Tailgating, Sacks, and Salary Caps: How the NFL Became the Most Successful Sports League in History

by Mark Yost

Book Overview

The NFL is the most successful professional sport. The league's secret to success is?sound business practices like revenue sharing and a salary cap. These policies have?created parity?on the field and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1419526006
• ISBN13: 9781419526008
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Kaplan Business
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Very well written and comprehensive

Mark Yost does a terrific job of explaining how the NFL was formed, how it has been sustained and how it may have peaked. Starting in the early 1900's, Yost describes the logical and unselfish thought process that formed the leauge and carried it through present day. As a sports business buff, this is just the kind of detail I have been looking for. Yost describes contracts in the detail of Likely To Be Earned (LTBE) and Not Likely to Be Earned (NLTBE) incentives and references several different cities to describe the benefits, real or perceived, of publicly funded stadiums and the public's share of gaudy Super Bowl numbers. The only thing that I would caution about this book is that it was written in 2006 when the Owners and Players' Union and just agreed to a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). Yost covers this CBA in detail and it is very interesting, however the Owners have recently decided to back out of this CBA early, which hurts the book's validity a little bit. All in all, a tremendous book!

Insightful ticket into the finances of NFL football

Baseball may be the Great American Pastime, but professional football is America's passion. With revenues in the billions of dollars, massive TV audiences thirsting for its product and merchandise flying off the shelves in thousands of stores, the National Football League is a textbook example of how to build and maintain a thriving pro sports league. While professional baseball, basketball and hockey have all experienced labor strife and endured difficult financial times, the NFL has largely avoided such crippling problems. That's mainly because of its salary cap and a revenue-sharing system that benefits teams in smaller media markets as well as teams in major metropolitan cities. In the NFL, owners and players consider themselves partners in an enormously successful enterprise, rather than operating as greedy adversaries trying to squeeze every penny from each other. Like any other multi-million dollar corporation, the NFL succeeds because of smart management and foresight. We believe that both the casual fan and the rabid NFL loyalist will appreciate author Mark Yost's expert examination of the league's economic infrastructure and behind-the-scenes politics. Highly recommended.

Creating Big Business from Sports

I wasn't around then, but from reading it seems to me that during World War II baseball was indeed America's pastime. Football was a distant relative, perhaps about where soccer is today. Now the World Series comes and goes, while every bar and restaurant has a Super Bowl party, and the supermarkets are loaded with Super Bowl displays of beer and snacks. This book doesn't describe the sport or talk about the coaches. It's about the hard business facts of how the NFL has created a monopoly and built a business model around it for the overall good (that's financial good) of the league. There are several surprising points: The NFL format appeals to the two prime target audiences of consumers: 18-49 year old males and FEMALES OF ALL AGES, FROM PRETEEN GIRLS TO MIDDLE-AGED MOMS. Really, that big a female audience? ABC has lost Monday Night Football. It moved to ESPN. Did ABC lose out in the bidding wars? Guess who owns ABC - Disney. Guess who owns ESPN - Disney. Disney simply decided it could make more money moving it to ESPN. Like I said, this book is about the business aspects, and they are not simple. This is big business, serious business, fascinating business.

Writer's Pedigree Shows Through

Fascinating! A brilliantly written insight into all those things you always wondered about the business of the NFL. Already an accomplished writer, Yost's Wall Street pedigree shows through in every page. No spin. Just how it should be. Highly recommend, and a must read for anyone interested in the sports business.