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AlbaNY_Ram
Neither article actually calculates the impact on league revenues, just a general opinion that the cap will go down if there are no fans. The second article actually makes a significant mistake when it claims that local revenues are part of league revenues. They are not.
Here's where the league revenues come from, and these are the only sources that go into it. (Also shown are their respective dollar amount and their respective percentage of total league revenues as of 2018): [
www.thehogsty.com]
....TV deals with the various networks ($5.1B, 55.86%)
....NFL Ventures ($1.4B, 15.33%):
........Merchandising; Fanatics is the lead NFL partner on this
....Enterprise ($2.3B, 25.19%):
........NFL Network, NFL.com and NFL Sunday Ticket
........Licensing deals, such as “official sponsors of the NFL”
....Ticket sales (40% of gross) ($330M, 3.61%)
And players get 48% of league revenues as written in the CBA so owners have no mechanism for taking a bite out of the players income.
The other 60% of ticket sales go to the team along with concessions, parking, and corporate sponsorships with the local team. Those revenues go to the team and they would all go away without fans. But there is no way for the owners to force the players to share in those losses.
As you mentioned in your post above, "Home games make up on average 38% of team revenue and teams like Dallas and Patriots it's over 50%". That is totally true. The sources I just listed are where that money comes from. And none of it factors into the cap calculation: they are team revenues, not league revenues.
Based on what I think I know, both articles are wrong. And until an article actually does the math and demonstrates what happens to league revenues (and by extension, to the cap) without fans I'm sticking to my story.