Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

6 Comments

  • I believe that Rush Limbaugh (vision-impaired squirrel) has found a nut when he points out that the settlement will encourage more litigation and that there will be a ripple effect through all levels of football play (high school etc.).
    Interesting to see if it will encourage litigation in other sports, e.g. hockey, soccer etc.

    • By Mike

  • When you do the math, it’s not really a whole lot of money per player

  • Someone on a news show said that the NFL could easily afford this since they rake in Billions… If that’s so, why do taxpayers need to foot the bill for stadia and why are the damn ticket prices so high? I saw some nosebleed seats at Soldier Field on sale for upwards of $250 each. Seats so far up you’d need your sports app on the cell phone to see the action.

    • By kimsch

  • @kimsch ticket price is a function of how much are people willing to pay. It does not have much with how to do with input costs.

    Similarly, who pays bill for stadia is a function of who pays whose campaign and who managed to convince public that private stadium is public good. It does not have much to do with who need those money.

    • By aaaa

  • Kimsch, this is a lot of money. The league brings in $9 billion a year. Most of this is distributed back into expenses, most notably, player salaries. So while the NFL is making a relative fortune, this is almost 30 million per team and it is real money. That is not a rounding error, even for these guys.

    People talk about all of these lawsuits where the defendant could win easily but settled the case for a lot of money for political and PR reasons. It happens very rarely in the real world. But this is exactly what happened here.

  • Some further analysis here: http://deadspin.com/why-the-nfl-and-players-were-both-desperate-to-settle-c-1243931321