appreciate your insights on all of this stuff. And you know how the money has grown and you’ve been such a part of it. Tell me what good work you’re up to. I know you’re doing something with the Super Bowl and, you know, I know you’re always working on player safety and on the future of players and their and keeping their earnings and and, you know, just doing good things for players all the people that you’ve represented all this
Leigh Steinberg 24:15
time. No, I’m in the process of putting a concussion foundation together. It’s not quite ready, and it will focus on long term Player Health, which is focused on awareness, prevention and cure, with the specter of athletic concussions, which is not just the knockout blow, it’s the fact that the inception of every play. When alignment hits alignment, it produces a low level sub concussive event, a little bit of change. But you could have an offensive lineman who plays in high school, college and the pros, who would have 10,000 sub concussive events, none of which have been diagnosed. None of which he’s aware of, but the aggregate almost certainly does the same thing as getting knocked out four times. We’re planning our Super Bowl party, which has humanitarian awards, so we give them for the good things that an owner or a coach or a GM does off the field, and we’ll announce those pretty quickly. We’re raising money for the Urban League that helps at risk African Americans with jobs and all sorts of things. We have a brain body lounge showing hyperbaric oxygen and stem cells and some of the new modalities that are taking over in sports and health and wellness, and we do a brain health summit before it. So we’re about to get into very heavy partying in New Orleans.
Nestor Aparicio 25:58
Well, I would say that’s one place you’re probably really pleased that it has come a long way from the league being in denial and seeing the old helmets that my pal Dan pastorini was wearing back in the days of Steve Bartowski, and saying, you see all the different helmets, all the different styles, the supportive helmet that looks unique. And it almost makes me giggle a little bit. And I think, why don’t every one of them, if that was my son, if that was that was my brother, if that was my I would want them to wear that and I think we’ve come a long way on thinking about head trauma and thinking about brain injuries, maybe a little bit differently as well. And wish Jalen Hurts well to get back on the field next couple weeks as well. Lee Steinberg is here, super agent, our friend out in California. Gotta let him go, because you too much sunshine out there and too much after party fun with all that Dodger fun out there. Lee, I miss seeing you at Super Bowls, but I’m pleased and privileged and always honored you take a little time and and spend with us in our audience here in Baltimore. I
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Leigh Steinberg 26:52
appreciate you My pleasure. Nestor, best of luck to you, and I’m not going to wish Patrick
Nestor Aparicio 26:56
mahomes Any luck here before two weeks from now, I’ll deal with you later on that I am Nestor. We are W, N, S T A in 1570 towns in Baltimore, and we never stop talking Baltimore. Positive. You.
