Behind the Bargaining Table: George Atallah on the NFLPA, the CBA, and Player Power

And that leads us to the late 80s and 1990s when the union and certain individual players utilized the courts in a number of cases trying to challenge some of the activities of the NFL with regard to certain issues of contract rights.

And that arguably may have led to the 1993 collective bargaining agreement, the basis of which is still present in the present agreements.

Why do you think that the union resorted to go to court as often as it did during that time? Leverage.

Again, you hit it at the top.

Players' associations and athletes and workers of all kind and labor unions of all kind rely on leverage to get a desired outcome.

And I think legal leverage... especially for the sports unions, and I think you're seeing that now, I don't want to spin it too forward, but you're seeing that now with athletes in college, legal leverage is a very important way or a very powerful way for athletes to get the outcomes that they want.

When you don't have a situation like free agency, as an example, which we sort of take for granted as sports fans and as observers of sports in a business context, When clubs and leagues prevent players from moving around, well, they have a couple of options.

They can file for antitrust or take a legal leverage option to get what they want, or they can go on strike to get what they want.

And in football, they tried both.

And both of those tactics were designed to generate as much leverage as possible, which ultimately resulted in free agency for professional football players in 1993.

Right.

And it also got to the point where some players wanted to disband the union to increase their leverage that ultimately dealt with that 1993 agreement that only led to that, which was really part of a judicial settlement.

But why do you think that the players had to go to that extreme to use their leverage? Was it saying that the union was not strong enough in the 1980s to get some of the free agent rights, if you will, that you see now? Well, I think

it's not a question of the union being strong or weak.

It's more of a question of they were attempting to literally break a system.

I mean, for fans of Game of Thrones who are listening to this thing, we were trying to break the wheel, or players were trying to break the wheel of how the system was running during that time.

And that takes a tremendous amount of effort, especially when you're dealing with a group of people who were operating... like an economic cartel, frankly, and did not want to make any changes, wanted to keep all the power and control and economic benefits to themselves.

When you're trying to break a system, and that goes for any system, the amount of energy and leverage that you have to expend is tremendous.

And it just takes time.

You have to keep chipping away and chipping away and chipping away.

There's no magic formula for how to make sweeping changes that you saw in the NFL in the late 80s and early 90s.

You just have to use whatever power you think you have to make that change.

And that came also in the heels of a strike in 1987 that was generally recognized as not that successful for the union.

Yeah, the 87 strike wasn't as successful as it was intended to be, but it still generated leverage that brought about the antitrust suit, which resulted in free agency.

So again, in a vacuum, in a micro context, yes, no doubt did not set out or did not result in what they set out to do.