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Commissioner Tagliabue
Press Conference ON NFL EUROPE RE-LOCATING TO THE U.S.:PT: No, it wasn’t discussed. It was always a European League and most of the discussion had to do with the interplay of player development of NFL teams and team development of NFL teams vs. player development and team development of NFL Europe. There was kind of a tension in two respects. Number one – many of the teams feel that the way the offseason has evolved it’s extremely important for all their players to be in their offseason training regimen and therefore it’s a burden to allocate players to Europe. The second aspect of it is, as we try to develop more national players and get them on the field and play over in Europe there is a tension between doing that and the allocation of NFL players. The higher the caliber of the game, the harder it is for some of the national players to get on the field and play. We have made a lot of progress in that area because we have eight national players and on every one of the teams in Europe you have three, four, five players that have earned their way onto the field, which was not the case five years ago. We want to continue to develop more and more of those players and get them on the field. There is a little bit of tension there between the national athletes whether they are from Europe, Japan or Mexico competing with NFL players who have played in college football and so forth.
ON EUROPE BEING PROFITABLE:PT: I don’t view it as a profit-making venture and we presented it as a long-term investment and an on-going investment. I don’t think that any sport that I’m aware of is too bullish about making a profit in the early years of their international player development and the exporting of their sport overseas. You see where soccer is today here. After 40 years it’s still not profitable and they have been at it for 40 years. I think if your expectations include profits your expectations are too high and I’ve always viewed it that way. It’s an investment in U.S. player development and an investment in long-term foreign and national player development and I think you can see that the time-line in other sports have produced a heck of a lot of talent from around the world if you look at baseball and basketball in particular.
ON THE MAIN DISPUTE OVER NFL EUROPE:PT: The primary issue was having a long-term set of goals planned for and pursuing a long-term set of goals with the focus primarily on international player development, national player development, non-U.S. player development such as other sports have achieved versus the short-term realities of taking NFL players and sending them to Europe and mixing them with European and Asian and Mexican players. It was the blending of the long-term with what we do next spring.
ON LOS ANGELES STADIUM, WHICH GROUP/VENUE IS AHEAD?PT: No one knows who is ahead or is going to win because we are a long way from the finish line. We found that out Monday night in the Giants-Dallas game. Until it’s over it’s not over and we’re nowhere near 11 seconds from the end. We’re in the first quarter so I can’t tell you who is going to win any more than I could tell you who was going to win that game on Monday night. We’re playing the game hard with a lot of different players on the field.
ON A PLAYER LEAVING EARLY FROM COLLEGE – COULD HE EVER SEE IT HAPPENING?PT: I don’t know. I guess that’s why we’re having meetings.
CAN YOU ELABORATE ON THE NFL TRUST ISSUES THAT WERE DISCUSSED?PT: We sort of ran out of time, but we talked about process and then we talked about some of the substantive issues as we looked at how the marketplace is today with tremendous business and consumer products interest in using sports, especially the NFL, as a marketing, promotional and sponsorship vehicle. How that is affected, by how technology and electronic technologies, the internet, data-base marketing and so-forth. It has already produced some changes in our business model in terms of what we have done with Coors and Pepsi in the cola and beer categories. We have done different things in a different direction with Reebok and others in the apparel category. There is no single model. As you look at different parts of the business there are different models. We started to put out some of those issues and some of it includes how you define the home territory of each team. We have a 75-mile home territory definition that goes way back, which is really out of sync with the way major metropolitan areas have evolved. It’s out of sync with the way teams in mid-size and smaller metropolitan areas market themselves. At one end of the spectrum the 75-mile definition doesn’t have much meaning in the context of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the whole northeast and at the other end of the spectrum it doesn’t have much practical meaning in terms of Buffalo and Rochester; Kansas City and the way the Chiefs reach out; New Orleans, the way the Saints are reaching out to the whole Gulf-South region. That was the one point we spent a fair amount of time on, just saying how do you approach a new definition that works for everybody in this new environment? That was an example of what we started to discuss and are going to discuss in Chicago in late October.
MORE ON DISCUSSING THE TRUST:PT: We are not discussing the trust. We are talking about a master agreement on commercial opportunities at the league and team level that has to do with sponsorship, retailing, advertising and similar commercial arrangements. It will not be a trust arrangement. The tax laws have changed, corporate law has changed. We don’t need a trust, we need a master agreement similar to how we did it with our internet network and what we did with our NFL Network that Steve Bornstein is heading up.
MORE ON NFL EUROPE:PT: I think the biggest thing from my own perspective and why I think this was widely accepted by our Business Ventures Committee and the membership, is that the international marketplace for sports is really rapidly evolving, maybe even to the point that it’s volatile and unpredictable. If you look at the 15 years that we have been in the international marketplace, going back to the late 80’s with American Bowl games in Wembley Stadium and then in Japan and the launch of the World League, the amount of change that there has been is really striking. And this is true in the United States, too, in terms of who owns the media companies, how big the media companies are, what forms of television are carrying the lion’s share of sports and so-on. When we went into the World League back in 1989 and 1990, of course I wasn’t even the Commissioner, Pete Rozelle was - that is one change. More importantly it was something that ABC was interested in as spring programming in the United States. It was a perception that television in Europe was interested in that there was a growing development of terrestrial television in Europe and so forth. Most of those assumptions have turned out to be out of sync with reality. Pay TV has dominated sports in Europe. Satellite TV, which we now have a major DirecTV package here and covers a lot of sports in Europe, if it was on the drawing board it was not a reality. Our first deal with DirecTV was in 1993-94 and we went into Europe in 1989-90, so much has changed globally. I think we have learned a lot and I think we have learned a lot from other leagues and the evolution of player talent in the other leagues. I said at one point, maybe we should have all seen 20-25 years ago that a Fernando Valenzuela can have an enormous impact for baseball with Mexican fans, far in excess of what Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale had, but I don’t know that a lot of people drew the conclusion from that we would have a Yao Ming, Detlef Schremp, and an Ichiro. I think a lot has been learned and we try to draw on that learning. We are learning a lot in Europe. We had 14 foreign players in training camps this year with NFL teams from five or six different countries – Japanese, Mexican, German, French – and some of those players came very close to making rosters and some teams said that if they have injuries those guys will be signed and come back onto active rosters. That is a long way from where the NFL was five or ten years ago in terms of foreign player development. A lot of things have changed that gave us a basis for a new business plan. All of that was factored into how we should move forward. It was not included in the resolution, but it was included in the sense of how we as a management team should go forward with NFL Europe.
HAVE YOU GOTTEN ANY FEELING ON HOW THE NETWORKS FEEL ABOUT AN 18-GAME SEASON?PT: No.
ARE YOU AT ALL CONCERNED WITH THE HANDFUL OF BLACKOUTS YOU HAVE HAD THIS SEASONPT: No. We have some blackouts every year. In recent years we have had fewer than ever and I’m quite certain that will be the case again this year. Over 90 percent of our games have been sold the last three or four years and my guess is that will clearly be the case again. We have some blackouts almost every week – happily very few. # # # |