Player recruitment a looming issue for CFL

TSN Football Insider

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Collective bargaining in professional sports includes all kinds of different elements between players and leagues. But ultimately, as is often said, it all comes down to money.

That has mostly been a losing proposition for Canadian Football League players in recent years, with salaries stagnating in line with revenues.

The CFL is coming out of two tough seasons economically, the lost 2020 season and a 2021 season in which most teams had to deal with reduced crowds and revenues.

So, it’s not hard to imagine that owners aren’t in the mood to push the salary cap up much beyond its current level of $5.3 million per team, even though the players have come through a couple of tough economic years of their own.

But there’s another dynamic in play when it comes to compensation this time around. The CFL has competition for American players, both from the upstart United States Football League, which just completed its third week of a 10-game regular season, and the Dwayne Johnson-led XFL, which is preparing to begin play next February.

There’s an instinct to dismiss these leagues as paper tigers, given the number of alternative professional leagues that have come and gone over the past 35 years – a list that includes the original USFL, the original XFL, the United Football League, the Alliance of American Football and XFL2, not to mention various incarnations of arena football.

The CFL’s approach to each has been simply to ignore it, focusing instead on its own business while the competition dies on the vine. And that’s exactly what’s happened in every single instance, each time restoring the CFL’s pipeline to the best players in the world not under contract in the National Football League.

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