The NFL has implemented the salary cap system since 1994, which stipulates the upper limit of the total salary of each team player, and it is a hard cap, that is, the total salary of any team player can not exceed the salary cap every year.
This is significantly different from the soft hat of NBA. In the NBA, as long as the salary is managed by a third party or the boss pays luxury tax, the total salary of the team can exceed the salary cap.
What are the benefits of salary cap?
First, we can keep the strength balance of each team and avoid the rich big boss recruiting star players at will. Teams in some small cities can also be very competitive.
Second, it can effectively control the expenses of each team and maintain a good financial situation.
How to get the salary cap?
The salary cap is calculated in a series of complicated ways, and the amount will change every season. The approximate formula is as follows:
Salary cap of each team = (estimated total league income next season x player share-welfare expenditure)/total number of teams.
Note: Welfare includes pension and insurance for players.
According to the new labor agreement reached on 20 1 1, from 20 12 to 2020, players' wages will account for about 47%~48.5% of the total NFL income. 20 12 team salary cap 120.6M Note: m refers to millions of dollars, the same below. It is estimated that the salary cap of 20 12 1 m is around 65438, with little increase.
What is the minimum wage?
Obviously, the salary cap is more beneficial to bosses, but how to safeguard the interests of players? So the concept of minimum wage came into being, which stipulated the minimum wage of each team player.
According to the labor agreement of 20 1 1, the average total salary of each team should reach more than 89% of the salary cap in the four years from 20 13 to 20 16.
What are the consequences of exceeding the salary cap?
Procedurally, no team can surpass the salary cap. Every contract must be confirmed by the alliance before it can take effect. If a contract comes into effect and it is found that the team will exceed the salary cap, the league will naturally not approve it.
However, there are also fish that slip through the net. Once discovered by the league, the punishment measures include fines and deprivation of some draft picks. Steelers and 49 people have been punished in this way.
Whose salary does the salary cap include?
Only players' salaries are included, not including coaches or other staff.
In the offseason, a team usually has 70 or 80 players to participate in trial training and training, and the wages of 5 1 high-paid players are included in the total wages. Once the regular season begins, the wages of all players (including those of the training team PracticeSquad) will be included in the total wages.
When does the total annual salary start to be calculated?
Starting from the league year of each year, the contract amount of all players. The league year of the 20 13 season begins at 4pm on March 12.
Can the team transfer the unused salary space from last season to next season?
Of course. But there are more complicated rules.
Part two: NFL player contract
After research, the author found that due to the restriction of hard salary cap, the team management can only try their best to recruit powerful and cheap players, which makes NFL player contracts have the following two remarkable characteristics compared with football, NBA, MLB and other sports:
1. The contract with the most complicated terms and the most subsequent operations.
2. What players lack most is a guaranteed contract.
What does a player's contract salary include?
The total integral is guaranteed and not guaranteed. For example, St. Quarterback Dreybris signed a five-year contract with a total amount of 65,438+000 m last year, of which 60M is guaranteed.
Some contracts have a lot of guaranteed wages, and some contracts have almost no guaranteed wages. It is entirely up to the players to rely on their own performance on the court.
Can I get a guaranteed salary as soon as I sign the contract?
Guaranteed wages are also divided into full guaranteed wages and other guaranteed wages. Guaranteed wages mainly include the obligation to sign contracts that we often hear. As the name implies, it is the money that players can get at once when signing a contract. No matter what happens later, even if the player is seriously injured in training the next day after signing the contract, the money will be the player's (unless there are special contract terms).
Other guaranteed wages must meet the conditions of a contract before they can be converted into full guaranteed wages, which can be obtained immediately.
For example, the guaranteed salary of Brice's five-year contract is 60M, but the full guaranteed salary when the contract comes into effect is 40M, of which 37M is the signing bonus and 3M is the basic salary for the 20 12 season. 20 13 February, the sage had three days to decide whether to fire Brees. If he does, he won't get the rest of the guaranteed and non-guaranteed wages, otherwise 15M guaranteed wages will immediately become full guaranteed wages. In February 20 14, saints also have three days to make a decision. If Brees is not laid off, the guaranteed salary of 5 million will be converted into full guaranteed salary. So after all, Brice must stay in the team until 20 14 to get the full guaranteed salary.
Therefore, guaranteeing wages is not a real "guarantee".
Breakdown of guaranteed wages
There are three kinds of guaranteed wages, aiming at injuries, skills and salary caps.
According to the competition level:
Some players are likely to be laid off because of the decline in their competitive level. For example, Jet recently laid off five veterans, saving 3 1M salary space. The main reason why they were laid off was that the team management thought their performance was not worthy of last season's salary.
If these players' salaries are guaranteed according to their competitive level this year, they can get these guaranteed salaries even if they are laid off.
For injury:
For example, a player has 65,438+00 meters in the first two years of the contract. If he is injured at any time in two years, he can't participate in the competition or even retire, he can get this 10M.
For salary cap:
If a player's salary is guaranteed by the salary cap, he can't be laid off (the player won't be released in the guaranteed operation) because the salary cap is very tight. However, it is more difficult for brokers to get this kind of protection.
Author's Note: I don't quite understand the obvious difference between salary cap and competitive level.
If part of the amount in the contract can guarantee all three at the same time, it is what we usually call full guarantee of wages. Players definitely want to be completely safe, but it is difficult. Many teams only give players two choices, either injury or competitive level, and they can only choose one every year.
Look at the contract of Jet Island Wang Lei Weiss. He got a guaranteed salary of 7.5 million in 20 12 and a guaranteed salary of 6 million in competitive level in 20 13.
If a player's salary is not guaranteed because of injury, but unfortunately he is seriously injured and disabled, he will not get the rest of his salary, but he will be compensated according to the terms of the league's injury placement.
Can the team lay off players during the contract period at any time?
Yes, the NFL is a highly competitive league. Once a player's performance on the court declines and he doesn't deserve his salary, he may be laid off at any time and replaced by a more cost-effective player. So there are no junk contracts similar to NBA in NFL, or the number of junk contracts in NFL is much less than that in NBA.
But when to lay off employees is very important. As mentioned above, this year's total salary includes the contract that came into effect on March 12, so the team will lay off some players during the contract period before this date to save salary space. For the laid-off players, the remaining contract salary is nothing.
After-loading contract
Many contracts in NFL are deferred payment contracts, that is, the signing bonus is relatively high, while the basic salary in previous years was not high, but it will rise a lot in recent years. For example, the basic salary in Brees5 is about 3m, 9.7m, 10m, 18m and 19m respectively.
The advantage of this is that it can reduce the salary cap pressure in the first few years of the contract. What should I do if my salary is high in the next few years? It's simple. The team will either lay off the players and not pay the money behind them, or renew the contract with the players.
For example, Eagle quarterback Michael Vick predicted that the income of 20 13 would be about 16M. Obviously, for a quarterback who has become a substitute, the money is too much, and there are many rumors that he will be laid off. Vic finally agreed to rebuild his contract with the team. Even if he performs well next season, he can only get 10M at most. Of course, the team also gave Vic a signing bonus of 3.5 million. Even if he was laid off in the offseason, it would be better than being laid off because he refused to restructure the contract.
Is the signing bonus important?
As mentioned above, the player's contract is very insecure, and what the player believes most is of course that he can get the signing bonus immediately. Moreover, many players know that the high salary in the last few years of the so-called big contract is actually a cloud, and many people have been laid off in advance, so the team can only get players to agree to such a contract by paying more signing bonuses.
There is also an OptionBonus, which you can think of as the signing bonus. The biggest difference is that the former is paid in the second year of the contract, and the uncertainty is greater.
Example: Peyton Manning 20 1 1 signed a contract with Pony, including 20 million signing bonus and 28 million option bonus. However, he didn't get the choice bonus because Pony stopped him on March 7th, 20 12. According to the contract, if he is still in the team on March 8, he will get 28 m.
How is the signing bonus included in the salary cap?
Signing bonus can be said to be the most skillful part of contract labor. The money is not included in the salary cap of the year, but is evenly distributed in the annual salary cap.
For example, suppose a player signed a 5-year contract in 20 12, and the signing bonus is 10M, with an average annual salary of 2M, then the annual salary ceiling of Caphit is 2M. But if he didn't perform well last year, the team is also very particular about when to cut him 20 13. If it is cut before June 1, 2065438, the remaining 8M will all be included in the salary cap on June 20 13; if it is cut after June 1, 8M will be divided into 4M on average, which will be included in June 20 13 and June 201respectively. The Caphit of the latter method was reduced from 8M to 4M, which had little impact on the salary cap, so many players were laid off after June/KLOC-0.
Are there any other bonuses?
Workoutbonus: a bonus that a player can get by participating in a certain amount of offseason training (usually 85%).
Rosterbonus: the bonus that a player can get if he stays in the team at a certain point in time (usually early March).
Motivation: It depends on the player's performance on the court, such as how many catches, yards and touchdowns the catcher needs each season to get the corresponding motivation.
Is the basic salary guaranteed?
Most of them are insecure, but it depends on the specific terms of the contract. For example, it is not guaranteed that a player must enter the competition list in three regular games to get the full base salary of the season, while some contracts stipulate that as long as the player is still in the team on a certain day in March, he can get the full base salary of the season immediately, which is guaranteed.
As for the old players who meet some conditions, as long as they are still in the team at the beginning of the first week of the regular season, they can get the basic salary for the whole season. In order to reduce expenses, the team usually cuts off some old players who are not the main players before the first week and signs them back the next week, so that his basic salary for the season will not be guaranteed, which means that if he is cut off after playing for five weeks, he will only get five weeks' salary.
What is dead money?
That is to say, the wages of players who are no longer in the team are still counted in the salary cap, which makes the team not have enough salary space to sign contracts with other players.
Example: Peyton Manning signed a five-year contract with Pony on 20 1 1 with a signing bonus of 20 million. According to the regulations, the signing bonus is calculated within the five-year contract period, with an annual bonus of 4M. However, he was laid off by Xiaoma in March of the second year of the contract, and the remaining signing bonus of 16M was fully included in the total salary of 20 12, which was considered a success. Pony's salary cap was 120.6M, which was occupied by 16M at once.
What is the salary of players after being traded?
If a player is traded, the new team will give him the same contract as the original team, but if the player agrees, he can renegotiate the contract.
Example: At the end of his career, mcnab intends to transfer from Redskins to Viking, but there is not enough salary space for Viking. If he reorganizes his contract with Redskins and reduces his salary, he will be traded to Viking.
Reconstruction contract of core players
In order to make room for salary, many teams will reorganize their contracts with some core players with big contracts, and convert their basic salary and lineup bonuses into signing bonuses in the next few years.
The reconstruction contract of the core players is not like the main marginal players like Vic. The total contract amount is large. In fact, you can also turn some insecure wages into signing bonuses that you can get immediately, and you can also help the team gain a good reputation. Why not?
For the team, the signing bonus will be evenly distributed to the total salary in the next few years, which has little impact on the salary cap.
For example, tom brady of Patriot 20 12 is the third year of his five-year contract, and the basic salary+lineup bonus is 1 1.75M, so the impact on the salary cap of that year is 1 1.75M, 20 12 years 3. All the other money is converted into 10.8M signing bonus, so the impact on the salary cap is only 4.55M (0.95M+ 1/3 signing bonus). Patriots got a salary space of 7.2m (11.95m–4.55m = 7.2m), which can be used by other players to sign contracts.