Player bargaining power and protests in the NFL

According to the Associated Press, the biggest sports news story of 2017 was the protests by NFL players, bringing attention to (among other things) police brutality and racism. The entire Dallas Cowboys team knelt for the national anthem before one game, while all but one of the Pittsburgh Steelers refused to leave the locker room for the national anthem in another game. However, not all players engaged in protest. Not even all African American players engaged in protest.

A 2019 article by David Niven (University of Cincinnati), published in the journal Social Science Quarterly (sorry I don't see an ungated version online), looks at the factors associated with protest amongst players in the 2017 NFL season. Using data on all 2196 players who appeared on an NFL roster that season (of whom 317 engaged in protest at least once), he found that:

...African-American players were 86 percent more likely to engage in protest than white players. This distinction is nearly matched by the effect of draft status, with first rounders 77 percent more likely to protest than seventh-round draft picks. Adding to the security effect, those with at least $1 million guaranteed in their contracts were 29 percent more likely to protest and those who had ever made a Pro Bowl were 34 percent more likely to protest.

He concluded that:

...for highly successful NFL players with guaranteed contracts, there is simply less risk associated with engaging in activism and they responded by engaging in protests during the National Anthem at far higher rates.

Players engaging in protest were risking their future career security. For those players whose career was more secure (Pro Bowlers, first round draft picks, those with guaranteed contracts), engaging in protest was less risky than players further down the roster, whose future was already uncertain.

One of the interesting things about this case is that it highlights the bargaining power (or lack thereof) that individual players are able to wield with their employers. Consider the difference between NFL and NBA players. NBA players seem to be able to get away with much more in terms of protest action than NFL players, because NBA players have more bargaining power.

NBA rosters have many fewer players (17) than NFL rosters (53 players), and fewer players are on court at a time compared with an NFL team. So, excluding a player from playing because of their protest action is likely to have a more detrimental effect on an NBA team than excluding a single player would have on an NFL team. That gives NBA players more bargaining power than NFL players, and allows NBA players to engage in more action that their employers may not agree with. And relatedly, the NBA player collective agreement is arguably more generous than the corresponding agreement for NFL players, again because of differences in players' bargaining power.

Coming back to the NFL players, players with more career security (because they are higher quality players) have more bargaining power. So, even though Niven doesn't highlight this point in the article, bargaining power is likely a key underlying explanation for differences in protest activity between players. Bargaining power really matters in the labour market, including the labour market for top athletes.

[HT: Marginal Revolution, last April]