I'm a pretty big sports fan, though politics has stolen some of that energy in recent years, but of course labor strife is where politics meets sports today.
It's tough to feel sorry for professional athletes in the 21st century- everyone in the NFL makes more money than I'll ever dream of- but the NFL have managed to make me do it. I guess football is like any other business in one way: no matter how much money you're making, it's never enough. So football owners are making truckloads of money, but many of them used that to invest in ancillary businesses that didn't do too well in the recession (my hometown Patriots built a very ambitious shopping center next to the stadium, which is like a ghost town most of the time). It seems like players would be willing to make concessions if they can have proof that owners are really losing the money they say they're losing, but of course the owners won't let the players see the books. What else do we need to know about their teams' profitability?
Football players have short careers, and many of them have broken bodies when it's over. They had a labor contract that allowed everyone to make plenty of money. For the owners that's not enough.
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